by Penny Jordan
Dear Reader
We are always keen at Mills & Boon to discover more about our readers’ likes and dislikes. This month, we want to know what you think about our heroes! He is always in command and always a real catch, but do you like your hero to be just that little bit on the side of dangerous—ruthless even? Or do you like him to be gentle and caring, and unashamed to show it?
Do you like a gentleman or a rake? And what about foreign heroes? We’d love to know, so put pen to paper and tell us.
The Editor
Born in Preston, Lancashire, Penny Jordan now lives with her husband in a beautiful fourteenth-century house in rural Cheshire. Penny has been writing for over ten years and now has over seventy novels to her name, including the phenomenally successful POWER PLAY and SILVER. With over thirty million copies of her books in print and translations into seventeen languages, she has firmly established herself as an authoress of extraordinary scope.
Recent titles by the same author:
LAW OF ATTRACTION
PAST LOVING
PASSIONATE POSSESSION
A MATTER OF TRUST
BY
PENNY JORDAN
MILLS & BOON LIMITED
ETON HOUSE 18-24 PARADISE ROAD RICHMOND SURREY TW9 1SR
All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author; and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.
All Rights Reserved. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
First published in Great Britain 1992 by Mills & Boon Limited
© Penny Jordan 1992
Australian copyright 1992
Philippine copyright 1992
This edition 1992
ISBN 0263 77752 9
Set in Times Roman 11½ on 12 pt. 01-9210-40366 C
Made and printed in Great Britain
CHAPTER ONE
‘But Leigh, you’re the private detective, not me,’ Debra pointed out firmly to her stepsister. ‘I’m a tax accountant.’
‘A tax accountant who is just about to start a week’s holiday and who doesn’t have to attend a business meeting that’s vital to her business,’ Leigh interrupted quickly.
Although there were six years between them and Leigh was the elder, it had always been Debra who had been the calm, down-to-earth one, and Leigh the impulsive cause of family chaos.
‘Look, Debs, you know how important this business is to me,’ Leigh pleaded coaxingly now. ‘After Paul left me, after the divorce, I felt as though my whole life was over. Now, since Jen and I started up Secrets, I feel as though life actually has some proper purpose again. I wouldn’t ask you to help if there were anything difficult or dangerous involved. It’s simply a matter of spending a few days in an empty house, keeping a tape-recorded list of someone’s comings and goings, that’s all.
‘He won’t even know you’re there. We’ve persuaded his next-door neighbour to go and visit her sister so that we can use her house. I promise you, you won’t have to do a thing other than—’
‘Keep a twenty-four hour surveillance over someone’s cheating husband,’ Debra interrupted drily. ‘Look, Leigh, I disapprove of men who cheat on their wives and families just as much as you do, but—’
‘This one isn’t cheating on his wife,’ Leigh told her flatly, her normally animated face suddenly set hard. ‘He’s trying to seduce a seventeen-year-old into leaving home and going to live with him... He’s thirty-four, Debs, with a string of women in his past and a taste for innocent young girls.’ Her mouth tightened in distaste.
‘According to her mother, Ginny is completely besotted with him and won’t listen to a thing either of her parents has to say. They felt if they could present her with concrete evidence of the kind of man he really is, although it will hurt her now, it will save her much more pain in the long run.
‘She’s a clever girl, Debs, university material, with her whole life ahead of her, but this man has a reputation for picking up and discarding clever young girls like her.’
Debra sighed. She could feel herself weakening. And was it really so much that Leigh was asking? She knew what a struggle her stepsister had had since her marriage broke up. Deserted by her husband and with two small children to support, she had changed overnight from a bright, breezy, bubbly personality into a withdrawn, tormented woman whom Debra barely recognised.
But since she and a friend had set up this detective agency specialising in handling cases mainly for other women she had recovered all her lost self-esteem. The business, although moderately successful, was still quite precariously balanced and very much in its infancy. With her partner away on a much-needed short holiday and Leigh herself suddenly being offered the opportunity to expand into a wider market, Debra could quite understand why Leigh should feel it was so essential that she not miss out on this all-important meeting.
Equally she could also understand why, having organised events so that a twenty-four-hour watch could be kept on the man involved in this current case, Leigh was pleading with her to take her place in the next-door house and watch him for her.
‘You won’t have to keep watch on him for the full twenty-four hours,’ Leigh was telling her coaxingly now. ‘I’ve arranged for Jeff to watch the house from midnight to seven in the morning from a car outside.’
Jeff was Leigh’s boyfriend, a solid, placid man, a teacher, some fifteen years older than Leigh, whom Debra liked and thought an ideal partner for her more volatile stepsister.
‘Look, I wouldn’t ask you if I weren’t absolutely desperate,’ Leigh told her. ‘The parents are going to have the girls for me, but you’re the only person...’
