The Temptation of the Night Jasmine Read Free

into the drawer he had opened for me. I had packed for all contingencies, i.e., a silk slip nightie and a heavy flannel one. Given the temperature in the house, I had a feeling I would be using the flannel.
    A door on one side of the room led to an en suite bathroom, confirming my impression that this must be the master suite. Did Colin’s mother really dislike Sussex enough that she had relinquished all claim to residence? All I knew was that she lived in Italy, with a second husband. Colin tended not to talk about his family much. I’d managed to gather that his father had died of cancer a few years back and his mother had decamped to Italy. It was, however, unclear whether the decamping had occurred before or after.
    There was no sign that a woman had ever inhabited this room. The furniture was all heavy, dark wood, and the wardrobe and drawers would never have begun to accommodate the accumulated clothing of two people rather than one.
    Wiggling my vanity case out of my overnight bag, I padded through to the bathroom, which looked like something out of a Jeeves and Wooster episode, only without Wooster’s rubber ducky. It was one of those bathrooms that had clearly begun life as something else – a dressing room, perhaps, or a small sitting room. White wainscoting ran all along the walls, which were papered above with yet another Morris print, peeling from the effects of continued steam over time. There was even a rug on the floor, a faded Persian marred and snagged from years of use, with the odd blob of what might have been toothpaste or shaving cream ground into the warp. Hey, it sure beat my Kmart bath mat.
    The only concessions to modernity were the modern shower head that had been installed above the tub and the electrical outlets that I was relieved to see had been stuck in at bizarre intervals along the walls. Even the toilet was the old sort, with a wooden case affixed high on the wall with a chain dangling from it.
    I efficiently unloaded the necessities of life from my bag. Shampoo and conditioner on the side of the tub (like most men, Colin only had the two-in-one dandruff stuff), glasses and contact lens case on the vanity, toothbrush in the toothbrush holder.
    There was something scarily domestic about the way our toothbrushes nestled together in the toothbrush holder, his contact lens solution jostling for space next to my contact lens solution on the vanity.
    He wore contacts. I hadn’t realised that. There was a lot I didn’t know yet, for all the casual assumption of intimacy created by our twin toothbrushes.
    Back in the bedroom, Colin was still listening to his voice mail messages. Whatever it was clearly did not please him; his eyebrows had drawn together and there was a twin furrow between them.
    He clicked the phone off when he saw me (ah, those early days of relationship), although he still looked abstracted. ‘Tea?’ he asked. ‘Or library?’
    ‘Library,’ I said decidedly.
    ‘Do you remember where it is?’
    On a scale of one to ten? I gave that about a three. I was pretty sure that it was on the same floor we were on, which narrowed the search down a bit, but I didn’t mind opening and closing doors until I found the library. To be honest, I was more than a little curious about Colin’s house. If I wanted to pretend I was being a good little historian, I would claim it was because it was the same house owned by the Purple Gentian, the house in which he had plotted and schemed, the house from which he had run – with his wife – his spy school. But, as Colin had told me on a previous visit, the house had been entirely gutted and remodelled in the late nineteenth century, the same time all the Morris prints and Burne-Jones tiles and heavy dark wood panelling had been put in. The only bits that remained intact from the early nineteenth century were the faÇade, the gardens, and the long drawing room that spanned the entire width of the main block on the garden side.
    My desire to