Kitabı oku: «A Matter Of Trust», sayfa 2

He moved so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to defend herself, taking hold of her, hauling her against his body, imprisoning her so completely that she actually found herself gripping hold of the front of his jacket to stop herself from losing her balance.

As she stared furiously up at him she could feel the frantic race of her own heartbeat. She could even, she recognised, feel the fiercely hard beat of his, just as she could feel the impact of his muscles against her own softness.

It was a disturbing sensation, and one that, to her shock, her body seemed to find distressingly sensual. Nausea rose inside her at the unacceptability of her physical response to him.

‘That’s the second time you’ve said that to me. The first was once too many. Whatever else I might be, I am not perverted,’ she heard him saying grimly to her, ‘and just to prove it…’

She had started to glance up at him as he spoke, an automatic reaction and one which he used to his own advantage, keeping her imprisoned between his body and the wall with one hand while the other held and cupped her face so that there was no way for her to avoid the alien masculine pressure of his mouth.

She could feel the anger in his kiss, the hard, fierce pressure that spoke of his antipathy towards her, but she could feel something else as well, a whisper of sensation, of awareness, curling like woodsmoke on a clear autumn day until it was everywhere. And as her body trembled she knew that he had felt it as well.

Later she told herself miserably that he at least had an excuse, as a man. It was in his genes to react with sexual aggression, but she had known none, and it wasn’t even as though she didn’t know exactly what he was.

But still her body responded to him, her muscles softening, relaxing, so that her body clung to him instead of rejecting him, and so that her mouth was pliant and eager beneath his, turning the kiss from what it had been to something very different indeed. Something very different.

And he responded to that difference, shifting his weight so that he was no longer imprisoning her but embracing her, the hand that cupped her face softening as his fingers slid into her hair, his mouth moving erotically on hers as his tongue-tip teased the moist softness of her lips.

Somewhere in the distance Debra could hear a sound, but it wasn’t until he released her with a soft curse that she realised it was the telephone.

Abruptly she came back to reality, her face on fire with self-contempt, while unbelievably her body ached and yearned for the contact it had just lost.

‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ he questioned her as he reached for the door.

His anger had gone, a remote coolness taking its place, making her feel as though somehow she was the one who had transgressed.

Thoroughly flustered by the whole encounter, Debra stepped back from him. He was already opening the front door. She told herself that she was glad that he was going, that she was glad that the phone had started to ring when it did, but her body said rebelliously that it did not share those feelings.

It wasn’t until he had actually closed the door behind himself that she realised that instead of answering the phone she had idiotically been standing watching him.

She turned round and hurried into the kitchen, lifting the receiver, her hand shaking.

‘Yes, everything’s fine,’ she assured Elsie, trying to swallow the hard ball of disbelief and shock that was threatening to block her throat.

What on earth had got into her? she asked herself shakily ten minutes later. The whole incident had been so alien to the way she normally behaved.

She bit her lip, wincing as she remembered the way she had lost control of the situation. How could she have behaved so idiotically? Leigh would be furious with her, and no wonder.

And as for that accusation about his being a pervert…She stifled a moan of despair that rose in her throat.

Well, he couldn’t have chosen a more devastating way of punishing her for it. Not in kissing her in anger. That she could have handled…should have handled with cold disdain and rejection instead of…She swallowed painfully, desperately trying to avoid remembering just how she had reacted to him, and then shivered a little as she tried to suppress the frisson of sensation that raced over her skin.

She wasn’t normally like that. Didn’t normally respond so immediately, nor so intensely, to being kissed. In fact, she couldn’t remember a time when she had ever experienced that extraordinarily powerful surge of sensuality and desire.

Relentlessly she forced herself to keep watch throughout the evening, even though she knew that it was hardly likely that he would provide the evidence she needed, now that she had so idiotically given everything away.

She couldn’t think what had come over her. Not only had she acted entirely against her own nature in losing her temper with him, not only had she let Leigh down, but she might also have ruined Ginny’s parents’ chances of making their daughter aware of the truth.

