Matter of Trust

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.