“What about your class?”
“I’ll cancel.” He opened the passenger door and let himself in.
Tilly, nonplussed, put the flowers and wine in the back seat and parked herself behind the steering wheel. She gave Calum a nervous sidelong glance. He didn’t look angry or anything. He was taking out his mobile phone and keying in a selection of speed dial numbers, texting with lightning fingers.
“Er, are you sure about this?” She asked as he bleeped away.
“Positive.” He looked up and smiled briefly. “Don’t want to read about your bloated corpse being found in the river tomorrow.”
“Calum!”
He put down his phone and fixed her with his eyes until she squirmed. “Don’t tell me it isn’t a possibility. We both know it is.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Well, forgive me for needing proof. Or at least, a trace of evidence. What I saw at the tango class last night was a girl who swam out of her depth very easily. If I’d turned out to be some psycho rapist, how could you have fought me off, eh? Alone in a building with a man a foot taller than you? Smart work, Tilly. No, I’m coming with you. Come on, then. Let’s go.”
Caught between feelings of irritation at his presumption and rapture at his reappearance, she simply turned the key, put her foot down and pulled out of the parking space. A burst of joyous Latin music filled the car, incongruous in the gathering dusk of the early spring night, pre-empting any possibility he might have had to further outline Tilly’s failings as an investigator.
She had to switch it off once they drew up in the street of smart detached houses in which Norman and Melinda kept their home.
“Nice place,” he said. “Are they loaded?”
“Melinda’s a nail technician, so I guess Norman must make some pretty se
rious money. What do your pupils say about him?”
He shrugged. “Not much. I’m told I’m an improvement. Some of the men disagree, I think.”
She snorted. “You’re eye candy.”
“Oi, don’t objectify me.” He reached over to give her earlobe a tweak.
The sensation was like an electric shock all the way down to her groin. Suddenly she wanted to throw the camera aside and leap on her Latin-dancing lover. “Awww, I like objectifying you,” she said unevenly, caught in that resolve-trapping, knicker-wettening eyelock she had been trying to resist.
He bent his head closer until his breath fanned her cheek.
“I like kissing you,” he said, demonstrating the proposition until Tilly was out of breath and sore of lip.
The sound of a car rounding the bend of a driveway brought them out of their sensual haze.
“Norman,” gasped Tilly, shaking hands returning to the dashboard. She felt for a minute as if her legs would be too weak to operate the pedals, but somehow she managed to get the car on the road on Norman’s tail without running into anything.
“He seems to be heading for the other end of town,” Calum said as they negotiated the ring road at a steady sixty miles per hour. “Slow down, I think he’s coming off at this exit.”
They found themselves in a nondescript residential area of terraces and small modern homes, rather less chi-chi than Norman and Melinda’s neighbourhood. He pulled into the forecourt of a DIY superstore off the main road, and Tilly followed, pulling into a space on the far side of the car park.
“He’s moonlighting as a painter and decorator?” she hazarded, watching an unimpressive, pot-bellied man with a huge moustache climb out of his car.
“That’s what you could have kissed.” Calum sounded mocking. “What a way to earn a living.”
“I wouldn’t have actually kissed him.”
“You kissed me. Thinking I was Norman.”
“You’re different,” she said, twitching a little when he put a hand on her thigh. “He isn’t going into the shop. What’s he doing?”
Norman lurked by a private side entrance for a few minutes until he returned to the front, accompanied now by a woman.