Melody Bittersweet and The Girls' Ghostbusting Agency: A laugh out loud romantic comedy of Love, Life and ... Ghosts? (19 page)

I drop my umbrella and slide my hands inside his jacket. They somehow end up inside his T-shirt too, and I gasp in shock at the warmth and sudden intimacy of his skin under my palms. I think I actually whisper ‘oh my God,’ and his breath quickens as I slide my hands up and fill them with his glorious broad shoulders.

‘You’re trouble,’ he mutters, then kisses me again, deeper, faster, sliding his tongue over mine as he slides the hairband from my hair and musses it with his fingers.

‘And you’re lethal,’ I say, my eyes locked with his as he lays his hand flat over the base of my throat.

‘Don’t ask me in for coffee unless you mean with breakfast,’ he says, cocksure, making me laugh softly.

‘In the whole wide world, we’re the two people who should not have sex the most.’

‘That doesn’t even make sense, Bittersweet,’ he says. I can hear the humour in his voice as he moves his hand down to cover my breast. ‘You should probably stop talking now.’

I close my eyes and soak up the pleasure, because, annoyingly and inevitably, he’s ridiculously good at this stuff.

‘We’re really very incompatible, from the neck up, Fletch,’ I say, trying to remember the conversation I had with Marina but then he puts his hand underneath my shirt and back over my breast, only this time his fingers are stroking my skin and it feels like someone just switched me on from the inside.

‘I like how my name sounds when you say it.’ He kisses the skin just below my ear. ‘Say it again.’

I won’t, of course, but then he eases the cup of my bra down and closes his thumb and finger around my nipple and I say it anyway. I might even have said it twice, and my hand moves around to slide down his chest. He’s just so damn hard and hot. I curl my fingers over the waistband of his jeans and tug him closer against me. He dazzles me, and I arch into his hand and his mouth.

‘Your clothes are in my way,’ he says quietly, and then with the confidence of a man who has done it often, he reaches up and flicks my bra open. Fletch’s easy, self-assured voice is a problem to me; it’s giving me goosebumps and shivers and is turning me into a woman who makes out in alleyways. I won’t let this go too far, but oh my God he’s just put both of his hands up inside my shirt and he’s holding my bare breasts in them.

‘Ask me in, Pretty Face,’ he whispers low and urgent into my mouth as he slides his thumbs over my nipples. ‘Ask me into your bed, Melody, and I’ll say yes.’

‘Fletch,’ I start, and he seems to sense what I’m going to say because he groans and nips my lip.

‘Don’t say no. Don’t tell me we have incompatible brains, because from the neck down we’re best fucking friends. Don’t tell me you can’t stand me, because your body is telling me that right now you can stand me plenty. I’m not suggesting we pretend we understand each other, or even that we like each other, but the need to screw you is keeping me up at night, Bittersweet.’

He’s had me backed against the wall and his hands have been full of my breasts the entire time he’s been speaking, and when he bends his head to mine and kisses me some more I feel sexier than Scarlett fucking Johansson. I don’t want to stop him, I really desperately don’t, but the small bit of my brain that isn’t drunk on either Fletcher Gunn or rosé wine wants, no
needs
, to say something.

‘I don’t have casual sex.’ The words slide into the night air, and in reply he lifts my shirt and bares my breasts.

‘I’m not asking you for casual sex,’ he says, catching his lip between his teeth in almost pained pleasure as he looks intently at my body. His eyes say I yearn for you, and his mouth says ‘I’m asking you for intense, uncontrolled, filthy sex. The kind of sex you have once and then spend the rest of your life getting over.’

Could anyone in the world refuse that? Why would they? He’s just morphed into a potty-mouthed Mr Darcy, and I’ve always been a sucker for Jane Austen. I’m going to do it. I’m going to take Fletcher Gunn upstairs to my flat and let him give me the most mind-bendingly amazing night of my life, and then I’m going to go back to hating him again in the morning. And that’s the plan, right up to the moment when I hear the bell above the door to Blithe Spirits and then my mother’s voice in the street just around the corner, along with a deeper male voice I’d know anywhere. It’s Leo.

‘Shit!’ I whisper-gasp in panic, dragging my shirt down as I jump guiltily away from Fletch. ‘Shit.’

He pushes both of his hands through his hair and stares at me, his breathing ragged and harsh. His baleful eyes tell me that he knows that our night of filthy uncontrollable sex has just gone up in smoke.

