Winters & Somers (16 page)

            A short while later
they fell asleep, nestled in each other's body warmth.

            “My God!” She sat up
sharply, fully awake and aware, “I'm sleeping with a man!”

It had been a
while, but she still remembered the feeling.

            “Sad to say, sleeping's
all you did,” came a grumble from the area of her left breast as Winters
struggled to surface. It wasn't easy for him as Cíara had her elbow in his
throat. She peered down into his face.

            “Are you sure about
that?” she demanded, eyes slit with suspicion, remembering the smooth way the
duty-free brandy had slipped down her throat the night before.

            “Honey, if you'd done
anything more than sleep with me, you'd remember.”

            “Never could stand a
braggart.” She levered herself out of the sofa, using the elbow in his throat
to propel herself upwards and enjoyed the satisfying gurgle that the action
triggered in him.

            “Not bragging – just
honest.” He pushed himself into a sitting position, flexing his shoulders. “Not
that you're ever likely to find out.”

            “What, forgotten about
our little bet, then?” The words were out before she could stop them – if he
had forgotten that he'd bet he could get her into bed, then it was best left
alone and unreminded.
Dumb!

            “I think I've won – you
did sleep with me!” He felt malicious this morning.

            “That's not the spirit
of the bet…”

            “Don't worry, Cíara,
I'll get around to making good on it. You'll just have to be patient.”

            “That's not what I
meant, and you know it!”

            “Tsk, tsk…do you guys
think you could hold off the lovers' quarrel long enough to drive me to the
airport? Some of us have to work, you know.” Alison Walker stood in the
doorway, coolly surveying them. She looked drop dead gorgeous, beautifully
groomed, self-possessed and wide-awake. Cíara, bed-headed and grumpy, wanted to
slap her.

            “I'm going for a
shower. Have a good trip,” she muttered ungraciously as she slipped past the
other woman, gritting her teeth as she heard Alison comment: “My, you didn't
work your bedtime magic with that one, now, did you?”

            She didn't wait to hear
Winters' reply. She didn't want to hear about his bedtime magic. She was
confused, mad and wanted to go home. And that's just what she would do, the
minute she'd showered and the two of them were gone.

            But the shower wouldn't
co-operate – she remembered Winters' comments about begging in the right way,
but somehow she didn't seem able to coax it into action. Then she remembered
that the power was off thanks to Frank’s meddling with the wires and last
night’s explosion. She seemed to be batting 1000 on failure to coax things into
action, she thought grumpily to herself – then remembered the moonlight kisses
she'd shared with Winters, the close embrace that had shown just how ready for
action he was. She cursed her foolish hormones, slammed shut the shower door so
that it rattled satisfyingly, and pulled on some jeans and a warm sweater.

            She sat on the bed
until she heard the bang of the front door and the roar of Winters' big
four-wheel drive sports vehicle. Safe at last, she told herself wryly as she
gathered up her overnight case and went out to her car.

But in her heart
she wasn't sure she was ever going to be safe from Jonathon Winters.

* * *

            “If you ask me,
darlin', I'd say you're looking a bit peaky.” Grace Muldoon slapped a large
plate of fried bacon and eggs, mushrooms with toast on the side in front of
Cíara. The bed-and-breakfast landlady was resplendent in a peacock blue jogging
suit with neon pink runners and a blue and yellow scarf tied around her head. 
She patted the scarf, when she saw Cíara's entranced glance. “Haven’t got me
curlers out yet.”

            Grace had been
delighted to see her. She was full of questions about the exciting cases she
imagined the young private detective was working on, especially the outcome of
the case Grace proudly asserted that she'd helped with.

            “Well, I sent in my
report but I'm not sure what kind of decision the lady in question has made,”
she told the landlady fatalistically, gulping strong tea to wash the bacon
down.

            “Well, maybe she'll
decide that she loves him enough to put up with his straying the odd time,”
Grace said, sitting down opposite with a panel of her quilting and talking
around the cigarette in her mouth. “Some women do, you know.”

