I nodded. “Okay.”
Martine went around the rest of the class, but I didn’t hear much of what anyone was saying. I was busy having a pity-party for one. Now I wasn’t going to bloody graduate if I wasn’t careful.
A man walked into the room without knocking, making me jump and my attention come back to the present time. I heard Martine stammer a little. He was quite attractive with his dark hair and blue eyes. “Who’s that?” I asked Destiny.
But I could have saved my breath because he turned and looked straight at me and said. “Samara Leighton. I’m Marcus Delaney from Cupid Inc PI service, and you need to come with me. You have some questions to answer with regard to a Betty Holroyd.”
“Do you think she killed her and that’s why she’s not here today?” Vax mumbled a little too loud.
I stared at him and used my finger to mime a throat cut. Asshole.
“Did you see that? She threatened me next.” He yelped.
Destiny caught my eye and rolled hers. She mimed that she’d text me, and I nodded, following after the hot PI. I might be married, but I wasn’t blind. I was going to make the most of staring at that arse… and his bottom.
I was shown into a room just down from my father’s office. It was a plain squarish room with stark white walls and a vertical blind at the window. There was a desk with a box of tissues on it, a computer, a pen and desk notepad, and a wastepaper bin just underneath the desk.
“Take a seat.” Marcus indicated as he sat behind the desk.
He opened the desk drawer with a key from his pocket and brought out a file. How many of these people had a file on me? I felt like I needed to feature on ‘Cupid’s Most Wanted’.
“So, would you like to explain why you fired two arrows in Eden Park Retirement Centre last night?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Erm, it was an accident???”
He gave me a grimace-smile. “And then CCTV trails you across London with one Betty Holroyd; the very lady you shot. Then Betty—who is also back in school for training—manages to make almost her final quota while out with you, finally shooting an arrow at a man called Bobby and a woman called Hannah this morning.”
“Really? Good one, Betty. I’d missed that match.”
I caught his glare. Oops.
“Is Betty okay?” I asked.
He sat back in his seat and crossed one grey trouser suited clad leg over the other. “Oh, Betty’s doing amazing. She was discharged from her Cupid duties about an hour ago and you don’t want to know what she was seen doing down the side of Cupid HQ with her new friend. Let’s just say she’d taken her teeth out in preparation and leave it at that.”
I stifled a giggle. Good ol’ Betty.
“Ordinarily, you would receive a two week extended training session to encompass learning the correct use of arrows, but seeing as you did it for the good of another and not yourself, Cupid has on this occasion ruled that you should just be given a warning.”
“Oh.”
“So consider this it. If you fire another arrow before you graduate training, you will be at this school for at least a further two weeks, probably longer. The unauthorised use of your bow is not something we take lightly. You might be a descendant of Cupid but I don’t see why you should get any future preferential treatment. You have been warned.”
I know I should have felt chastised, but to be honest he was all dark and commanding and he was giving me a lady boner.
“Yes, Sir. I understand, Sir.” I said contritely. “Will that be all?”
“Yes, Samara.”
“Well, thank you, Marcus, for coming all this way over to training school to see me.” I emphasised the me. “Always happy to come to HQ unless there’s another reason you come over here…” I let my comment dangle.
A smirk appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“Have a nice day, Samara.”
“Thanks. I think tonight I fancy tasting a nice Martine-i. How ‘bout you?”
“Out.” He pointed at the door.
I laughed as I left.
As it was almost the end of the morning class, I headed straight for the cafeteria and before even getting any lunch, I sat down at a table and checked my timetable. After lunch it was counselling. Oooh. This must be one of the new things Cupid Inc was doing. Setting up sessions for couples who’d been matched and were struggling maybe? I wondered if I’d be an observer or able to actually take part and help. How exciting. Or maybe it was dealing with people who the Cupid’s had hit accidentally. I found myself actually looking forward to a lesson. After sorting out Betty’s life, I felt motivated. Then tonight I’d do my homework and really go to town on it and hopefully Martine would overlook the fact I made a mistake. After all, I did do an assignment, just the wrong one.