‘Quiet,’ I mouth, holding my finger up to my lips. I don’t know which out of my mother and Leo dislikes Fletcher Gunn more, and I definitely don’t want either of them to find me half-cut and fooling around with him in the alleyway. He rolls his eyes at me as if I’m an idiot, and it strikes me that he doesn’t want to be found in a compromising position with me either. Should I be offended? I can’t muster it, because I’m under no delusion that this thing between Fletch and me is anything but inconveniently combustible chemistry and best kept between the two of us. Or not actioned at all, which now I’m out of the lust-trance he cast over me, seems like the best option all round. I just need to get him out of this alleyway without being seen.

‘
I
’ll speak to Melody
,’ my mother says. ‘I’m sure she’ll help once she knows.’

What’s he up to? And what the hell is he even doing at my mother’s dinner party in the first place? My chest burns with unanswered questions as I tiptoe backwards and press myself against the cool brick wall. Fletch does the same, and we stand there side by side in the shadows and listen to my mother bid Leo farewell.

‘Don’t leave it so long next time,’ she practically purrs. I can tell from her tinkle of girlish laughter that she’s had a couple of glasses of my grandmother’s champagne, which is all it takes to relax her defences; she clearly gets her lightweight drinking-genes from her father rather than her mother.

‘Should I nip round and see if Melody’s home yet?’ Leo asks, and I peel my lips back in an exaggerated grimace of horror that probably makes me look like a character from
Wallace and Gromit
. I can’t even breathe as I stare into the darkness at the end of the alley.

‘We’d have heard her, I’m sure,’ Mother says lightly. ‘I’ll make sure she gets in touch soon.’

I hear him murmur his goodnights, and then listen to his receding footsteps with my hand over my banging heart ready to catch it if it bursts out of my skin. When I hear the bell over the shop door jingle, I finally let my breath out in one giant whoosh.

‘I didn’t think it was possible to dislike Leo Dark more than I already did.’ Fletch’s voice is hollow in the dark alleyway. ‘I was wrong.’

‘
S
o how did
the dinner party go?’ I’m in my mother’s kitchen playing innocent devil’s advocate, if indeed there can be such a thing. Sunlight streams through the open window in front of her by the stove, highlighting her sleek silver hair as if she’s an angel, which she categorically is not. What kind of mother invites her daughter’s ex-boyfriend to dinner and doesn’t think to mention it in advance? She’s meddling, and I’m going to call her on it.

‘The paella was an unmitigated success,’ she says, placing a big plate of bacon and eggs on the table before me. ‘How was your date?’

I consider how to respond.
I lied to you about having a date to get out of your dinner party.
I’m fairly sure that would go down like a rancid oyster
. I had an unplanned, thoroughly unexpected, filthy-hot date with Fletcher Gunn.
And that one would have me wearing my breakfast. ‘He didn’t turn up,’ I say, eventually.

‘What?’ Oh, she looks furious, but thankfully she’s furious with my imaginary Sicilian boyfriend rather than me so I’ll take that as a win.

I shrug regretfully as I pick up my knife and fork. ‘I watched the movie anyway. It was okay.’ I’m going straight to hell.

‘But you should have come home,’ she cries, waving the spatula at me. ‘You know perfectly well that I could have made room at the table.’

I burn to say
Where at the table? Next to Leo?
but I just chew on my bacon and try to make a ‘shucks, why didn’t I think of that’ face.

‘Yeah, I should have. Did you have a fun evening?’

She frowns. ‘Well, yes. A funny thing happened, actually . . .’ she pauses and twists her mouth, the way she does when she’s thinking how to phrase something. ‘We had a surprise visitor arrive just before we sat down to eat.’

‘You did?’ I round my eyes and stop chewing, like a Disney princess about to be given vital news.

‘Leo called by again.’

‘Leo? Leo Dark?’ I ask nonchalantly.

She nods. ‘He came hoping to see you, but he stayed for dinner anyway.’

‘So you hadn’t invited him to the dinner party, he just happened to come at the exact moment that you were serving up the paella?’ I don’t know whether to believe her or not. She sounds convincing, and she looks convincing, but then I am sitting here lying through my teeth so what’s to say that she isn’t too?

‘You know I had an empty seat, he filled it. It was no trouble really, but Melody I really think you should talk to him.’

I frown, and then huff a bit. ‘Wasn’t it only a few days ago that he was still in your bad books for the way he treated me?’

