by Penny Jordan
Before she had left, Elsie Johnson had told her nervously that there had been a good deal of commotion next door during the previous evening, raised voices, doors slamming, that kind of thing; but today all was peace and silence.
Debra had brought some work with her to help pass the time... not office work.
The previous summer she had accidentally become involved with a semi-private, semicouncil-sponsored scheme which had involved individuals giving some of their spare time to young teenagers whom the council had in care.
It had been through a friend of a friend that Debra had originally heard of the organisation, and now she was a very committed member of the group, giving up a couple of evenings a month plus odd days at weekends to spend at the home.
The object of the exercise was to provide the teenager with someone with whom they could hopefully form a bond on a one-to-one basis, someone who, while not being their parents or having any authority over them, could help them with their problems in an adult way.
Debra was still in touch with the fourteen-year-old Amy, who was now back with her mother, and she was presently trying to form a bond with Karen, who had been taken into care having been abused by her stepfather, a withdrawn and obviously desperately unhappy girl. It made Debra’s heart ache with compassion and sadness to see the look of despair and misery in her eyes.
If and when she ever managed to break through Karen’s isolation, she hoped that she could do as she had done with Amy—take Karen out for small treats and help her to re-establish herself and to feel less institutionalised.
Now Debra was making a list of the problems she confronted in trying to make contact with Karen, and opposite these problems she was writing down the solutions she might find to them.
It wasn’t easy; she found working with the teenagers emotionally and mentally draining, but the counselling and courses that all members of the group took had helped her to understand the children’s problems and how best she could help them.
It was seven o’clock before she saw any sign of movement from next door.
She almost missed hearing the car pull up outside, and in fact she suspected that she would have done if she hadn’t happened to be on her way downstairs at the time.
She frowned a little. The small compact Volvo was not somehow or other the kind of car she had expected the man to drive.
The net curtains hanging at the landing window obscured her vision of him and she had to flick them back a little as well as switching on the cassette which Leigh had impressed upon her she was to have with her at all times.
The man emerging from the car was tall and dark-haired. Before opening the garden gate he paused, glancing down the road, so that Debra had an unobscured view of his face.
A tiny shock of sensation curled through her, an immediate and disturbing physical response to him that made her check and tense.
He was frowning slightly and looked rather more formidable than she had imagined. He looked like a man used to being in control of himself and others. Warily Debra watched him. She had expected him to look different, less powerful, less compelling. She had assumed that he would have about him an air of weakness and self-indulgence, which this man most assuredly did not.
Before walking up the path he paused and then looked up at Elsie Johnson’s house. Immediately Debra tensed. He couldn’t possibly have seen her watching him, could he?
Her heartbeat suddenly accelerated, her muscles tensing. She dared not look out of the window in case he was still studying the house.
One minute went by and then another. This was ridiculous, she told herself crossly. There was no reason why she should not simply walk past the window, why she should feel so intimidated.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to move. Only when she was safely on the other side of the window did she allow herself a brief glance out of it. The man had gone inside the house.
Vigilantly Debra kept watch all evening, but all that happened was that she got cramp. All was quiet from next door. No one had arrived or left.
When she went to bed she set her alarm for six-thirty so that she could be on duty for seven when Jeff went home.
She didn’t need the alarm. She hardly slept at all, and not just because she was in a strange bed, she admitted as she dressed. It wasn’t just what she was doing that disturbed her; the man himself had unnerved her.
By seven o’clock she was eating her breakfast in front of the sitting-room window, where she had a clear view of the Volvo.
When by nine o’clock the Volvo was still there she began to panic a little.
Could he have left via the back door? Had he guessed that he was being watched? Had he perhaps even left during the night while Jeff was watching him?
At half-past nine she settled herself upstairs, where she had a clear view of the back garden and through the open landing window could hear any sound from outside at the front.
At eleven o’clock a taxi drew up alongside the Volvo and a woman got out. She was tall and elegant, expensively dressed, and as she paid off the driver Debra congratulated herself on noticing the wedding ring she wore.
Whoever she was, she certainly wasn’t Ginny Towers, Debra reflected with satisfaction, and then she remembered that she was supposed to take photographs.
She had almost left it too late, and, as it was, she had to squash herself into the side of the window-frame and lean out of the window a little to get a good clear shot of the woman.
It was only as she withdrew that she realised that the man had opened the front door to welcome his visitor.
He had his back to her, and for some reason it gave her an odd sensation in her tummy to look down on him.
Vertigo, 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 De
bra 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 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 na
ture 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.