All That Mullarkey

by Sue Moorcroft

  All That Mullarkey

  Sue Moorcroft

  Copyright © 2010 Sue Moorcroft

  First published 2010 by Choc Lit Limited

  Penrose House, Crawley Drive, Camberley, Surrey GU15 2AB

  www.choclitpublishing.co.uk

  The right of Sue Moorcroft to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London, W1P 9HE

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

  from the British Library

  Print ISBN 978-1-906931-24-7

  PDF ISBN-978-1-906931-04-9

  To Paul

  For being in the next room

  writing songs that I’m the first to hear.

  Love you, darling.

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks again to Det. Supt Mark Lacey for telling me about Friday nights at the nick, police procedure and how Crimestoppers works; Laura Longrigg; Mark West, who read the draft and had many perceptive remarks to make about Cleo. And to Roger, who read the script when I thought it was ready and pointed out a big hole in the plot.

  Special thanks go to all those friends who shared their experiences of nuisance campaigns. Better if I don’t name any names! Some of you have been so naughty.

  To all at Choc Lit for supporting me with determination and enthusiasm, particularly Lyn, who understands the importance of chocolate and champagne, and Gill, copy editor extraordinaire.

  And for all my friends in the Romantic Novelists’ Association who made me see what is possible.

  Prologue

  Gav’s key in the door. Cleo’s heart skittered uneasily but she lifted her chin. All she had to do was tell him that she was going to the reunion.

  All day she’d considered retreat; the easy option. The reunion would be full of her uni classmates of a decade ago, flashing their kids’ photos, looking blank when she’d none to show in return, and babbling about the careers that their business studies degrees had earned them. She’d come home thinking, ‘So what?’ And Gav really, really didn’t want her to go.

  So why was she going?

  Because Gav had told her she mustn’t.

  Now he stepped through the sitting-room door, tie untied and hanging, curls ruffled, jacket over his arm. Halted to take in her new jeans, shiny blue top and make-up, then slammed the door shut. ‘So you’re going to this piss-up, then? Even though you know how I feel about you hanging around with your ex?’ He threw down his briefcase, yanked off his tie and flung it behind him.

  Cleo kept her voice calm. ‘You know I don’t do as I’m told, Gav. Anyway, I’m not “hanging around with my ex” – I’m going to my course reunion. I’ll have a few drinks with a few old mates, then come home.’ She slipped into her jacket, flipping her hair clear of her collar. ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry. Yes, I went out with someone on the same course and he might be there. Am I planning to jump his bones the instant we’re in the same room? No. If you choose not to believe me –’ She shrugged. ‘It’s you that’s got the problem.’

  A sudden crash made her jump. Before she could properly take in the mark on the wall where Gav had kicked his briefcase against it, he was bawling in her face, eyes bulging. ‘And I’m just supposed to sit home whilst you go out with your old boyfriend, am I? While you piss me about and make me look stupid?’

  Furious colour scalded Cleo’s cheeks but she stood her ground. ‘I’ve never pissed you about! But if you don’t trust me –!’

  Gav’s normally tidy hair hung into his eyes, sweat shone on his face. ‘It simply isn’t on!’ he roared. ‘You’re supposed to be my wife!’

  In her outrage, Cleo could hardly breathe. ‘It was all over two years before I met you, just like it was all over between you and Stacey. You know that!’ He didn’t like talking about Stacey. Cleo knew how hurt he’d been when Stacey had ended things.

  ‘I just don’t want you to go!’

  Cleo actually stamped in frustration. ‘This stupid lack of trust is hardly any thanks for five years’ loyalty, is it? Don’t try to control me, because you can’t!’ Several heartbeats passed before she added, coldly, deliberately, ‘And you never will.’

  Gav halted. He gripped the back of the sofa, breathing hard, his face creased in disgust, as if he’d examined an apple and found a worm in it. ‘Fuck you. If you go to the reunion, I won’t be here when you come back. There will be no marriage.’

