A Matter Of Trust. Penny Jordan

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.