And on top of all that, as if it weren’t enough, she had actually physically desired the man.

She gave a small shudder of self-contempt and despair.

CHAPTER TWO

‘I’M SO sorry, Leigh. I just don’t know what came over me. I’ve ruined everything.’

‘No, you haven’t,’ Leigh assured her cheerfully as Debra reached the end of her explanation of what had happened.

‘It seems that the owner of the house had served notice on our friend to leave. Apparently the rent hadn’t been paid for several months and he had re-let the property and found another tenant. I suspect that the commotion Elsie overheard from next door the night before you moved in was our Mr Bryant, leaving under protest. The man you have been watching must be the new tenant, because Jeff told me that Bryant left in the early hours of the morning, and that he followed him as far as the motorway. Bryant was driving south and he was on his own.

‘Ginny’s mother has been in touch with me to tell me that she suspects he and Ginny must have had a row, because, although Ginny has been very weepy, she has told her mother that she isn’t seeing him any more and that she doesn’t want to. So, all’s well that ends well.

‘I’d have loved to see his face when you accused him of being a pervert,’ Leigh grinned. ‘Pity you didn’t manage to capture that on film.’

Debra gave her an appalled stare.

‘Do you mean that he wasn’t…?’

‘Bryant? It doesn’t sound like it,’ Leigh confirmed, ‘and from your description he doesn’t sound like it either. Your man seems to bear more resemblance to Superman than Mike Bryant,’ she added with a touch of wry amusement.

Debra flushed, torn between relief that she hadn’t messed everything up for her stepsister, and an appalled recognition of what she actually had done.

‘You don’t think he might report me to the police, do you?’ she asked Leigh in a small voice.

‘Saying what?’ Leigh asked. ‘That you took photographs of him and accused him of being a pervert? Hardly.’ She grinned. ‘Have you seen him again since he came round?’

Flushing again, Debra shook her head.

She had diligently kept a watch on him, monitoring his comings and goings, and while doing so she had been acutely aware of the way he would pause and look up at the house every time he left or entered next door, leaving her in no doubt that he was aware of what she was doing.

‘Please don’t ever ask me to help you out again, will you?’ Debra pleaded feelingly as she handed Elsie’s keys over to her stepsister.

Thank goodness she herself lived on the other side of the city and was unlikely to ever see him again. She gave a small shudder as she contemplated the embarrassment that that would cause her. And it made it worse, not better, hearing Leigh say that he had not been Mike Bryant. No wonder he had been so furious with her.

But who was the woman who had visited him and what was his relationship with her? Debra wondered as she drove home. Whoever she was and whatever her role in his life, it was no concern of hers, she told herself severely as she let herself into her house.

It felt blessedly familiar and safe, and as she closed the door behind her she told herself firmly that she was also closing the door on what had happened over the last few days. The best and most sensible thing she could do was, as Leigh had counselled her, to put it completely out of her mind.

She had not told Leigh everything, though, she acknowledged uncomfortably. She had not told her about that kiss.

Because it had nothing to do with helping Leigh out, she told herself swiftly. Nothing at all.

Was that the reason, or was it that she was still acutely aware of how quickly and immediately she had responded to him? She had shocked herself with that response and, even though she had tried desperately hard to forget it, to push it away from her and out of her mind, it was still there, threatening to haunt and punish her.

Not that she didn’t deserve punishing, but not like this, not by waking abruptly in the night, aching and tense, knowing shamingly that she had been on the edge of reliving his kiss…that she had wanted to relive it.

What she ought to be punishing herself with was her own self-contempt, not some silly, immature yearning that belonged more properly to a teenager than an adult woman.

She spent the rest of the day diligently gardening and decorating, and on Thursday when she went to see Karen she admitted to herself that part of her outburst had probably been fuelled by her own emotional response to the trauma that Karen had endured. Not that he, even if he had been Mike Bryant, was guilty of the same sort of crime as Karen’s stepfather, but Ginny’s age and his maturity had sparked off all the anguish and helpless anger she had felt at Karen’s plight.

