taking the mickey out of her to stop myself from spontaneously combusting with excitement.
‘Oh, so he’s here then,’ she said a little while later. I briefly marvelled at how she knew when she had her back to the door, but I realized my wide grin must have given the game away.
‘Hi,’ I said, way too over-enthusiastically. I lent up to kiss his cheek, but he turned and gave me a kiss on the lips. ‘This is Maria.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, offering his hand. She looked a little miffed that she wasn’t getting a kiss and I had to suppress a giggle.
‘You too,’ she said, in her clipped telephone voice.
Two bottles of wine later and Maria’s ancestral Scottish lilt was beginning to make itself heard. My accent, on the other hand, had apparently become more Italian, as Maria had laughingly observed.
‘So, you’re in the wine business, eh?’ she asked Thomas. ‘How much would this . . .’ She took a look at the label. ‘So, how much would this Merlot be?’
He smiled as she pronounced the T. ‘Well, this bottle wouldn’t be worth more than you paid for it, other than you’d expect to pay twenty pounds more in a restaurant and five pounds less in a supermarket.’
‘So, where’s the big money angle? Cos me and my Jimmy would be up for some of that.’
I looked at her and rolled my eyes. She and Jimmy barely made it through the month, but maybe that was all the more reason to invest.
‘Well, it’s all about the fine wines,’ he said. ‘Their values increase and decrease, and you just have to know when’s the right time to buy and sell, much like stocks and shares I suppose. But this is much more of a dead cert than the London Exchange could ever be.’
‘So, we’d be buying wine?’ asked Maria.
‘Yes, but not to drink.’ He laughed. ‘You’d keep it in a safe place, in optimum temperatures, until you wanted to sell it. All of my clients make over a two hundred per cent return, minimum.’
‘But who would we sell to?’ she asks, her expression confused.
‘Well, you’d normally sell it to the highest bidder, and because I’ve always got clients who are looking to invest large sums of money, I’m normally able to outbid anyone else because I’ve got people lined up who want it.’
She gave me a nudge in the ribs. ‘So, we wouldn’t really need to do anything, your “hot guy” would do it all for us.’
‘O-kay, it’s time to go,’ I said, not wanting Maria’s loose tongue to reveal any more secrets.
She wound her window down as she got in her taxi. ‘You two lucky ducks go and have a fun time,’ she said, blowing us kisses. ‘Go give each other multiple orgasms.’
I turned to Thomas, wide-eyed and laughing. ‘I am so sorry. She has an alcohol threshold that should never be crossed.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he laughed, pulling me towards him. He took my breath away as he kissed me, his hands entwined in my hair. He almost knew to support me as my knees threatened to buckle. ‘So, what about it?’ he whispered into my ear.
‘What about what?’ I asked, breathlessly, not wanting him to stop.
‘Let’s go give each other multiple orgasms.’
18
I was too busy being kissed as I fished for the keys in my bag to notice that the front door to the flat was ajar. It wasn’t until I went to put the key in the lock that my blood ran cold.
‘Come on, what’s taking you so long?’ said Thomas as he nuzzled my neck, seemingly oblivious to Tyson’s frantic barking.
‘Look,’ I blurted out, not even thinking that I might alert whoever was in there. ‘It’s open.’
Thomas looked up and instinctively walked around me, so he was between me and the door. ‘Call the police,’ he said authoritatively, holding an arm out to stop me moving forward.
‘Don’t,’ I said, my breath catching in my throat as he pushed the door slowly open. ‘Someone might be in there.’
In a split-second panic, I ran through the items that a burglar might take that could never be replaced; the necklace from my dad, his wedding ring, framed photographs of us on the mantlepiece. I could see them all so clearly, being carelessly shoved into a holdall, their value so paltry to anyone but me. The very thought was enough to cause a ripple of pain through my chest and my bottom lip to wobble.