LITMIR.BIZ

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them, the chances of someone recognising her are remote to zero.

      Kate is swirling the dregs of her red wine with burgeoning discontentment when Jack strolls in.

      ‘You look gorgeous.’ He unleashes his most intimate smile.

      Her resentment evaporates.

      ‘Let me order you a refill,’ he adds, stroking her back lightly with circular movements. ‘Is that a new lipstick? Have I told you yet how sensational you look? How come you look extra fabulous tonight?’

      ‘I had an early night last night,’ laughs Kate, warmed by his main-beam attention. ‘It’s down to sleep, the ultimate beauty aid. No, come to think of it that’s plastic surgery. But sleep must run the scalpel a close second.’

      Jack looks faintly bemused as he leans an elbow on the bar and asks for two glasses of red wine. They arrive in miniature bottles and he carries them to a pair of curving cream leather armchairs which miraculously disgorge their occupants just as he searches for a place to sit. Life operates that way for Jack, reflects Kate, as he touches his glass to hers.

      ‘Here’s to wine and women, we’ll pass on the song,’ he says.

      ‘To wine and men,’ she responds. ‘Although a man is only a man but a good glass of wine is a drink.’

      ‘You purloined that from somewhere,’ he accuses her lightly.

      ‘Cannibalised it,’ she shrugs. ‘That’s as acceptable as invention.’

      Time to play the goodbye girl, she reminds herself minutes later as he crowds her, leaning across the table and gazing at her lips so intently she starts to wonder if she has a red wine rim around them. Covertly she rubs between nose and upper lip while pretending to adjust her ankle boot, then prepares to extract one of her guillotine lines from the ready-prepared store. But Jack distracts her by lifting her hand and running his thumb against her inner wrist.

      ‘Feck it,’ she decides, ‘I’ll tell him we’re finished after we have sex. No point in ruining the evening.’

      It seems churlish to raise the subject in the languorous afterglow of their lovemaking, especially when they have unfettered access to her apartment with Pearse’s absence. Instead of biting the bullet Kate swallows it, along with her good intentions, and snuggles up to Jack who’s radiator warm.

      She’s slumbering contentedly when he leaps up, dislodging her head from its perch on his shoulder and complaining she should have kept an eye on the time.

      ‘Eimear will go ballistic if I wake her arriving home at 2 a.m.,’ Jack whines, looking considerably less alluring with a crossly furrowed forehead and one foot in his underpants than he did a few hours earlier.

      Kate regards him with a distinctly unenamoured expression as he cannonballs around her bedroom scooping up articles of clothing. She thought men were supposed to fall asleep after climaxing, not trash your room. Right, this is it, he’s brought it on himself – she’s ready for endgame. But Jack isn’t.

      ‘Listen, we have to talk,’ she begins.

      ‘Not now, baby girl; order me a cab, would you. And, um, you couldn’t lend me a couple of notes to pay for it – I forgot to hit the hole-in-the-wall machine today.’

      Automatically she dials up one of the local firms and hands him the price of his fare. By which stage Jack is dressed, prepared for flight and has regained his grip on the sixth-sense charm he operates.

      He bends over the bed, cooing: ‘What did you want to talk about, Katie-Kate?’ and covers her face with feathered kisses which completely divert her from following her own advice delivered in front of the bathroom mirror. Oscar Wilde had the right idea about good advice: Pass it on. As precipitately as possible.

      ‘Share the joke, baby girl,’ murmurs Jack, by now licking her inner ear.

      But before she responds the front-door buzzer sounds the taxi’s arrival and he bounds away like a greyhound out of the trap.

      Kate scowls, punching the pillows, and contemplates having that chat with Jack over the telephone. He can’t trickle exactly the optimum quantity of saliva into her ear over the phone. Honeyed words are as much as he can manage there. She’ll call him tomorrow.

      The last conscious thought to strike Kate, as she nods off, renders that phone call unlikely.

      ‘I don’t honestly want to end this affair with Jack, that’s why I’m having such trouble doing it. Just because Jack belongs to Eimear doesn’t mean I can’t share him – if we’re discreet.’

CHAPTER 2

      ‘I’m having an affair.’

      The words dangle in the air, flaunting as temptingly as a Christmas bauble. Gloria’s instinct is to take them down and examine them, just as she always longs to handle glittery tree decorations – touch them to check if they’re real. She’s lying in a hospital bed, a captive audience. If in doubt say nothing: that’s her mother’s advice. Gloria ignores it.

      ‘Who with?’ she asks Kate.

      ‘With Jack,’ responds Kate, feigning interest in the wilting floral arrangement on Gloria’s locker.

      The news is so startling it almost – almost – distracts Gloria from her own problems. Now she does take her mother’s recommendation to heart, although only because she’s too dumbstruck to speak. Kate glances at her covertly as she strips expiring foliage from the vase of moon daisies and seizes the silence as an invitation to elaborate.

      ‘We’re in love, Gloria. Neither of us planned it but it happened and now’ – she blushes – ‘we find we can’t live without one another.’

      ‘And love invents its own laws?’ Gloria’s tone is caustic; she’s regained her power of speech and a sense of outrage along with it.

      The stain on Kate’s cheeks deepens, clashing spectacularly with her red hair. ‘We know we’re doing wrong,’ she admits. ‘This is such agony, ecstasy too, but agony. I can’t erase Eimear from my mind.’

      ‘You managed very nicely when you leapt into bed with her husband.’

      ‘Oh, Glo, don’t be angry with me, I know I’m a wicked temptress who deserves to be ducked in the village pond.’

      Kate beats her chest in such mock-pious atonement that Gloria can’t help but smile. Just for a nano-second; this is no laughing matter. She hurriedly resumes her stern expression.

      ‘What were you thinking of, Kate McGlade, taking up with your best friend’s husband and you with a man of your own at home?’

      Kate bows her head in comic humility, hoping for an encore of the smile, but Gloria is relentless now, appalled at the impact her deviancy will wreak on their triumvirate.

      ‘This is serious, Kate; this is beyond serious, you have to stop seeing him immediately.’

      ‘I can’t,’ she wails, rumpling her hair until it’s standing in peaks. ‘It’s the real thing, he’s my Coca Cola lover.’

      ‘Well then,’ forecasts Gloria, ‘prepare for Armageddon. And you’ll probably have your cornflake-box crown confiscated.’

      They each wore one, sprayed gold and decorated with fruit gums, twenty-six years ago as the Three Wise Men. Trouble is, they grew up to be Three Unwise Women.

      But Gloria’s losing sight of her own troubles with Kate and she’s not ready to shed that comforting blanket of misery just yet – especially not to tackle a situation as explosive as this. A dear little nun who calls for an uninvited visit is just about to remind her of them. The sister totters into the room, sees another figure by the bedside and starts backing out, but Kate (natural born coward that she is, thinks Gloria) insists she has errands to run and she’ll

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