  Fury blocked Cleo’s throat. Black then red flickered across her vision and she trembled from her knees up. Over the clamour of her heart she forced out words to hang in the air between them. ‘If that’s how you feel, it’s worthless anyway.’

  Outside, her car key shook so much in her hand that it took three attempts to get it into the ignition. She ripped away from the kerb without looking, driving at a stupid speed out of the village, not noticing the ponies in the field or the nicest gardens or any of the things that made her love Middledip. She flew through Bettsbrough and into the traffic circulating Peterborough to find the big pub at Wansford, the venue for the reunion.

  Half an hour later, her breathing had slowed. Reason prevailed. She slowed the car, indicated right at a roundabout and turned back.

  However much she was not in the wrong, she felt sick to think of the way they’d screamed at each other. They’d suddenly found themselves careering down a slippery slope and she had to find a foothold. The sensible way would be to show Gav that their relationship was more important than some stupid reunion – even a stupid reunion she had every right to attend.

  She’d sort things out. Discover why Gav was acting as if he were possessed by the insecurity demon.

  They’d make up in bed. She presumed so, anyway. They’d never quarrelled like this.

  Outside the house she drew up and saw that Gav’s silver Focus was gone.

  The front door was wide open. Cleo ran upstairs … Gav’s wardrobes and drawers stood open and ransacked.

  And then. A moment of utter stillness and dislocation from the world, of horrified incomprehension, as she saw the message written large in thick, black marker pen on the bedroom wallpaper.

  THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav.

  Part 1

  Cleo Callaway

  Chapter One

  Cleo’s eyes burned with the effort of trying to pierce the ultraviolet glare of a nightclub that heaved with partying Friday-nighters, as she willed her sister’s blonde head to bob into view. Liza had said she’d be here at Muggie’s tonight.

  Cleo needed Liza’s sisterly arms around her, needed to rain foul insults on her absent husband (safe in the knowledge that, if Cleo forgave Gav, Liza would forget every word). And, as the bass and drums music thumped, Cleo had already texted her four times, without reply.

  With a squeak of relief she glimpsed two golden heads and began wriggling her way towards them. ‘Angie! Rochelle!’ she gasped. Not Liza, but close. Angie and Rochelle, Liza’s cronies and clones – hair up in a series of complicated plaits, necklines low and hems high – swung around and gave Cleo air-kissy little hugs. ‘Cleo! Hiya!’

  ‘Where’s Liza?’

  Angie, a starlet in scarlet, pouted heavily glos
sed lips as she raised her voice above the music. ‘She’s supposed to be here but we haven’t seen her. Have you tried texting her? What you having?’

  Cleo paused. She hadn’t bothered with the bar yet but, actually, a drink would be perfect. Until Liza showed, Cleo could drink with Angie and Rochelle in this, the city centre’s pick-up joint, simply because she knew how much Gav would hate it. If he was going to insult her with accusations of bad behaviour, she might as well behave badly. Alcohol would be a good starting point. She turned to the red leather and chrome bar and surveyed the bottles in the cold cabinet behind the scurrying black-clad bar staff. ‘Lager, thanks.’

  The pint of special brew Angie passed back to her wasn’t quite the bottle of Becks she’d had in mind, but the big, fat, frosty glass felt satisfying. Gav hated her drinking pints.

  She checked her mobile but found no texts and no voice messages. Aggravated that Gav wasn’t even trying to get her – so that she could ignore him – she drank the pint down steadily and took her turn to buy a round, making her own another pint of special. Gav’s giant strop had made her feel unsafe, unstable, as if she could combust at any moment. Fury clanked around inside her head. She needed Liza.

  She kept one eye on the iron staircase that brought punters up into the club from the street below, hovering beside Angie and Rochelle as they quartered the room with beady eyes and heads on springs. ‘There’s Duncan, look, with Daniel. And Ross!’ They waved across the room at men Cleo couldn’t identify in the crowd.

  Cleo couldn’t even raise a smile, wishing deeply, dreadfully, that Liza would appear so that she could share her festering fury before she ripped someone’s head off. She heaved a sigh.