Karen’s social worker had already explained to her that Karen had been distraught at the thought of causing the break-up of her family and that her mother, far from supporting Karen, had accused her of trying to come between her and Karen’s stepfather.

As she watched her now, withdrawn, silent and so obviously distressed, Debra’s heart ached for her.

Very gently she started to talk to her, giving her time to respond, and then, when she did not, she simply continuing talking, keeping the tone of her voice as soothing and reassuring as possible, knowing that she must not try to rush things, or to pressurise Karen into lowering the barriers she obviously felt she needed to protect herself.

By Monday morning she had almost convinced herself that she had put the man and his kisses firmly to the back of her mind. On a very high shelf, lettered in red, ‘Do not touch—danger’, she told herself wryly as she walked to work.

Linda, the receptionist, smiled at her as she walked in, and asked her if she had had a good holiday.

‘Not too bad,’ Debra told her. ‘I managed to weed the garden and to strip the paper off my spare bedroom. Anything interesting happened?’

She asked the question casually as she picked up her own post, not really expecting an affirmative answer, but, to her surprise, Linda nodded and then leaned conspiratorially over her desk.

‘He’s arrived. A fortnight ahead of schedule. Obviously wanting to catch us on the hop.’

When Debra looked puzzled, she explained, ‘Him. You know, the partner from London who was due down next Monday—Marsh Graham.’

Debra’s forehead cleared.

‘Seems as if I’ve really missed out,’ she commented with a smile.

She was not too concerned about Marsh Graham’s appointment. She was a conscientious worker who knew she merited the praise she had received from her superiors. She was ambitious but not aggressively so, content to learn all that she could from her present position and to stay within it for another couple of years before embarking on something more challenging.

She felt she was too far down the hierarchy to be of much interest to the new man.

She was also very proud of the way she had streamlined her own systems, subtly and quietly adjusting the rather old-fashioned methods employed by her retired predecessor without stepping on anyone’s toes. That she had found several rather disturbing errors and oversights was something else she had kept to herself, discreetly putting things right without drawing attention to them. After all, what genuine satisfaction was there in laying claim to a progress that was only made by correcting errors which should never have occurred?

‘He’s taken over old Mr Thompson’s office,’ Linda told her as though this were something totally unexpected, whereas to Debra it seemed perfectly acceptable that he should take over the empty office of the newly retired senior partner.

As she walked into her own office, calmly secure in her environment and her abilities, Debra felt a little of the tension and shock of the last few days ease from her. Here she felt in control of her life once again; here it was much much easier to push that kiss and its bestower safely out of her thoughts.

At eleven o’clock she received a telephone call from Marsh Graham’s secretary, Mary, to say that Marsh wanted to see her.

‘Nothing to worry about,’ Mary told her cheerfully. ‘He just wants to introduce himself to everyone and since you weren’t here when he arrived…’

Firmly suppressing an impulse to ask Mary what he was like, Debra thanked her and replaced the receiver.

She was wearing a plain navy suit with a soft cream silk shirt, her tights were a toning blue-grey shade and her shoes the same navy as her suit.

It was a neat and very businesslike outfit, the sort of thing she always wore for work, apart from on those days when she had to visit one of her farmer clients, when she wore a fuller skirt and made sure she had her wellington boots in her car.

Even in summer, farmyards always seemed to be muddy and damp, and after ruining a pair of shoes she had sensibly made sure that she didn’t ruin a second.

Her hair was caught back softly and neatly off her face with a navy silk scarf, and, having checked that her lipstick hadn’t disappeared, Debra set off for Marsh Graham’s office.

Mary smiled at her as she walked past her desk.

‘Just go straight in,’ she told her. ‘He’s expecting you.’

Debra did so, pushing open the door and then turning to close it behind her so that it wasn’t until she turned round again that she actually properly saw the man standing up to greet her.

The blood seemed to leave the extremities of her body, her fingers, her toes and most dangerously of all her head, in a fierce, dizzying compression of shock as she stared at him in disbelief.

