A Matter Of Trust. PENNY JORDAN

she told herself quickly, wondering if she dared risk trying to photograph them together without his noticing her, but it was too late. He was already ushering the woman inside.

      Debra could hardly believe her luck when later on the two of them emerged into the garden. Despite her shaking hands, she managed to get several good shots of them standing talking together.

      At three in the afternoon another taxi arrived and the woman left.

      Standing beside the open landing window, Debra dutifully recorded this fact.

      Although the man accompanied her to the taxi, he did not touch her in any way.

      Leigh had described him as having a penchant for very young women. His visitor had not fallen into that field. She had been around his own age, early to mid-thirties.

      Well, at least she had got some photographs of them together, Debra told herself as she went downstairs to make herself a drink.

      She had just made it when the doorbell rang. She went to answer it without any sense of apprehension, her mind on the task Leigh had given her.

      The safety chain wasn’t on and she opened the door automatically without thinking, tensing in an alarm which came too late as she watched the man from next door march angrily into the hall and push the door closed behind him.

      ‘Would you mind telling me exactly what you think you’re doing?’ he demanded curtly.

      He was tall, Debra acknowledged, and strong as well, his body athletic and powerfully muscled. No doubt he found it paid to keep himself fit in order to impress his youthful victims. After all, a man of thirty-odd could not possibly hope to have the physical appeal of one much younger, she told herself, stubbornly ignoring the evidence of her own senses, which told her quite categorically that this man need not have any fear that younger rivals might present a more physically compelling appeal.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered as the guilty colour stormed her face. ‘But I don’t—’

      ‘You don’t what? You don’t know what I’m talking about?’ he interrupted her savagely. ‘Like hell you don’t. In someone old and alone, snooping on the neighbours can be understood and excused; in someone your age…well, let’s just say you’d have to have some profound behavioural problems.’

      As she heard the contempt in his voice Debra found that she wasn’t shocked any more. She was angry…very, very angry.

      ‘You’re the one with the problems,’ she told him unequivocally. ‘Or don’t you believe that it’s a problem for a man of your age to want to seduce a girl barely over the legal age limit for sex? Men like you disgust me,’ she added passionately. ‘You deliberately lie and deceive. You don’t care who you hurt…how many lives you destroy. It’s just a game to you, isn’t it? Girls like Ginny…too young and innocent to see what you really are.’

      ‘Now just a minute,’ he began grimly, but Debra had the bit between her teeth now and she wasn’t going to stop. How dared he force his way in here and try to bully her…to accuse her, when he was the one…?

      All her normal caution and restraint was swept aside in the passionate tide of feeling that engulfed her. She had been so lucky, so loved and protected as she had grown up, but she was well aware that not all young girls were, that there were men like this one…like Karen’s stepfather, who deliberately made young, vulnerable girls their victims; who destroyed them emotionally and ruined their lives. And he had the gall to stand there, glowering angrily at her.

      ‘Why don’t you simply leave her alone?’ Debra swept on, ignoring his interruption. ‘She’s seventeen years old. Young enough to be your daughter.’

      She saw him start and was grimly aware of the shock that momentarily darkened his eyes.

      ‘I suppose you hadn’t thought of it like that, had you? Men like you never do. You’re too obsessed with your own appetites…your own perversions.’

      She heard the breath whistle out of his chest, and stopped, suddenly shocked by her own vehemence, suddenly realising her own vulnerability and danger.

      ‘I don’t understand what’s going on here,’ he told her, adding menacingly, ‘but if you think I’m going to tolerate you spying on me, photographing me, lying about me, well, let me tell you, there are laws against the kind of thing you’re doing.’

      ‘There should be laws against people like you,’ Debra spat shakily at him.

      He was clever, she had to give him that, twisting things…accusing her…intimidating her with his alien male presence.

      She was suddenly acutely conscious of the narrowness of the hall, of the closeness of his body, of the anger she could feel emanating from him.

      ‘You won’t be in any danger,’ Leigh had told her. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure.

      ‘I want those photographs,’ he told her flatly, ‘and I want to know just what you think you’re doing.’

      ‘You know what I’m doing,’ she told him. ‘I’m trying to make sure that Ginny finds out exactly what kind of man you are…before it’s too late.’

      ‘Ginny?’

      His deceit infuriated Debra. ‘Yes. Ginny,’ she snapped back at him. ‘You know, the only-just-seventeen-year-old you’re trying to seduce. You’ve been seen before, you know…bringing other girls here.’

      As she threw a defiant look at him it seemed to Debra that something in his face suddenly changed, that there was some subtle alteration she couldn’t quite define.

      ‘You should be ashamed of yourself,’ she hurled angrily at him. ‘She’s little more than a child. It’s…it’s perverted.’

      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