Dead Sexy Read Free Page B

body with a luscious old-fashioned powder puff—‘It’s Never the Wrong Time to Pamper Yourself!’ Finally, she crept over to the bed, hoping that Fox had fallen asleep.
    He was lying on his side, his back to her. As she slipped under the sheet, he rolled over to spoon her. ‘What’s the time, honey-doll?’ he mumbled into her back.
    ‘Dunno. Late.’
    There was a pause, then, his lips against her shoulder-blade, ‘So where were you?’
    Anabelle says,
Honesty is not always the best policy!
    ‘I, uh, went to meet Johnny B. Wright,’ she blurted.
    ‘I told you that if he contacted you again, I’d kill him.’ Fox’s voice sounded like it came from a faraway place.
    ‘I wanted to tell him it was all over.’
    There was a long pause. ‘I wasn’t kidding,’ Fox stated.
    A chill went through her. She wriggled around until she was facing him. His eyes were closed, his beautiful features expressionless. She tried but couldn’t read anything in them. ‘Fox? Fox?’He was breathing evenly and deeply. He couldn’t have fallen asleep that fast, surely? ‘Fox?’ she whispered. ‘I won’t be seeing him again.’
    There was a very long silence. Fox’s response tumbled slowly out of those sexy lips. ‘I know.’
    He knew?
    When she finally fell asleep, Nicola dreamed Detective Mann was simultaneously himself and a pug that she had on a lead. She sat in a long narrow cafe with him at her feet. She was pulling on his little ears and swilling dry martinis—there was a row of them on her table—while people hurried up and down the aisle by her table, carrying their genitalia under their arms. Detective Mann licked her ankles. The scene dissolved. She turned into a cucumber, honey and coconut facial and ate herself.
    Arriving late at the office, shaken by the night’s events, jittery from too little sleep, Nicola poured herself a cup of instant in the tearoom. She wouldn’t have come to work at all if she couldhave helped it, but Fox wasn’t due at the station again till the afternoon and she didn’t think she could hold herself together in his presence. She also had a deadline to meet. Returning to her desk with a mug of foul brew, she sat and forced herself to sift through her mail.
    Dear Anabelle, I think you’ve been a very naughty girl and I want to spank you…
She got half a dozen of these every month. She skimmed through the rest of the fantasy…
my ginormous member ploughing the paddock of your vagina…your sweet red pomegranate lips wrapped around my huge pulsating rod…
She screwed up the page and chucked it in the bin.
    Pomegranate lips? Nicola tried to get her head around the image. What did that mean? Seedy?
    With perfect timing, Liz chose that moment to lurch into the office, hair like a rat’s nest, bags under her eyes that could carry the porters, and her Morrissey silk shirt on inside out. ‘Bloody men,’ she declared. ‘You can live with ‘em, you can live without ‘em.’
    Nicola smiled despite herself. ‘I think that’s“you can’t live with ‘em, you can’t live without ‘em”.’
    Liz squinted at the ceiling and repeated the phrase. ‘Whatever. Oh fuck it. Where are the samples?’ Nicola pointed to a stack of boxes containing the freebies with which cosmetic, hair care and perfume manufacturers inundated them in exchange for editorial mention. Liz pawed through the boxes until she had an armful of product and slewed off to the toilets.
    Dear Anabelle, my husband likes to wear a Playboy Bunny costume when he does the housework…Dear Anabelle, I have fantasies about the ticket machines on the Melbourne trams, the main one being that I am a ticket machine, and commuters are putting coins into my slot…
    Nicola put her head in her hands. Why were people so weird?
    If they weren’t, would Johnny be dead? Johnny B. Dead?
    She desperately wanted to talk to Liz about the events of the night before. But Detective Mann had warned her in a severe tone of voicethat there were