Matter of Trust Read online

  ‘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 hers
elf 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 lighthearted 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.