Chapter One
Tilly Turner was not sure wearing a wire was such a good look. The strip of duct tape securing it just beneath her left breast pulled uncomfortably every time she moved—and this evening, she was moving a lot. But if the mini-microphone was uncomfortable, the wretched three-inch sparkly heels were ten times worse. True, they gave her much-needed height and stature, and they made her booty sway inside its thin covering of glitzy nylon like animated peaches, but a peachy butt was not acceptable compensation for a broken ankle.
“Oh God, sorry,” she muttered once more to the suave elderly gent guiding her around the sprung floor of the Colliton community centre.
“Take it easy,” he said again. “Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know. It takes time to master the tango.”
He had that right. Who would believe that Tilly ‘Two Left Feet’ Turner would ever be spotted at an evening class devoted to the Argentine tango? Certainly not her old school friends, who couldn’t even prevail upon her to do some freestyle flailing to the Arctic Monkeys at Indie Night in the local nightclub.
“I don’t do dancing,” she always told them. “Dancing is for people who sway. I lurch. Lurchers should never dance.”
“Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow,” dictated the teacher from the front of the hall, directing the crumpled hordes of would-be passionate lovers of all ages, sexes, heights, weights and social profiles. Tilly’s gent was one of the more fragrant members of the group; her first partner had been a sweaty man in a soaked football shirt. It had come as a massive relief to find that partners were swapped every ten minutes or so, to give each dancer the opportunity to shimmy with an expert.
“I’m okay with the slow, it’s the quick that floors me,” Tilly said.
“Just concentrate.” His smile was polite but frosty.
Tilly tried to concentrate, tried to match the movement of her feet with the heated tempos issuing from the CD player, but stray thoughts kept distracting her from her mission. Would this tragic dress and these killer shoes be tax deductible? Would the wire stay in place when her skin was becoming increasingly, dangerously slippery? And how the hell had her client managed to snag a man as jaw-droppingly handsome as the tango teacher?
At the set-up meeting, over lattes in Starbucks, Melinda hadn’t mentioned her fiancé’s stunning resemblance to a cross between Heathcliff and somebody out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. Tilly had to wonder why. It would make Melinda’s insecurities a little more understandable, a little less ragingly paranoid. Tilly herself thought that she would hate to be involved with such a handsome man. Trying to be worthy of his arm would be too exhausting.
She had smiled and fidgeted with the crackly wrapping of her biscuit while Melinda outlined her requirements.
“I love him, of course I do, I love him to death,” the woman had insisted in nasal tones. “He’s my soul mate, my rock. He completes me, know what I mean?”
“Yeah. That’s great. So…”
“I just have a little problem with trust, Tilly. You know how it is. When something good comes into our lives, we can’t just sit back and enjoy it, can we?”
Speak for yourself, thought Tilly, who hated being lumped in with some half-arsed concept of ‘we women’ and instantly disrespected Melinda for subjecting her to it.
“It’s like, men are more rational, women are more emotional, yeah?”
“Oh, sometimes maybe, but I think that’s just a cultural—”
“So I just need to put my mind at rest. I’m sure you know what I mean.” Melinda dabbed the side of her pink-frosted mouth with her napkin, the delicate movement tinkling from the excess of gold jewellery about her wrist.
“You’d like me to investigate Norman? Maybe follow him? Check out his background, previous track record in relationships?”
“Oh, no, love, I don’t think he’s having an affair. Not yet anyway.”
Tilly was bemused. What on earth did Melinda want from her, if not to find some proof of infidelity, or otherwise?
“Before I walk up the aisle, I need to be sure of him. I don’t trust those bitches at his tango class any further than I could throw them.”
“Maybe you could go to the tango class yourself?” Tilly probably shouldn’t be offering Melinda ways out of hiring her services, she reflected, but it did seem rather an obvious point.
“Oh no. I work in the evenings, you see. Besides, I’m not much of a dancer.”
Tilly smiled, heartened to find a point of similarity with her brittle, overly-perfumed client. “So could you be clear about what it is you want me to do?”
“Don’t you know? I’ve read about it in the magazines. Honey traps. I want you to go to his class and try to chat him up.”
“You want me to entrap him?”
“No! I don’t want you to succeed! But I want you to try.”