Impossible for her not to recognise him, or for him not to recognise her.

Even in her shock, her brain registered his momentary tension and the rapid dilation of his pupils, but he recovered faster than her, saying wryly, ‘I take it that you are Debra Latham?’

Debra willed herself not to give in to the impulse to open the door and run.

‘Yes,’ she confirmed, her voice croaky and unsteady.

‘It says in your file that you’re employed here as a tax accountant.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed even more croakily.

Inadvertently she focused on him. The hands holding her file were long-fingered and strong, very male, the nails short and clean. A disturbing sensation quivered through her stomach as she remembered how he had touched her, sliding his fingers into her hair while he’d kissed her.

She made a small agonised sound in her throat, which immediately made him focus on her face.

‘If you are a tax accountant, I wonder if you can explain to me exactly what it was you were doing last week? Or perhaps it’s your hobby,’ he added derisively. ‘Spying on people.’

Debra could feel her face burning. One half of her wanted to tell him that how she chose to spend her free time had nothing whatsoever to do with him; the other reluctantly admitted that he had every right to demand an explanation. Had their positions been reversed, she would have wanted one.

But would she have got one? Would she have dared to challenge him the way he was challenging her?

If he had not held the position within the firm that he did she might have been tempted to ignore him, but morally he perhaps had a right to know what had happened, she admitted.

Haltingly she explained, unable to bring herself to look at him.

‘Mistaking me for this man Bryant, I can understand…although I should have thought your stepsister would have supplied you with a photograph of him,’ he said scathingly. ‘Losing your temper and accusing him…or, rather, me of being a pervert…’ He paused, and Debra discovered that she was holding her breath. It had been bad enough when she had turned round and recognised him, but to have to suffer this as well…

‘Has it struck you,’ he pursued grimly, ‘just what danger you might have brought down on your own head, had I been this man Bryant, in making that kind of accusation? You were completely alone in that house, and, from your description of him, Bryant does not sound the type of man who would ignore that kind of accusation. It isn’t one that any man would take lightly,’ he added, watching her.

Unwisely Debra had lifted her head and turned to look at him, and now she was forced to withstand the full intensity of his thorough scrutiny of her flushed, defensive face.

He was lecturing her as though she were a child, she decided miserably, and it was obvious that he thought her completely irresponsible and incapable of calm, mature judgement. Her heart sank as she worried about how this might reflect on her in her career, and then acknowledged that he would have to be either a saint or inhuman not to let what had happened influence his assessment of her. In his shoes she doubted if she could have divorced herself from what had happened.

But if he was expecting her to apologise then he would just have to go on expecting.

She might have wrongly identified him, but she hadn’t grabbed hold of him and physically punished him.

No, but she had responded to him; had turned that punishment into a few seconds of illuminatingly intense mutual intimacy. Because he had responded to her.

She realised that he had started talking again, only this time it was work he was discussing, saying something about wanting to look at some aspects of their tax planning service with her.

‘Unfortunately I’m not going to have time until later in the week,’ he added, dismissing her.

She had reached the door when he asked her coldly, ‘What did you do with the photographs?’

Without turning round, she told him in a muffled voice, ‘I burned the film without having it developed once Leigh told me that you weren’t Mike Bryant.’

Why had he been so anxious about the film? she asked herself miserably as she half walked and half stumbled back to her own office. Or was it his companion he had wanted to protect, the married woman who had visited him?

A small shudder convulsed her body, a cold sweat breaking out on her skin despite the warmth of her office.

When she had comforted herself that she was hardly likely to see him again, fate must have been laughing out loud at her.

The incident had upset her enough as it was, without this extra burden of realising that she was going to have to work for him, without knowing that what had happened must influence his judgement of her, to her detriment.

And besides all that…

Besides all that, when she had incautiously looked across his office at him she had found herself focusing helplessly on his mouth, her body tensing with remembered pleasure and an unwanted frightening yearning to repeat it.

