Page 15 of The Trouble With Love

‘It’s an owl’s eye by someone’s interpretation. Shit, this is great. Anything else?’

‘Last one. The words of a king.’

There was a moment, a perfect moment, when we stood there in the hallway, thinking the same thing. Then he dropped the box, I pushed the wine and glasses onto the staircase and we both ran for the living room, jostling each other as we raced to be first through the door and over to the bookcase.

‘Yes!’ Kai won and snatched a dog-eared copy of The Tommyknockers from the shelf. I was halfway to The Shining, but let go when he ripped three pages out of his book and waved them in the air. ‘That’s it! What do we win?’

‘Our wishes, I think.’

‘Jesus.’ He calmed down instantly. ‘So, you all make a wish, do the spell and then what?’

‘It comes true, according to Vivienne.’

He whistled softly and went back to finish pouring the wine into both glasses. ‘Right. So a bunch of possibly psychologically-uneven women get loose in the wood and try to perform magic . . . Wow, I am going to look for something to work on in the Orkneys while that’s going on. Sounds as though it has the possibility to become the oestrogen-fuelled bitch fight to end all bitch fights. Whereabouts did you say you were, again?’

‘The bare hilltop on the other side of the dale. Creepy place, Isobel said she could feel someone watching when we were there last time.’

‘I bet she did.’ He emptied his glass. ‘Look, Holly. This place, Barndale — even if most of you wouldn’t know Wicca from a wardrobe, it’s still not a good place to be wandering around.’

I whistled the theme tune to the X-Files. ‘Yeah. There’s armed gamekeepers and loony journalists for a start.’

‘No, seriously.’ A hand curved onto my shoulder. ‘Just be careful.’

There was a sudden darkness to the mood, his image switch was complete. ‘Okay, I will.’

‘Right.’ He flashed his wrist in front of his eyes. ‘God, look, it’s nearly one. Sorry, but I’m going to have to kick you out. Got an early start tomorrow.’

‘Oh, yes, course. Well, me too.’

‘I’ll call you a taxi. Give me your keys and I’ll drop your car off for you tomorrow morning on my way to the station.’

Damn, I’d forgotten about my car. Or had I? Had I secretly been hoping that being over the limit would get me invited to stay the night in that balconied room with the toad-like furniture and this amber-eyed man? Had his previous flirtatiousness really just been a knee-jerk reaction to a female presence then? It had felt like more . . . I glanced up at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Taxi?’

‘I think so, yes.’ The hand on my shoulder turned me firmly towards the door. ‘They can normally be with us in five minutes. You wait there and I’ll ring.’

That was possibly the subtlest turning down of my charms I’d ever encountered.

Chapter Eight

It would have been so easy. She was giving off all the right signals, the cute little head-toss, bit of lower-lip action between the teeth, all carefully choreographed, of course, and I had to admit that she does it well. Almost unstudied, a kind of knowing innocence about her, like she doesn’t know how she’s doing it but she’s going to keep doing it until I go for it. But. And, oh yeah, there’s a big but here, something else kicked in. We were playing the whole ‘eye contact’ game and it was going so, so well, point to her, point to me, it only needed one of us to take advantage and . . . And then she looked right into me. Can’t describe it. It wasn’t like she changed, conversation kept right along the lines it had been but . . . yeah, there’s that word again. But. She asked me about my past. About what made me go into this mental whoring that I like to call ‘journalism’ as if that gives it any respectability, about what I am. A simple little question, nothing that anyone else couldn’t have asked anywhere along the line. Any of them. Any of those thoughtless, careless women who wanted me enough to let their eyes skim the surface without their brains even trying to get underneath. For all their smart ways, their great jobs, their intellectualism, not one of them ever asked me why I did it. They were all content to let the image rule. Like they didn’t want to know anything else, like they wanted me to be the man they thought I was, with nothing going on to break that image. Like they didn’t want me to be real, somehow. No shitty background, no identity crises, nothing nasty to ruin the view of me that they had, as some kind of black knight, in his designer jacket and jeans, riding in over the horizon to sweep them from their lives of boring mediocrity.

It hit me hard. Oh, I covered myself, the good old bait-and-switch. Distracted her attention and got it all back to where I could deal with it, put myself back in the driving seat and never let her know that she’d done something that no one has ever attempted before — got through my armour like a tungsten carbide round. And there I was, like one of those poor bastards on the war fields, too shocked to feel pain, with all my protection rendered useless.

And she never even knew what she’d done.

Chapter Nine

Vivienne had pushed all the furniture up against the walls of her living room and we stood awkwardly in the bare centre, like early arrivals at a school disco. A ginger tomcat stropped against my legs and Isobel had hardly taken her face out of her handkerchief since she’d arrived. Megan looked perky, bouncing from foot to foot, a supermarket bag swinging from her wrist, containing what looked like a human head. Eve had brought a stick, on which she leaned heavily.

‘Sciatica playing up this week,’ she explained. ‘It’s the weather, must be changing.’

‘Well, we’re not going anywhere yet.’ Vivienne motioned us to one side and we huddled in the kitchen doorway as she rolled back the dusty carpet to reveal bare floorboards on which someone had chalked an amateurish circle. ‘First we must prepare our ingredients.’

She made us put our bags in the centre of the circle and then fussed around drawing symbols beside them.

‘So, how was dinner with Kai last night?’ Megan asked. ‘I rang you around elevenish but you weren’t back.’

‘It was good, yes.’ I didn’t know what else to say. Kai and I had parted company chastely enough, with a shaken hand and a kissed cheek, and even now I could feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder, turning me away from him. There had been a strange weakness in the gesture, as though he knew he had to do it, but hadn’t really wanted to. Or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. Or not. I still didn’t even know what it was he had going on, but I wouldn’t have turned down a quick bounce on that limber-looking body.

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