Fools for Lust Read Online Free PDF Page B

Minister”. Sorry.
    Ah, that feels better. Thanks.
    I suppose I’d better tell you now, then. The sooner the better and I’ll be left to get some sleep, I suppose.
    But I know you’re going to be disappointed.
    It’s a rather ordinary story, I fear.
    A woman.
    It was because of a woman.
    No. Not her, Cherie. You must be joking. That mortician’s smile would deflate a man’s hard on instantly!
    Mind you, so did his own smile-by-numbers sincere expression of choice.
    No. No. Don’t get excited. I was just being facetious. I’m not gay. The Prime Minister’s smile and my past erections have nothing in common. Wouldn’t want the country to go on another anti-gay pogrom, would I?
    A woman.
    A real one.
    A beautiful one.
    Who knew how to provoke erections and what to do with them with tender loving care.
    Yes, I know, sometimes I get a tad too lyrical. It’s the way I am, the way I write. What can I do about it? Some reviewer even once said I was a romantic pornographer. Damn right. And proud of it.
    A woman.
    Her name was Edwina.
    Why am I saying ‘was’?
    Her name is Edwina. It’s a bit of an old-fashioned name. So she calls herself Eddie. A bit ambiguous, but who cares. Took me ages to find out that Eddie actually concealed Edwina. She’d decided it was her turn to pay the bill when we ate out one evening, and I spied the truth on her credit card. Edwina O’Callaghan. A name like that you’d imagine some old Irish biddy or worse. I’d actually heard of her vaguely some time before we actually met, and the name alone gave me a completely wrong impression somehow. I imagined her middle-aged, dowdy, supercilious, just not my type of person.
    It was a shock meeting her the first time, I can tell you.
    As you know, my books don’t sell in great quantities. I’m strictly second division. I have to supplement the income with a fair bit of arts journalism, reviews, the occasional well-paid travel piece. So, like most jobbing writers, I’m always looking out for new markets or publishing opportunities.
    An American company specialising in mail-order recipe and gardening cards and part works was making a foray into the crime and mystery field and was trying to devise some form of whodunit product which people would subscribe to. Their London office was in charge of development. They needed writers to dream up whodunit plots in novella form, longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. A length I, for one, particularly enjoyed but which seldom proved commercial due to a sparsity of outlets. I wasn’t into traditional mysteries where the detective hunts down the clues and later by intellect and much eccentric ratiocination assembles the suspects and reveals the guilty party. I’m more into dark streets, femmes fatales, emotions and murky psychology. But the money was good. Three grand for just a third of a book and the rights to the material reverted to the author fairly quickly. In addition, the whole concept of the scheme and the way it was to be sold by mail order only sounded rather dubious to me, and I estimated there was even a good chance it would never get off the ground once the company’s marketing boffins had analysed, market-tested, focus grouped it and all and the writers would be three grand to the better and with a story they could sell again.
    Edwina O’Callaghan had been recruited to find a dozen or so authors to pen the various booklets and I’d heard through Mark Timlin she was not averse to darker stuff, as long as the whodunit elements were present. I thought to myself the task was not impossible and also a gentle challenge. I could construct the plot in reverse and hey presto! easy money.
    I was wrong. Like all the women who think writing a Mills and Boon romance is a cinch! It was bloody tough, and I was no good at it. We’d spoken over the telephone. She didn’t sound as old as I thought. She had