‘Soft enough to be persuaded into helping you out,’ Debra finished drily for her. ‘All right,’ she agreed, adding under her breath, ‘I just hope I don’t end up regretting this.’
‘You won’t,’ Leigh promised her. ‘Look, I’ll have to take you round to introduce you to Mrs Johnson. You’re her god-daughter and you’re staying at the house to keep an eye for it while she’s away.
‘She’s a nice old thing, although I don’t think she quite approves of the idea of female private detectives.’ Leigh pulled a wry face. ‘She certainly isn’t on her own there. She’s only just moved into the house a month or so ago, so unfortunately she wasn’t able to tell us very much about her neighbour. Only that he comes and goes rather a lot.’
‘She’s seen Ginny going into the house with him?’
Leigh sighed. ‘Not as yet, thank God. I keep asking myself how I would feel if it was one of my two. What I’d do if, when they get to that age...’
‘You’ve a long way to go before they do,’ Debra pointed out to her. ‘Sally is only eight and Bryony ten.’
‘I know. Paul should have had them this weekend, but he cancelled at the last moment. I could have killed him, Debs... Not for my sake, but for theirs. Oh, Bryony put a brave face on it... said she expected that Daddy had a lot of work to do, and I went along with it. Work. Hah... more like some bimbo blonde occupying his time. Luckily Jeff came round, so we went into Chester, walked
round the walls and then went on the river. He’s so good with them, Debs. You can see in his eyes how much he’d have liked kids of his own. That must be so hard for a man, knowing that he can’t be a father. That’s why Alex divorced him, you know. Apparently, when they found out that his sperm count was too low for her to conceive, she told him that she couldn’t stay married to him. That the reason she had married had been to have children.’
‘He’s a nice man,’ Debra told her.
‘A very nice man,’ Leigh agreed.
Both of them started to laugh as Leigh mimicked one of the voices from a popular current TV advertisement. Although they were physically completely different, a sense of humour was something they shared.
Leigh had been ten when her father had married Debra’s mother, and Debra had been four.
Leigh was like her father, tall, vigorous, with strong bones and thick curly brown hair.
Debra was like her mother, average height, slim, with delicate bones and the kind of honey-coloured hair that went strikingly fair in the summer.
Luckily, although it was very fine, it was also very thick. As an accountant, she often felt she would look more businesslike if she had it cut, but she had always worn it at shoulder-length, and she liked the versatility this gave her, plus the fact that her simple timeless style was easy to maintain.
Her mother and stepfather still lived in the same Cheshire village where she had been brought up. Leigh had bought a small house there after her divorce so that her daughters could be near to their grandparents.
Debra was now the proud owner of a very pretty little Georgian terraced house in Chester which was within walking distance of where she worked.
She was a happy, contented girl who enjoyed the friendships she shared with people of both sexes. At twenty-six, she was in no hurry to commit herself to a permanent relationship. A brief love-affair during the early years of her training when she had worked in London had taught her that the intensely passionate and deeply private part of her nature which she wanted to share with her lover was not always something that the male sex seemed to want. She had decided she wanted, needed a partner who would share her goals in life, who wanted security and calm; a family. Passion, she had decided, was not for her. One day she wanted to marry, but not yet. Leigh had once remarked that she was afraid of passion. She had, of course, denied it—too vehemently perhaps.
‘Come on, I’ll drive you over to Mrs Johnson’s now,’ Leigh told her.
She had arrived out of the blue at Debra’s front door just over an hour earlier. Debra had been outside in her small back garden, watering the plants in her pots, and wondering if the current spell of good weather really merited the purchase of that wooden seat she had been coveting at the garden centre.
‘Won’t she mind, so early on a Sunday?’ Debra protested, but Leigh shook her head, giving her a naughty smile as she told her,
‘I’ve already warned her to expect us.’
Leigh had always been able to coax her into doing what she wanted, Debra admitted as she got into Leigh’s car and secured the seatbelt.
Elsie Johnson’s house was the next but last in a row of substantial Victorian houses in the suburbs of the city.
Leigh parked outside it with a flourish of gear-changing and sharp braking that made Debra wince a little.
All the houses in the row had short front gardens enclosed by a low communal wall, and from what Debra could see all of them were well maintained. It was the sort of quiet, respectable middle-class area that one would not normally have associated with the kind of situation Leigh had described to her, but if the man was as coldblooded in his deliberate seductions as Leigh had implied then he probably found the area’s respectability an asset.
‘He won’t be in now,’ Leigh told Debra as she saw her glancing at the end house. ‘He’s taking Ginny out for the day. Her parents are afraid to refuse to let her see him in case she leaves home before they can help her to see just what kind of man he is.
‘At seventeen, she’s still barely more than a child still... at least, she is compared with him, a man in his mid-thirties. I hate that kind of man.’
‘Yes,’ Debra agreed vehemently. ‘So do I.’
She followed Leigh up to the front door.