She got up, walking tensely over to her office window, and stared out. Please God, not that, she prayed desperately. Anything…anything at all, but not that.

She warned herself of the humiliation she would suffer if anyone, anyone at all other than herself, guessed what kind of effect he had on her, and he would be the first to lead the pack, she warned herself grimly.

She must not allow this ridiculous awareness of him to take root; she must destroy it, ignore it; it must not be allowed to flourish and to threaten the easy calmness of her life.

As she tried to concentrate on her work she wondered helplessly whether, had she not first met him in the way she had, had he not, as he had done, kissed her, but had they met for the first time today across his desk, she would have felt the same helpless surge of physical desire towards him.

Thankfully she didn’t see anything of him for the rest of the day. She was just leaving at five-thirty when one of the other girls rushed into her office and apologised, ‘I forgot to put it in your diary, but I made an appointment for you to go out and see Eric Smethurst tomorrow morning. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ Debra assured her.

Eric Smethurst was a fairly new client. A large, quietly spoken farmer who, her colleagues teased her, had something of a crush on her.

Debra had accepted their teasing good-naturedly. She half suspected they might have a point. Eric was thirty-two, hard-working, and very anxious to make a go of the run-down farm he had recently inherited from an uncle. He was also very shy and rather inarticulate, and, while Debra felt nothing for him in any remotely romantic sense, she did like him and wanted to do her best to help him to get the chaos his uncle had left behind him into proper order.

As she walked home she decided the only way to make sure that no one—but especially Marsh Graham himself—guessed about that vulnerable physical responsiveness she had to him was to treat him as coldly and distantly as she could. Not, she suspected, that she would be given the opportunity to do anything else.

Checking that she’d got her wellington boots in the boot of the car, Debra drove to work. The firm had its own private car park, and as she drove into it she immediately recognised Marsh Graham’s Volvo.

Her mouth tightened a little as she deliberately looked away from it. She had overheard one of the secretaries chattering about Marsh to her friends the previous day, talking admiringly about the fact that he practised what he preached in that, when he said that he thought it wantonly selfish of greedy, self-important executives to demand larger and larger company cars, he obviously meant it, because he himself drove a small lead-free-fuelled car.

Privately Debra agreed with him. The days were gone when through ignorance one could allow oneself to believe that it wasn’t up to each and every individual to be responsible and aware, not just on behalf of those closest to them, but on behalf of all humankind.

And, far from demeaning or lowering his stature in any way, the fact that he did not need to announce his success to the world by driving a large expensive car only seemed to reinforce the mental and emotional strength in him which Debra had recognised the first time she saw him.

She parked her car and got out, locking it before heading for the office.

‘You’re early this morning,’ Linda commented as she saw her.

‘I’m going out to see Eric Smethurst,’ Debra told her. ‘And I wanted to go through my post before I leave.’

‘Eric Smethurst. Oh, the farmer. Isn’t he the one who sent you those gorgeous flowers last Christmas?’

Debra knew she was flushing. She had her back to the corridor, but she was aware of the firm, male footsteps coming down it towards her.

A warning tingle ran down her spine and she knew without turning round that it was Marsh. She heard him stop behind her, felt in some subtle way the actual displacement of air caused by his presence.

‘Are you sure it is just a business meeting?’ Linda teased her.

Debra was acutely conscious of Marsh standing behind her. Even without turning round, she could sense his disapproval. Quickly picking up her post, she turned round, keeping her head down as she side-stepped him with a tense, ‘Good morning,’ before hurrying into the sanctuary of her own office.

The meeting with Eric went very much as she had expected. He wanted her advice about switching his accounting system on to a computer, something his uncle had scorned and refused to even consider, and Debra offered to arrange for the head of their own computer department to come out and see him.

‘Margaux will have a much better idea than me of which system would be best for you,’ she told him when he confessed that he had hoped she might be the one to advise him. Linda’s light-hearted comment had alerted her to the danger of inadvertently encouraging him to believe theirs could be more than merely a business relationship. He was a very sensitive man, and the last thing she wanted to do was to hurt him, but she sensed from his reaction to her statement that he had picked up the subtle distancing message she was giving him.

