A Matter Of Trust. PENNY JORDAN

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