Destiny came in but unfortunately this time she had Vax with her, no doubt here to try to suck up crumbs of information as to why I was interviewed by Marcus so he could share them with his sister. Jeanette also trailed behind, along with a couple of other students. I really must learn their names because dugup and greasebucket weren’t going to go down well if I said them out loud.
“You not got any lunch yet?” Destiny asked.
I shook my head. “No, I figured I’d better concentrate on seeing what lesson was next.”
“Samara’s becoming a swot. Whatever next? I just saw a pig fly over the building.” Vax tittered. “Oh, they have vegan sausage rolls. Must dash before they run out.”
I narrowed my eyes. I wish there really was a pig flying right now cos I’d stuff it inside his vegan sausage roll, the smug git.
“Don’t let him get to you. He’s an arse. He’s bound to give up if you rise above it. Now what do you want to eat and drink? My treat today.”
“A really juicy burger and a coke please, Destiny. I’m going to delight in eating it in front of Vax.”
“It’s not helping, you calling him that.”
“Ah well.”
She laughed and went to the counter. Shame you couldn’t get a rare steak.
My burger was delicious and so was my drink. They both disappeared in record time, as did my lunch break. Before I knew it I was saying goodbye to the others. I double checked my phone to see what room the counselling was in. Room F14, The Valentine Suite. As I stared at my phone, the word blurred a bit. Shit, I was exhausted from all the Cupiding last night. Tonight, I needed to get any assignments done quickly and have an early night.
Even my legs ached as I walked down the hall, going a little wobbly on a couple of occasions.
I knocked on the door to F14 and walked in.
“Wow.” I said a little too loudly.
The room had cherry red walls and pale pink curtains with red love hearts on them. There was the usual office furniture of a desk and chair and another chair in front. The chair in front was also red but was a comfy armchair with lots of cushions. I walked over the plush cream carpet and my feet sank in it while I moaned with pleasure as to how lovely it was. This office and its furniture were like a host womb.
A woman walked out of a back office. Tall and slim, she definitely worked out as her muscles were lean and taut. She needed a good meal. Her medium length, dark brown hair was cut so she had a buzz cut on one side and it hung over her eye at the other. She spoke out of narrow lips.
“Hey, Samara. Good seat, hey?”
I wiggled my bum to sink further into its depths. “It’s fantastic, but how does anyone get any work done here? I just want to sleep.” I yawned. Crikey, I was feeling exhausted. Helping Betty had really taken it out of me it appeared.
“Well, you only have to think and speak, so you may as well be comfy. My name is Jessica and I’m the school’s psychologist.”
I looked around. “When are the couples arriving?”
She sat back in her own seat and folded her arms across her chest. “What couples would those be, Samara?”
I yawned again. “The ones we’re going to counsel.”
She shook h
er head. “Samara. This is an individual counselling session. The focus of the session is you.”
I opened one eye. When had I closed them? “Say that again?”
“We’re here to talk about you and the underlying issues of why you have been labelled…” She picked up a file. God, another one! I’d be recommending Cupid Inc go computerized. Save the trees! Jessica continued. “Crazy, Stupid, and Lazy.”
I saw her eyebrow raise as she looked at me, but it was no good, I could feel my eyes drooping and I was powerless to stop it.
“Samara!”
That was the last I heard as sleep took me over.
Samara
I cracked an eye open, hearts coming into view. Where the hell was I?
“You okay there, sleepyhead?”
I slowly came around and realised I was in the chair in the counselling office and it had been adjusted into a recline.
“Oh my god.” I shot up. “I am so, so, sorry.”
Jessica laughed. “Well, I’d say they hit the nail on the head with the lazy accusation. Did you not sleep well last night? Because I tried to wake you and you were almost comatose.”
“How long was I out?” I wiped the sides of my mouth, thankful there was no drool.
“Fifty minutes. Take your time coming around. While you were sleeping, I did some other work. I don’t have a client after you so we can start in ten and do your hour then.”
