If you're using getline after cin >> something, you need to flush the newline out of the buffer in between.
My personal favourite for this if no characters past the newline are needed is cin.sync(). However, it is implementation defined, so it might not work the same way as it does for me. For something solid, use cin.ignore(). Or make use of std::ws to remove leading whitespace if desirable:
int a;
cin >> a;
cin.ignore (std::numeric_limits<std::streamsize>::max(), '\n');
//discard characters until newline is found
//my method: cin.sync(); //discard unread characters
string s;
getline (cin, s); //newline is gone, so this executes
//other method: getline(cin >> ws, s); //remove all leading whitespace