Lauren Willig Read Free Page A

in the trees above. In real life, one of them would probably crap on his head. So much for romance.
     
     
Logically, I knew that the man was just as imaginary as the scene. The Colin I knew—or, rather, the Colin I had met, since I couldn’t really presume to know him at all, despite a rather intense acquaintance to date—was far from perfect. In fact, he was mercurial to the point of being schizophrenic, warm and flirty one minute, cold and distant the next. When I’d first met him, he’d practically bitten my head off for having the nerve to accept his aunt’s invitation to go through the family archives; the next thing I knew, he was refilling my champagne glass and looking at me in a way that made me go all wobbly (although four glasses of champagne will do that to a girl).
     
     
At least he’d had an excellent excuse for his most recent Jekyll and Hyde performance. What I’d thought was a case of Colin simply blowing me off because of, well, me, turned out to be a panicked rush to Italy, where his mother was unconscious in a hospital after a particularly nasty car accident. I hadn’t even realized Colin had a mother.
     
     
Naturally, I knew he must have had one at some point (yes, we all took sixth-grade bio class), but in novels, heroes never seem to have parents, at least not living, breathing ones who get sick or have accidents. Occasionally they have parent issues, but the parents are always conveniently off somewhere to stage left, usually dead. Can you imagine Mr. Rochester trying to explain to his mother how he burned the house down? Or Mr. Darcy promising his mother he won’t marry that hideous Bingley girl? I rest my case.
     
     
Even writing off Colin’s last mood swing, I still hadn’t found out just why he had reacted quite so violently to my excursions into his family’s archives. Most of the hypotheses that occurred to me were far too ridiculous to countenance. Even if Colin’s great-great-grandparents had founded a sort of spy school on the family estate, there was no way that the family could have remained continuously in the spying business since the Napoleonic Wars.
     
     
Could they? My notions of modern espionage had a lot to do with James Bond movies, complete with low-slung cars, talking watches, and women in bikinis with breasts like helium balloons. Colin drove a Range Rover and wore a Timex. As for the helium balloons, let’s just say that if that’s what Colin was looking for, he wouldn’t be going out to dinner with me.
     
     
Occupied by these fruitful speculations, I managed to make my way through the series of linked rooms that led to the back of the house, which petered out into a narrow corridor: Someone had painted the walls a utilitarian white that somehow managed to look more depressing than an outright gray.
     
     
There was a door with a big sign on it that read PRIVATE in all capital letters in four languages (presumably, if you didn’t speak English, German, French, or Japanese, this prohibition didn’t apply to you), with a rope strung across the entrance for emphasis. I cleverly deduced that that was not the door I was looking for.
     
     
An anemic red arrow pointed visitors down a narrow flight of stairs with shiny reflective tape beginning to peel back from the treads. Clutching the warped handrail, I picked my way carefully down and came straight up against—the bathrooms. The little stick figures were unmistakable.
     
     
Next to them, however, a plain white door had been marked with the word REFERENCE. It was just the tiniest bit ajar, presumably for ventilation rather than hospitality. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and made my way in, the heels of my boots slapping hollowly across the linoleum floor.
     
     
In contrast to all the gilt and rosewood upstairs, the reference room wasn’t a very impressive setup. The room was small and square, furnished with two rickety aluminum folding tables, each supplied with four equally rickety