  ‘What’s up wiv you?’ Angie had recently affected an inability to pronounce certain words containing ‘th’. ‘You look like you’re, like, spitting fevvers.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Cleo muttered. ‘I just want to talk to Liza.’

  Angie exchanged glances with Rochelle before asking, slyly, ‘Your Gav not wiv you tonight?’

  She shook her head, blinking back tears.

  ‘Ah. Right.’ Angie nodded, sagely.

  Rochelle, eyes outlined startlingly in aquamarine, patted Cleo’s arm. ‘It’ll be all right when you go home! He’s probably waiting to make up.’

  Cleo felt her eyes begin to melt. ‘But he stormed off –’

  Angie’s attention was suddenly whipped away. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Where?’ Rochelle craned to follow her friend’s gaze.

  ‘There! Spiky hair, pointy face. Hot, or what?’

  ‘Wow!’ Rochelle’s intake of breath was so deep her neckline almost gave way under the strain. ‘He’s looking! Make as if he knows us.’

  Finger-twiddling waves in the direction of Spiky Hair ended in sighs of disappointment. Cleo glanced across as he threw back his head and laughed with two men wearing excruciatingly short platinum crops and wrap-around shades. Angie and Rochelle were probably missing the pulling power of Liza, tiny, fey, blonde man magnet. Cleo had long ago accepted philosophically that Liza was the one who turned heads. She didn’t mind because Liza, her kid sister, heap of trouble, oddball, was one of Cleo’s favourite people.

  Cleo had what their mother (another tiny, fey, etc.) termed ‘dark and uncommon attractions’. All, apparently, to do with Stanislaw, a Polish grandfather who bequeathed Cleo Slavic cheekbones, a kind of stocky sexiness and medium height to make her the tallest female in her family. Her eyes, her mother decreed, were her big asset. ‘Dark and twinkly, turning down at the corners to meet your big smile turning up.’

  ‘Crap,’ Liza would mutter, ‘your big assets are your boobs.’

  Cleo rose onto her tiptoes to do a 360-degree scan of the room. Turning back, alerted by straightening of tiny skirts and hair flicking, she saw that, despite unpromising early indications, the laughing man with the spiky hair was on his way over. ‘I saw him first!’ hissed Angie.

  ‘His call,’ Rochelle growled, bolstering up the contents of her bra under her thin lace top.

  Spiky arrived through the throng with a dazzling smile. ‘Evening, ladies.’

  ‘I’m Angie!’

  ‘Rochelle!’

  Cleo sank into the background, content to be the audience for Angie and Rochelle’s forthcoming boob-thrusting assault. But suddenly she found herself under the brown-golden gaze and it was like being fixed by the eyes of a leopard. His mouth curved. ‘I’m Justin.’

  Through her astonishment, Cleo heard dual sighs of disappointment.

  ‘This is Cleo,’ Angie snapped, turning away.

  ‘Her husband’s run off,’ added Rochelle, meanly.

  Cleo gazed uncertainly at Justin. His hair was cropped tightly at the sides, sharpening his features, and his smile seemed to poise him on the point of laughter. Somehow her eyes kept sliding down to his mouth – perhaps because he kept looking at hers.

  Justin smiled. Centrefold material. ‘Sorry to hear about the husband.’ Cleo had never seen anyone look less sorry about anything. He cocked his head. ‘So, what did you do?’

  Cleo’s stomach twisted on fresh indignation. ‘He left in case I did something.’

  Slowly, he grinned, teeth white and narrow. ‘That’s … unreasonable. So. Option A or Option B?’

  She blinked. ‘Sorry?’

  He edged nearer as people tried to push past him to the bar, dropping his head close to hers so that she could hear him over the clamouring music. Warm. He smelled of aftershave and beer. ‘Option A is where I leave you to brood about your gitty husband. Option B is where I take you to dance to forget your gitty husband.’ His eyes laughed, inviting her to join in.