Elsie Johnson had obviously seen them arrive because she opened the door before they could knock.
Half an hour later, as they drove away, Elsie having assured herself that it would be safe to leave her home in Debra’s care, Leigh turned to Debra and thanked her.
‘I suspect she thinks you’re much more trustworthy than me. You always did have the gift of inspiring confidence in people.’
‘Probably because they realise that, unlike you, I’m not going to do anything rash or reckless,’ Debra told her with a smile.
Leigh laughed.
‘I’ve got the tape and everything else you’ll need in the boot. I’ll give them to you when I drop you off. It will only be for a couple of days. I’ll be back from London on Wednesday. I really am grateful to you, Debs. If we can get this contract to vet job applicants for Driberg’s it will make all the difference to us.’
Debra pulled a face.
‘I’m not sure if I approve of large companies using private agencies to vet potential employees.’
‘I understand how you feel,’ Leigh agreed. ‘But it’s a fact of commercial life these days, and if we don’t get the commission then someone else will, and I have two growing daughters to support. Don’t tell me that none of your clients has ever hinted that you might help them find a loophole in the tax laws,’ Leigh added.
‘We aren’t that kind of firm,’ Debra told her firmly. ‘The advice we give our clients is always strictly within the terms of the law.’
Or at least it had been, Debra reflected later on when she was on her own and thinking over her conversation with her stepsister.
Would that continue to be the case now that the small old-fashioned firm she had worked for for the last three years had been amalgamated with a much more modern, thrusting Chester offshoot of a large multinational firm of accountants?
The multinational was putting in a new partner. None of them had met him yet, although they had all heard the rumours and whispers about how dynamic he was; about how determined he was to ensure that the new amalgamated firm would run efficiently and profitably. There had been no suggestion that jobs would go, but still there was an air of tension and uncertainty in the office, and Debra had been rather looking forward to her short break, especially since over the past few months she herself had been particularly busy, having had to take on the workload of a colleague who had left unexpectedly and not been replaced, in addition to working for her own clients.
She had planned to spend her time doing nothing more mentally demanding than working in her garden and redecorating her spare bedroom, but wryly she admitted that she could not really have refused to help Leigh out. Despite their differences, the two women were good friends, and Debra knew that in the same circumstances Leigh would have been the first to offer to help her.
The arrangement was that she would drive over to Elsie Johnson’s in the morning just before Elsie was due to leave for her sister’s, and that she would stay at the house until Leigh returned from London to relieve her on Wednesday.
If her stepsister’s business continued to expand they would need to think of taking on extra staff, Debra mused as she packed. Both Leigh and her partner were adamant about preferring to take 'on only other women. They were not a tough, macho agency, Leigh had pointed out when Debra had gently reminded her that in doing so they could be accused of discrimination. The reason they were getting so many small commissions from other women was perhaps because it was a female-based agency and because, as women, they understood all too well how other members of their sex felt about male betrayal.
‘Jeff helped out and he’s a man,’ Debra had pointed out.
‘That was different,’ Leigh had overruled her, adding that Jeff on
ly helped them out as a favour. He didn’t work for them.
In the morning Debra was careful to make sure that she arrived at Elsie Johnson’s exactly on time.
As she had expected, she found the older woman was packed and waiting for her, a relieved expression touching her face as she opened the door to her.
Inside the house was shadowy and dark, the hall filled with old-fashioned Edwardian furniture.
Mrs Johnson was meticulous about security. Both outer doors had security chains as well as double locks; all the windows had locks as well, and Mrs Johnson herself reminded Debra of a timid little field-mouse, all nervously twitching whiskers and tensely anxious little body.
She would ring every evening, just to make sure that everything was all right, she told Debra before getting into her waiting taxi.
It was just as well that Leigh’s clients were wealthy, Debra reflected later as she made herself a cup of coffee in the immaculately tidy kitchen. It was they who were paying Mrs Johnson for the use of her house, and paying her very generously as well.
Cautious and orderly by nature, Debra did not, as she suspected that Leigh would have done, find the immaculate tidiness of the house constricting.
She had brought all her own food supplies with her, and once she had had her coffee she unpacked her case in the small spare bedroom.
From upstairs she had a completely unrestricted view of the next-door house and rear garden, and if she left the landing window open she could, additionally, hear cars arriving at the front of the house.
Her instructions from Leigh were relatively simple. All she had to do was to monitor and then log down on the tape-recorder the details of anyone who visited the house.
Leigh had also provided her with a camera.
‘Just in case we really get lucky and he brings one of his other women here,’ Leigh had told her.
In any other circumstances Debra might have balked a little at such an intrusion of anyone’s privacy, but she agreed with Leigh that a girl of seventeen, madly in love and totally obsessed with her lover, was in a dangerously vulnerable situation, and she could well understand Ginny’s parents’ concern for their daughter.