I looked at the office curtains and the hearts span off and whizzed around the room.
“Wow. How do you do that? Is it a spell?”
A concerned gaze met mine. “How do I do what?”
I pointed at the curtains. “Make the hearts come off and fly around the room?”
“I’m just going to check something, Samara.” She came over to me and looked closely at my eyes.
“Have you taken any drugs today?”
I stiffened. “No I certainly have not. I am very anti-drugs. I don’t even like a paracetamol. I’m not a junkie.”
A smile hovered on Jessica’s lips. “I meant like maybe a sedative to help you sleep. A lot of students do as they find it difficult being away from home.”
“Oh. Well, no, I haven’t taken anything at all. I did have a drink of coke with my lunch?”
“No, you are definitely under the influence of something. Where did you get your drink from? The cafeteria?”
“Yes, my friend brought it to me.”
“A closed can?”
“No, it was in a glass.”
“Hmm. Have you upset someone while you’ve been here, Samara? I believe someone may have tampered with your drink.”
“Vax! I bet Vax did it. He was next to Destiny in the queue.”
“Vax?”
I nodded. “His name’s Max, but I changed it to the name of a vacuum cleaner brand because he’s a suck up. He’s the brother of the woman whose fault it is I’m here in the first place.” I huffed. “I’m going to force feed him dog food. He’s a vegetarian.”
Jessica moved away from me. “I’m going to make you a strong coffee, give you ten minutes to wake up a little more and then we’ll start this session afresh.” Jessica looked at me pointedly. “Including going through the reasons why you’re here, because you’re still laying blame at other people’s doors. We have work to do. While you drink your coffee, I shall ring Cupid HQ about the possible tampering with of your drink.”
I couldn’t bloody believe it. Vax drugged me! He’d actually drugged me. Knowing I’d fall asleep in the next class. “He’s trying to make me fail so his sister can stay on my patch. I just know it.” I said.
“Drink your coffee and keep quiet while I finish this. You get to talk in counselling, but to my prompts.” Jessica went back to her computer.
“Bet your husband knows his place.” I quipped.
“I’m divorced. Guy was an idiot, but we’re not talking about me. Now shut up, Samara.”
A couple of minutes later she handed me a mug of the dark and delicious and sat back behind her desk.
Blowing over the top of it first, I took a sip of my coffee. It was gorgeous. My eyes widened. “Is this Jax’s?”
She smiled a triumphant smile.
“I like to find out my clients’ likes and dislikes. Bring something familiar and comforting into their environment. So for you, I got in touch with your friend Jax at her coffee shop and arranged a delivery of her signature blend.”
I burst into tears. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has done for me in weeks.” I began to get hysterical. Seriously, it was time for Noah to return and get two of everything on a boat. “I can’t stop crying. What’s going on?”
“You’re coming back down from the drug.” Jessica walked over and squeezed my arm. “Keep drinking the coffee. You’ll be okay.” She passed me the box of tissues from her desk.
“I thought they were just for display, but tissues are really quite helpful aren’t they? Thank you, lovely tissues.” I said, before bursting into tears all over again.
Jessica showed me into a bathroom to one side of her office. “My room is a therapy room. Lots of people show a whole gamut of emotions here and lots need to freshen up.”
I walked into the bathroom and headed for the mirror.
I had bloodshot eyes and mascara halfway down my face. Immediately, I made a mental note to pick up some waterproof for on Wednesdays. Then I stood stock still. For on Wednesdays. It seemed it had hit home that I wasn’t going to be out of here by the end of the week. Look at the state of me, and I’d not even actually had one complete counselling session yet. I splashed my face with cold water, wiped the mascara from under my eyes, took some deep breaths, and went back to the comfy chair.
“Could I sit on a stool instead?” I asked Jessica.
She shook her head. “No. You’ll enjoy the chair. I have every faith you’ll not fall asleep again, but it’s like a huge hug, so try it again. If you definitely don’t like it, I’ll arrange a different chair for next week.” She stared at me. “Hmm, I expected a comment about you not being here next week.”