She looks torn and sits down at the table opposite me. ‘Well, yes, of course, he was. He is,’ she stresses. ‘It’s just that he’s taken such a lot of responsibility on, you know with the TV, and those girls as well.’

My ears prick up. ‘The twins?’

She nods. ‘Did you know that he pays all of their costs to be here; their rent, their food, everything.’

I mull on this for a second. ‘Yes, but you know they’re the founding members of his Twitter fan club?’

She nods. ‘He told me that they switched their affections to Leo after Finbar Honeyman took out a restraining order against them. Tricky situation, from what I can gather.’

‘Hold up a second.’ I frown, thoroughly confused. Finbar Honeyman does a similar job to ours somewhere up near the Scottish Borders – I’ve come across him occasionally at conventions and events and he’s even more egotistical than Leo.

‘Nikki and Vikki were Honeybunnies before they were Darklings?’ I think that might be one of the most bizarre sentences I’ve ever uttered, but stay with me. Leo and Finbar Honeyman are self-styled rivals both on Twitter and in life, so I’m fascinated to hear that the twins switched allegiances from one to the other. Oh hang on . . .

‘Finbar Honeyman took out a restraining order?’

Mum leans in towards me as if she’s sharing a top secret. ‘Apparently, they were a bit too obsessive over Finbar, terrorised anyone who dared to say anything negative about him. Menacing threats on Twitter, abusive and threatening messages on Facebook, that kind of thing. The police ended up getting involved and banned them from ever going near Finbar again. And so they switched their attentions to Leo.’

‘Okay,’ I say slowly, thinking back to the incident in the cellar at Brimsdale Road. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so quick to give them a second chance. ‘And now he’s paying for them to live here as his personal assistants?’

‘Between you and me, Melody, I don’t think he had any choice. By the time all of this came to light they were already here and in charge of his . . . Darlings, is it?’

‘Darklings.’

‘They turned up on his doorstep with their suitcases and presented themselves as his dream team. He didn’t know a thing about the whole Finbar debacle until they’d got their high heels firmly under the table.’

I don’t tell Mum that they’ve been on my doorstep in tears too, but I’m starting to build up an idea of how those girls work and I’m seeing them in a whole new sinister light. It sounds very much to me as if Leo has wound up with a couple of crackpot obsessive fans that he doesn’t quite know how to get rid of. I expect he’s caught between being wildly flattered by their attention and worried that they’ll go all Kathy Bates on him and start smashing his ankles with a sledgehammer if he cuts them off.

‘Melody, sweetheart,’ my mother sits down with her cup of tea in her hand and sweeps her long silver hair over one shoulder as she studies me, ‘I hate to say this but I think Leo came here to warn you to watch your back around them.’

* * *

‘
J
esus sodding Christ
!’ Marina is hopping mad when I relay this in our Monday-morning meeting around the coffee table. ‘Watch your back? Did you tell your mum that they’ve already had their first go at stabbing you in it?’

I shake my head. ‘Mum thinks it would be best if we work
with
Leo to sort the Brimsdale Road case out.’

‘What, and let him grab all the glory on live TV just to keep Pyscho and Nutso off your back? What about the next case, and the case after that?’

Glenda Jackson is perched neatly on the armchair, and I shake my head so she doesn’t record that particular comment in the meetings book.

‘She’s just worried for me. You know how she gets.’

‘Well, she doesn’t need to be. You’ve got me.’ Marina won’t stand for intimidation unless she’s the one doing it.

‘And me,’ Artie says sitting beside me on the little sofa with his mouth full of one of Nonna Malone’s cucidati cookies. I look at the tin and wonder how likely it is that I can hide the rest of the iced, fig-filled biscuits, and then I watch in horror as Lestat’s head looms up over the edge of the table and faceplants into the tin.

‘No!’ I shout, lunging for him, but it’s too late. He’s got icing in the folds of his furry face and drool all over Nonna’s wonderful creations. I can take his snoring and his early morning wake-up calls, but he’s just pressed the wrong button and tipped me over the edge.

‘I’m taking him back,’ I growl. ‘Put it in the minutes, Glenda! Lestat is going back to the rehoming centre on account of the fact that he is ruining my goddamn life!’

The dog pauses and looks up at me thoughtfully when I shout and then chows back down again. Everyone stares at me, and Glenda makes no move to record Lestat’s predicament in the minutes. I don’t think she’s taking me seriously. I go to speak, but then something terrible happens. My eyes fill with big fat tears that burst free and tumble down my cheeks. It catches me totally unawares; like a sudden nosebleed you have no control over.