It was almost one o’clock when she eventually left the farm. In addition to raising the subject of the computer and appropriate software package, Eric had also made tentative enquiries about how he might best set up a pension fund for himself, and Debra knew that once she got back to the office she would have a lot of work to do, liaising with her colleagues so that they could advise him.

Tax was her special field of operations, but Eric, like a good many of their smaller clients, preferred to deal with one specific person rather than each individual expert.

Debra had been wondering recently if there was some way in which this could be achieved, and so far she had not managed to come up with a solution, but she made a mental note to bring it up at the next office brainstorming session.

It was coming up to her stepfather’s birthday, and she told herself that she must not forget to buy him a card. He was a keen gardener and she had ordered a very special old-fashioned climbing rose for him, which was presently being cosseted at her local garden centre.

As she drove back into Chester she glanced at her watch. She didn’t really have time for lunch—she had too much to do—but if she drove home she could leave her car there and buy her stepfather’s birthday card on her way back to the office.

Because she had been so young when her own father had died, and could not really remember him, she had formed a very close relationship with Don, her stepfather, and she smiled mischievously to herself as she picked out a card for him emblazoned with the words, ‘To my most favourite man.’

She paid for it and tucked it between the two files she was carrying to make sure that it didn’t bend.

Back in her office, she read quickly through her notes and then dictated an aide-mémoire for herself and a couple of memos, one to Margaux Livesey, the head of their computer department, and the other to Ian Rothsey, who was in charge of pensions and other allied insurance schemes.

She then rang through to Margaux’s office to ask her if she could spare her half an hour.

‘Just so long as it is half an hour, because I’m due to see Marsh after that. Come straight up,’ Margaux offered.

Twenty minutes later, when Debra had finished outlining Eric Smethurst’s situation, Margaux confirmed, ‘I don’t think we should have too much trouble sorting him out with a suitable package. It depends just how much he wants to take on board. There are farms which even have computer-controlled feeding systems for their livestock.’

‘I don’t think he’ll want to go that far. Not at this stage. He can’t afford to. When he inherited the farm from his uncle it was very run down. There were a lot of tax problems to sort out, back tax to pay, that sort of thing, and it’s still very much touch and go whether or not he makes a success of it. I hope he does—’

There was a knock on Margaux’s door.

‘That will be Marsh,’ she told Debra, standing up.

Debra stood up too, and as they walked to the door together Margaux opened it, smiling at Marsh and saying to Debra, ‘Don’t worry about your farmer. We’ll make sure he gets the right package. You’ve obviously got a soft spot for him.’

Thanking her, Debra turned to leave, intending to step past Marsh, but he moved at the same time that she did, so that instead she virtually walked into him.

She had a heartbeat’s space of time to control her expression, to avert her face and to lower her eyelids, while inwardly she was sickly conscious of the immensity of her body’s ability to record and remember so many small and diverse details about him that she had immediately recognised his personal body scent, immediately recalled the exact configuration of muscles and sinews that were his, immediately sensed that the tension in his body was spiked with far more than any human being’s automatic reaction to being walked into by another.

She was still shaking half an hour later, still unable to concentrate properly on what she was supposed to be doing, still so appalled and absorbed by the emotional shock of her physical response to him that when someone rapped on her office door she could barely manage to croak out a, ‘Come in.’

She froze as the door opened and Marsh walked in, watching him warily as he walked over to her desk.

What did he want? Why had he come to see her? Her heart started to pound frantically.

‘You weren’t here last week when I explained to the others the way I consider that a business such as ours should be run,’ he began, refusing the seat she offered him.

Since she was sitting down, while he stood, Debra immediately felt that he had put her at a deliberate disadvantage. She was tempted to stand too, but she withstood the impulse, trying to breathe deeply, to push away from herself her awareness of him as a man and to concentrate on the reality of him as her ultimate boss.