I sighed. “Yeah, well, I think thoughts of an early escape are a dream. I failed my last assignment, had to see a PI from Cupid HQ before lunch, and then I fell asleep in counselling. I might be your most challenging subject yet.”
“I assure you, you aren’t.” Jessica typed into her computer and once again opened my file. “Okay, I think we can finally begin. So, firstly I’d like to go back to the events that led to you having to return to school. You talk of Max’s sister.” She looked at the file. “Rebecca Wilkins. Okay, tell me about you and Rebecca.”
I nodded. “I will, but first, is there any chance I can have another coffee? And get yourself one. Honestly, it’s the best thing ever.”
“Oh my god. You are so right. This is from a coffee shop in Withernsea? I’m moving. Do they need psychologists there?”
“Do they need psychologists? You’d have a job for life. Most of them are supernatural mixes so identity crises are par for the course.”
“Yet you talk about the place with such fondness.”
“I love it there. I was happy. My friends are lovely and I was truly happy with my husband, home, and the grooming salon.”
“But not Cupiding?”
“No.”
“Hmmm. Well, we’ll come back to that. Today, I want to know about Rebecca.”
I blew out a breath over my top lip. “Rebecca is the Cupid rep for neighbouring Hornsea. I only ever saw her at regional meetings. She was always trying too hard. Top marks every time. First to volunteer for things. No one else could ever get a chance to do anything. If you had an idea, she had one better. If she heard you had set up fourteen couples, she’d make sure she had fifteen. No one ever said anything against her though. You could see in their faces they wanted to strangle her to death, but no one would say a word.”
“And why did it bother you that she was good at what she did?”
“Because she wasn’t doing it fo
r the right reasons. She didn’t care about the people she’d matched up. It was all numbers. Quantity. They were forgotten the minute she’d shot her arrow and she was onto the next. Yet at the meetings it was ‘here’s an award for the top number of matches’. Meanwhile, I was taking care with whom I was sticking my arrows in and following up, making sure things were going smoothly, and all I got was, ‘You need to try harder, Samara’, ‘you’re missing your targets, Samara’. The same went for most people. I carried on, doing it the way I wanted. I hate being told what to do, and yes, therapist, that’s because my superstar superswot parents spent my entire childhood telling me how I needed to shine, to show I was the perfect Cupid rep. Never mind being a child and wanting a teddy. No I had to study them. Was it the sort of teddy suitable for a gift from a loved one? Did it measure up?”
“Okay, we have work to do on that, but back to Rebecca.” Jessica was typing notes into her laptop while I spoke.
“Shelley came to Withernsea and set up the dating agency. Our seer said it was all fated. She was to open up in the same block my grooming salon was in, and she’d marry a vampire. But Shelley needed to start somewhere and she set me up on a date with my now husband, Johnny.”
“How did it make you feel? That a dating agency was being set up on your turf?”
“I didn’t mind. There are many looking for love in Withernsea. I was one of them. And I wanted to do my own matchmaking at my pace. Slow, steady, and ensuring it was the perfect match. Shelley had the staff and computer system to be able to work faster. Once mine and Johnny’s story was featured in the press—as we got engaged on that first day—her agency took off. But me and Johnny had shared the single tingle. I’d shot my arrows into us because we were a perfect match. Shelley and I had both made my union happen.”
“And after you married, your statistics began to climb, but yet you did less?”
“Yes. I was a newlywed and in love with my husband. We needed to work. Him as a vet and me at my grooming parlour. The rest of the time we wanted to be together. The dating agency was on the up and doing superb and I asked Shelley what her success rate was. Her figures. I put them on my target report as if it wasn’t for me and Johnny and our press interview, she wouldn’t have had all those numbers. Also, nowhere on the form did it say they had to be directly shot with arrows by a Cupid. It just said Withernsea matches. So it wasn’t a lie.”
Crazy, Stupid, Lazy, Cupid (Cupid Inc Book 1) Page 5
