The Gilded Madonna, Garrick Jones [best fiction novels txt] 📗

you getting socked in the jaw started your motor running?”

“Nah, Clyde. It was watching the muscles in your shoulders and neck straining against your shirt when you slugged that Russian spy and knocked him onto his arse. You know I love it when you get all blokey.”

“And there I was thinking you liked my other, less-physical assets.”

“Oh, I love those too, don’t worry. Now, about the commie agent who missed you and hit me—”

“How do you know he was a Russian spy?”

“Play along, Clyde.”

“Ah!”

I got it. Harry liked make-believe. He loved games—amorous, pretend games, usually done and dusted five minutes into the action when lust overtook his sense of adventure. I was more than happy to play along. In fact, more than once it had been the way I’d broadened his sexual repertoire. He’d had a basic bedroom education and had even taken part in a few tussles with groups of friends before he’d met me. However, there were things he’d seen, but had never had the courage to try. Not more than once we’d played “Clyde says” and Harry had obeyed.

“So do I call for room service, ambush the hotel steward, tie him up and make him watch?”

He laughed. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“One day, I’ll feel confident enough to share, Clyde.”

“I’ve got a little list of contenders …”

“Your former playmates?”

“Harley Yaxley, the delivery boy with the dick of death, is high on the list.”

“Uh huh.” He knew I was teasing. Well half-teasing. Even though he’d been the only one in my bed since we’d decided to become an “item”, it didn’t stop me getting hot under the collar thinking of two of the guys I’d been sleeping with regularly before Harry had staked his claim on my bed and my heart. There’d been two others, but regular wouldn’t be a word I’d necessarily use to describe our sporadic get-togethers.

“You’re the only person I know who can look as sexy as all get-out wearing nothing but his shirt, Clyde,” he mumbled into my mouth.

I knew what he’d said, even though it had sounded like a navy diver trying to communicate underwater—all glugs, gurgles, and muffled moaning sounds.

“What about now?” I said, triumphantly, as he released my tongue from his mouth. My shirt landed in the bathtub behind him. I took his hands and ran them around my waist.

“Where’s that room service man, Clyde?”

My reply was from the heart. We’d had enough teasing play. “You’re enough for me, Harry Jones,” I said.

I meant it too. We’d shared stories of my former sex life, and his comparative lack of it. I hadn’t held anything back. I’d shared my fantasies with him, and he’d done the same. They weren’t much different from my own, merely variations on the same thing. But, ultimately, when the chips were down and the talk no longer held meaning, all I needed in my arms was my big passionate man who, in my opinion, deserved an Olympic gold in the making-love event.

*****

We’d chosen to stay in the Windsor Hotel at the top of Bourke Street, opposite Parliament House. It had been Harry’s dad, Arnold, who’d insisted we stay there. I had to admit it would normally have been way above my budget, but of late I’d been making a motza. What with my earnings from journalism and the wage I was paid for being a member of an official ongoing investigation into a case I’d broken earlier in the year, I was sitting far more comfortably than most people I knew.

It was a very luxurious, old-fashioned hotel with a well-earned reputation for offering the best of the best. The dining room still served meals that might have graced menus in the late nineteenth century, and I liked the food, but as it was usually a choice of traditional Australian home cooking with a flair or French haute cuisine, I found the former boring and the latter indigestible. I’d lost my gall bladder after a stabbing–shooting incident, and fatty foods really gave me a great deal of discomfort and at times even severe pain.

The great beauty of the hotel was not only its central location and easy access to public transport, but it offered amazing in-house facilities. I’d made good use of the secretarial service over the week we’d been there. The purpose of our trip was not only to attend events at the Olympics but also for me to talk to the local cops about how we did things in Sydney—each Australian State had differing laws. My information session had been arranged as a deal for the mutual benefit of both forces. The investigative unit in Melbourne, unlike that in Sydney, cooperated with local private investigators who helped augment their ongoing cases. I’d had experience in that exact same scenario, but in Sydney I’d been forced to work outside the local police force and without their direct help.

Making use of the secretarial assistance in the hotel had allowed me to write a few articles on the theatre and cinema life in Melbourne, and to keep up with my regular crime reports for the Sydney Morning Herald. I dictated, the ex-military secretary—a stern-looking man in his mid-fifties—took shorthand notes, typed out my text, gave it to me for correction, and then sent off the articles by express post to the two newspaper editors that employed me.

“Are we eating in or out?” Harry called from the bathroom. I was still supine on one of the twin beds in our room. He’d exhausted me. I wasn’t complaining, just feeling every day of my thirty-six years of age.

“Jancsi gave me the address of a Hungarian restaurant down in Little Collins Street.”

“What?”

“I said—”

“Can’t hear you!”

It was another of his games. The shower stall in the bathroom was big enough for five, and he wanted me to join him, not lay flat out on my back on the bed like a lizard stretched in the afternoon sun.

“I said, Jancsi—”

“I heard you,” he said with a face-splitting grin as I opened the