‘Oh no.’ Marina shoots up in an instant to grab a tissue from the desk and then puts her arm around my shoulders. ‘This is about more than Lestat eating Nonna’s cucidati, surely? Because if that’s all it is she’ll bake you some more.’

I blink to clear my vision, feeling like a fool. ‘I’m okay, really I am.’ My voice comes out in sniffly gulps. ‘It’s not just the biscuits, it’s lots of things. It’s how horrible and sad Agnes Scarborough’s diary was, and how I hadn’t counted on gaining freaky enemy twins when I started this, and how I’m not exactly sure how to resolve the case, and how I nearly had mind-blowing sex with Fletcher Gunn on Saturday night and now Lestat has eaten all of the biscuits and they were my new favourites.’

All three of them stare at me open-mouthed.

‘Don’t put any of that in the minutes, Glenda,’ Marina says.

‘Especially the bit about Fletcher Gunn,’ I say, wishing I’d kept that particular woe to myself. ‘And for God’s sake don’t tell Mum or Gran. You know how much they hate him.’

Poor Glenda. She is quite caught between the Bittersweet businesses now that she works for both of them.

‘Oh, I won’t,’ she assures me. ‘But in my experience, Melody, mind-blowing sex is not something to be passed up lightly. Fletcher Gunn is a terribly handsome man.’

I look at her goggle-eyed; it was the last thing I expected her to say. Artie is practically humming the national anthem with embarrassment by this point. His head looks like a boiled beetroot.

‘I think I’m going to take Lestat for a walk up and down the alley,’ he says, lifting the protesting pug away from the biscuit tin and heading for the door.

Glenda pulls open her desk drawer and pushes a Cadbury’s Turkish Delight bar across to me. It’s a special moment; for as many years as she’s worked for Blithe she’s kept an emergency-only Turkish Delight on hand, but I’ve very rarely seen it eaten. I don’t know all that much about Glenda’s marriage, but I can draw my own conclusions from the fact that my missed opportunity for mind-blowing sex is considered an emergency-chocolate situation.

* * *

A
fter lunch
, Marina, Artie and I pile into Babs and hoon off in the general direction of Brimsdale Road.

‘Grab my Magic 8 Ball, Artie,’ I say, and he punches the glove box like a pro.

‘What’s the question?’ Marina asks, squished between us. ‘If it’s whether to shag Fletcher Gunn, you don’t need the magic ball to tell you “no”. You’ve got me to do that.’

She is very against the idea of any kind of neck-down liaison with Fletch, on account of the fact that my heart is down there and could get broken again.

‘Not that,’ I say. ‘I need to know whether to share the case and any associated proceeds with Leo.’

‘Put the ball away, Artie,’ she scowls. ‘You don’t need to help Leo out of the hole he’s got himself into with the psycho Barbies; I’m not frightened of them, and you’re not either.’

‘I’m proper terrified of them. They look like they eat babies for breakfast,’ Artie drops into the conversation, earning himself a swift jab in the ribs. I can only nod, because, now we know that their harmless Cheeky Girl impression is a front, it’s an astute observation.

‘Forewarned is forearmed,’ Marina insists, resolute. ‘We’ve got their number now and the gloves are well and truly off. Every business has its rivals, Melody. Yours just happen to model themselves on the fembots from
Austin Powers
.’

D
ouglas is waiting
for us in the kitchen when we let ourselves in.

‘You’ve come back, then.’ He’s not his usual laid-back self. ‘I wasn’t sure you would after Isaac decided to behave like a poltergeist.’

‘Douglas wasn’t sure we’d return after Isaac’s behaviour at the weekend,’ I say, for Marina and Artie’s benefit.

‘You’re damn lucky that we have,’ Marina says, all attitude. ‘We need to talk to Isaac.’

I shoot her a sharp look. She doesn’t have the luxury of being able to see Douglas, but if she could I think she’d have been a little less agro. ‘Last time I checked, I talked to the ghosts?’

She lifts one shoulder, unrepentant. ‘Just sayin’.’

I look back at Douglas. ‘How has he been?’

He glances towards the high kitchen ceiling. ‘He’s holed himself up in the attic and won’t come down.’

Okay. Well, as it seems that the mountain isn’t coming down, Mohammed will go up.

‘There’s cricket on,’ Douglas says. ‘Come and watch it with me?’