The Passion of the Purple Plumeria Read Free

he was sure the contact was firmly in place, raised a brow at me. He was so cute when he tried to be all supercilious. I didn’t say that, of course.
    “You know he rang,” he said drily. “You were on the other extension.”
    “I hung up,” I protested. “As soon as I heard who it was.”
    Okay, maybe there might have been a few seconds of lag time. No one’s halo is quite that shiny.
    “You could have stayed on the line,” Colin said gently. His eyes met mine in the bathroom mirror. “I wouldn’t have minded.”
    I shrugged, poking at a patch of peeling paper on the wall. “I didn’t want to pry.”
    It wasn’t true, of course. I was dying to pry. But now that I knew that I was leaving, I was feeling particularly scrupulous about our respective realms, what was his and what was mine. I might be living in his world, but my stay was only temporary.
    I could feel Colin looking at me, but all he said was, “When it comes to Jeremy, I’d rather have witnesses.”
    Fair enough. I pushed my hair back behind my ears and perched on the edge of the bathtub. “So what did he want?”
    Colin squirted toothpaste onto a blue plastic toothbrush. “He says he called to apologize.”
    “Huh,” I said. The only place I could see Jeremy voluntarily burying the hatchet would be in Colin’s skull. He’d probably keep the scalp, too, and call it installation art. Jeremy is something to do with art sales. That’s his career; his vocation is bedeviling Colin. “What did he
really
want?”
    Colin’s lips quirked. “You don’t pull your punches.”
    “That’s why you like me,” I said cheerfully.
    Toothbrush suspended in space, Colin looked back over his shoulder at me. “It’s not the only reason.”
    It hurt to look at him looking at me like that. It hurt when I knew that the clock was ticking, marking the moments until I climbed on that plane, back to the other Cambridge, the American one.
    It would have been easier if I could have blamed someone else for it, but the decision to go back had been mine. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. Now . . . Well, there was no changing my mind, was there? The teaching contract for next year was already signed, sealed, and delivered, or the e-mail equivalent thereof. What didn’t break us up would make us stronger. Or something like that.
    I lifted the shampoo bottle in mock toast. “Cheers.”
    Through a mouthful of foam, Colin said, “You also make a decent toasted cheese.”
    I set down the shampoo and scrubbed my hand off on the knee of my jeans. “Only decent? Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
    Colin rinsed and spat. “Superlatively brilliant toasted cheese?”
    “Too little, too late.” I tossed him a hand towel. “Jeremy?”
    “Wants to come over for lunch. To make his amends.”
    I leaned back, bracing my hands against the enamel sides of the bath. “You’d think if he really wanted to make amends, he could at least take us out.”
    “But then,” said Colin, “he wouldn’t have an excuse to come to the house.”
    We exchanged a look in the mirror. We both knew why Jeremy wanted to come to Selwick Hall.
    He was looking for the lost jewels of Berar.
    Berar was in India. Selwick Hall was in Sussex. Slight anomaly there, no? The jewels had disappeared during Wellington’s wars in India, back in the early nineteenth century. It was the usual sort of hoard: ropes of pearls, piles of rubies, emeralds bigger than pigeons’ eggs (having never seen a pigeon’s egg, that descriptor wasn’t quite as useful for me as it could be), and, the pièce de résistance, the one jewel to rule them all, a legendary something or other called the Moon of Berar. I say “something or other” because the contemporary commentators differed as to what exactly made up the Moon. Opals? Sapphires? Diamonds from the mines of Golconda? No one knew for sure. What they did agree on was that the jewel was credited with all manner of mystical powers, ranging from omniscience to