            Cíara, who had
developed a very dim view of male/female relationships, just grunted.

            “'Course, I wouldn't
have put up with anything like that. Mr. Muldoon, bless his soul, was as
faithful as the day is long. He knew what would have happened otherwise!” Grace
laughed, but then seeing Cíara 's sober expression, added: “So, what is it,
luv? You look like a woman with man trouble.”

            She didn't intend to
tell another living soul. But this was Grace Muldoon, and all of a sudden the
words came tumbling out of her, all about the high-handed behavior of one
Jonathon Winters, about the way he was taking over her life…and, unexpectedly,
about the bet they had.

            “Sounds like a right
one to me, dear,” Grace said, when she'd finished the bout of laughter that had
brought tears streaming down her cheeks. “I like a man with a sense of humor, I
do. What did you say he did for a living?”

            So she told her that,
too – leaving out the policeman part but reluctantly adding the romance writer.
The other woman's eyes went round and wide and the cigarette end glowed red as
she sucked especially hard. Then she whipped the white tube from her mouth,
stubbed it out vigorously in the small black ashtray at her elbow, and yelled:
“J.V. Winters? J.V. Winters wants you to go to bed with him and here you are
sitting in old Grace Muldoon's kitchen? What's wrong with you, girl? Are yah
anemic or something?”

            Cíara sniffed. “I
hardly thought you'd approve of a man wanting casual sex,” she said huffily.

            Grace took in a deep
breath. “Love, some things are a sin, and some are experience. Have you read
the man's books? Now there's a man who knows how to please a woman. And how'd
you know it's just casual, anyway?”

            She fought the tears
that sprang to her eyes. “Because when he's finished messing around in my life
and my agency, when the Great Writer gets bored, he'll be taking himself off
without even a backward glance, to Hollywood to write a script or to New York,
or to…to…”

            “I know what they do in
New York, dear. I watch TV, too.” Grace said, patting her on the shoulder
comfortingly. “Do you really think he'll leave?”

            Wiping her eyes with
the back of her hand, she sniffed. “Yeah, I do. And I hate him because I've
only known him a few days, and I miss him already. What will it be like at the
end of his year in Ireland? I'll be insane!”

            Grace nodded
sympathetically and went to pour more tea. For once, she had nothing to say.

* * *

            The phone was already
ringing when Cíara arrived, but she decided to let the answering machine take
it. Sinking down wearily into Winters' new office chair, which was after all,
where
her
office chair had once stood, she rested her head in her hands.
Then his voice came over the machine, and she wanted to wail and pull her hair
out.

 It was bad
enough that she'd driven alone through the unfamiliar country roads, battled
the traffic into Dublin and then had to park miles from the office because of a
parade through the city center to commemorate something or another – but that
the first voice she should hear on arriving back was his was too much.
Could
she never escape the man?

            “Going home and sulking
isn't going to solve anything, Cíara,” his disembodied voice floated into the
office. “I have work to do here, but I'll be back in town Monday night at our
apartment. We still have a lot of things to discuss – about the business.”

            “Damn him!” she
snarled, throwing a pencil across the room. One of
Winters'
pencils,
from
Winters'
desk – in what to all intents and purposes was
Winters'
office.
And her apartment was now our apartment? How had all this happened?
She'd
always been fully in control of things, with her work and love life well under
control.

Although it’s
been a while since you had a love life,
a nasty little voice in her heart
muttered.

“Shut up!” she
shouted, hearing her voice echo satisfactorily around the small space. So she
shouted again, only louder, for good measure.

* * *

           
“Hey, Cíara,
darlin! C'mon, babe, open the door!”

             Cíara was almost
snarling as she wrapped a towel round her head, pulled on a robe and yanked
open the door of her flat. “What the feck do you want, Smokey? It's late, and I
was in the shower.”