  ‘Gav isn’t gitty,’ she objected. Then added, honestly, ‘Or not normally.’ But she thought of THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav. Maybe he was gitty. A bit. A bit she hadn’t noticed before.

  Which was why she was there, on her own. Anger adrenaline combined headily with special brew, making her feel suddenly reckless. And free. Her head buzzed and she felt that delicious first slide into drunkenness, quarantining all common sense behind closed doors in the back of her mind. She drew in a deep breath. ‘Option B!’

  She might not be dressed to pull in a pelmet skirt and see-through top like Angie and Rochelle but, man, she was pissed off enough to dance with a stranger.

  The dance floor was hot and crowded. Cleo was tingling-aware of Justin’s hand in hers as he led her into the heart of it, alive and giddy with drink and naughtiness. This would show Gav. Mistrustful bastard. She’d give him something to mistrust.

  She would treat herself to this naughty little step out of time, a wicked moment where there was no one to sit in judgement of her. Heedless and unbounded, she felt disconnected from her normal – married – self. No husband to guard her; no sister to make her feel safe. Cleo raised her arms and let her hair swish over her face and the beat move her, the flashing lights bathe her, the hot bodies around her give her their rhythm.

  She did keep an eye out for Liza. But Liza never came.

  Unbelievably, the music was winding down into the slow stuff already. She looked at her watch. One thirty!

  Couples were drifting into each other’s arms and the lights had become slow and purple. Angie and Rochelle were long gone.

  The passing hours and several special brews had been softening the details of the row with Gav, but now it flooded back. Like a punch in the stomach. Cleo felt freshly adrift.

  Justin took her hand. ‘All right?’ His smile faded at her silence. ‘Or are you ready to select Option A?’

  Her heart shrank. She’d drunk five times too much to drive home and she didn’t want to face lonely, empty home anyway. When the club closed she’d get a taxi to – where? Back to Liza’s to sleep in the car in the hope that, sooner or later, she’d turn up?

  She shuddered, forcing a smile. ‘Still Option B.’ On the crowded dance floor he scooped her into his arms and she allowed herself to enjoy the delicious heat of him. She heard his
breath catch, felt his hands move to the small of her back to press her closer.

  His head dipped, lips close to hers, waiting. Her heart galloped.

  She shouldn’t.

  She absolutely shouldn’t.

  But, slowly, tentatively, shoving the thought of Gav away because he deserved it, she did. She lifted her face to Justin’s and their lips brushed, soft as angel’s wings. Cleo felt lust shiver up the back of her neck as he fleeted kisses along her jawbone, each a tiny starburst of heat.

  Then he slid his hand under her hair and kissed her mouth.

  Their dancing halted and her fingers clutched his shoulders. When he finally released her, the floor felt spongy under her feet.

  ‘Wow!’ he breathed.

  She nodded as her heart drummed the air out of her lungs. Wow.

  Outside, the night air was fresh enough to make the head spin, particularly when you’d drunk as much special as she had. Clinging to Justin’s arm, she tried to marshal her thoughts through the after-loud-music ringing in her ears.

  Justin kissed her temple. ‘There are still some taxis.’ He paused. ‘Where …?’

  Abortively, she checked her mobile for messages from Liza, then heaved a mega-sigh as she fought the alcohol fumes for a half-sensible idea. ‘I suppose I’d better go to my sister’s and see if she turns up.’

  He ducked his head to see into her face. ‘Not home?’

  THIS MARRIAGE IS OVER. Love Gav. ‘Taxis won’t go right out there at this time – I live in Middledip village. My car’s at my sister’s in Bretton. If she doesn’t come home I’ll sleep in it.’ In the dark. In a cold inhospitable car.

  Breath whistled between Justin’s teeth and he slowly shook his head. Then, more rapidly, ‘You can’t do that. That’s not safe.’ He traced the side of her neck with his thumb. ‘You’d better come home with me.’

  Oh crap, she mustn’t do that! That would be a desperate, awful thing, hurling her rather drunken self over a line that must not be crossed at any cost. She was married. Possibly. Probably.