All That Mullarkey by Sue Moorcroft

kissed had been Cleo.
    The last woman in his bed. The last to lay her pretty hands on his body.
    He just didn’t feel like the chatting up, the drink buying and the bullshit. He stood up. ‘Sorry. I’m feeling a bit rough, I’d better have an early night.’
    Drew and Martin sent him astonished looks over their shades. ‘That married woman’s really fucked you up,’ observed Drew.
    Instead of going home, Justin drove to the lake and sat in his car, watching the water in the twilight; the evenings were getting shorter already. Where the moorhens bobbed now, he could see Cleo climbing on the jet-ski fully clothed, hear her whooping and squealing at the power and the freezing spray. Wading from the lake, picking bits of weed from her saturated clothes. Laughing herself breathless.
    Madwoman.
    Where was she now? He glanced at his watch. At home, with her husband? In bed? Maybe an early night? He imagined them turning gently to familiar exploration of the body next to them.
    Balls. His problem was that he hadn’t had time to get tired of her. She’d landed in his life and then whizzed off, taking him by surprise. That was it. She’d taken him by surprise.
    Any time now he’d get over it.
    He took his mobile from his pocket, pressed phone book and ‘C’. Cleo 077 … His thumb hovered over the green button. All he had to do. Press the button and she might answer. He thought of her voice.
    Then he thought about her in bed with her husband. He sighed.
    He ought to be glad that nothing he’d done had screwed up her marriage. He should respect her feelings more.
    He put the phone away and drove home.

Chapter Twelve
    ‘One moment, she’s here now.’ Francesca, a recent addition to the staff of Ntrain, waved her telephone handset as Cleo walked back to her desk. ‘Rockley Image for you, Cleo, can I put them through?’
    Cleo, fresh from yet another fruitless trip to the Ladies in search of her missing period and wishing she’d had the courage to take the pregnancy test already, hoped her nod was casual. Sliding into her chair, she grabbed a pen with suddenly slippery fingers and picked up the ringing phone. ‘Cleo Callaway.’
    During the two seconds’ silence at the other end before he spoke, she knew it was Justin. She had a sudden, blinding vision of that smile. ‘Are you free to talk?’
    She wrote Rockley Image on her pad, kept her voice carefully professional. ‘How can I help?’
    ‘I want to talk to you.’
    ‘Yes, go ahead.’
    A sigh. ‘Perhaps a drink after work?’
    She drew a box around Rockley Image , super-aware of Nathan, at his desk, watching her through his red-framed glasses and listening. ‘I haven’t got the information with me, can I ring you back?’
    He laughed shortly. ‘What, to have another irritating half-conversation like this? Can you meet me at six thirty tonight? At The Almshouses?’
    She hesitated. Then, ‘I can do that. ’Bye.’ She scribbled down the time, tore the page from her pad and stuffed it in her pocket, returning to studying the big sheet of paper where she’d been roughing a presentation plan about measuring team performance. She paused, waiting for the pulse pounding in her temples to steady. Waiting for Nathan, always alert for further business or even, God forbid, complaints, to speak.
    ‘What’s up with Rockley, Cleo?’
    She made as if dragging her attention away from opening a new PowerPoint presentation on her computer. ‘It was just one of their staff. When I did the gig there we got talking over coffee about scuba diving. I said friends had taken a holiday with tuition, he’s asking if I could get the name of the tour operator.’
    ‘Yeah?’ Nathan picked up his headset, uninterested if the query wasn’t work-related.
    Francesca brought round coffee, never – bless her brown doe eyes – seeming to mind the chore. Cleo took the first hot and heady sips with her eyes closed against the steam. Heaven. Bliss. Opened her eyes. Of course, caffeine