            “Sure, girl, and you
should be glad and grateful to the Lord Above that you have a shower. Some of
us poor folks, we don't got none.” The lanky, longhaired hippie type standing
on the doorstep delivered the lines with perfect pathos gently simmered in
North Dublin street slanguage.

            “Got thrown out again,
did you?”  Cíara asked, amusement and impatience flitting across her face. The
tall drink of water before her nodded mutely. “You been smoking that weed
again? Didn't the landlord threaten you and threaten you?”

            “Er, it was a bit more
than that. You see, we….well, the lads and me, we'd been out at that concert,
you know, and we'd stopped in to lift a few jars on the way home, and Musty,
he'd thrown up..”

“Oh, God,
Smokey, spare me the details,” she sighed, bracing herself for the inevitable.
But then a door on the landing above opened, and a red full moon face peered
over the banister rail.

“Jesus, Mary and
Joseph, Cíara Somers, have you gone into volunteer work? What in the  name lf
God are you doing bringing home beggars off O'Connell Street at this time of
the night? Now, you just cut out this racket, or I'll be on to Mr. Travers in
the morning and you'll be kipping under O'Connell Bridge with yer friends!” The
face disappeared and the door slammed shut.

            “You'd better come in,”
she said, grabbing Smokey with one hand and yanking him inside while directing
an internationally recognized hand signal in the direction of her grumpy
neighbor.

            “Er, it’s not just me,”
Smokey said, digging his feet into the hall rug and keeping Cíara from slamming
the door shut.

            “Not just you?”  She
knew it was trouble every time Smokey crossed her path. “Come on, spill the
beans.”

            “There's Short Eddie,
too,” Smokey shuffled his feet. Cíara sighed.

            “Okay, okay – Come on
in and join the party, Short Eddie,” she called down the hallway. She should
have chosen her words better and could have bitten her tongue when all three
hundred pounds and six-foot four of Short Eddie hurtled across the landing. The
word 'party' was like a red rag to a bull, and she almost made the sign of the
cross as the two men collapsed on her living room furniture and the room began
to fill with the sweet smell of marijuana that followed them everywhere.

            “Look, you two – you're
only here for the night. I've a new roomie moving in and he'll not be happy to
be crowded,” she warned them.

Short Eddie
smiled vaguely in her direction and Smokey waved a hand. “You're a saint, Cíara
Somers, so you are.”

            When she came back from
blow-drying her hair and dressing, the only sound in the room was the dull
symphony of soft snores. The two were sleeping like babies.

Let's hope to
God they stay that way,
she thought, then cursed as she tripped over a
rucksack, probably containing all Smokey's worldly possessions, dropped
casually in the doorway.

            It was full dark as she
left the apartment, and in her black leather coat and black pants, with a black
beret covering the shine of her red hair, she was almost invisible. The MG
purred obediently to life, and she slipped out onto the night roads.

* * *

            Winters had just
arrived back and pulled into a lucky parking spot a few spaces down from the
big Georgian house that housed Cíara's flat.
Our flat
, he thought with a
rueful grin. He kind of liked the sound of that, and found the realization
disturbing.

His grin didn't
last long – wasn't that herself, tricked out all in black and moving with the
gait of the guilty? He heard the engine of the little MG start up –
beautifully
tuned,
he thought to himself enviously – then sat up straight in his seat. 
Somers was slipping out into the night like a thief.

The Diamond
Darling was on the loose and could be a woman…Jonathon shook his head. He was
letting his cop's imagination run riot. The journey back from Dunmore East must
have tired him more than he knew. Even so, he waited until Cíara's car was on
the other side of the green, then started up his own engine and slowly trailed
her.

* * *

            “Feck it!” Cíara
muttered viciously to herself as she unsnagged a thread of her sweater from the
window latch. Imagine, a huge house like this, the front door locked like the
Vatican but the alarm system left off and the kitchen window open a crack!