The Temptation of the Night Jasmine Read Free Page A

prowl around the house had far more to do with the man who occupied it now. It was the same sort of impulse that drives you, early in a relationship, to go through the entirety of the other person’s CD collection, as if some deep insight into his character could be gleaned from the fact that he once bought this or that CD. I wanted to see where he lived, how he lived, where he spent his time.
    So instead of saying, ‘Point me in the right direction,’ I smiled confidently and said, ‘I should be able to figure it out.’
    Colin’s hand closed protectively around his mobile. ‘You don’t mind if I abandon you for a bit? I have some work that needs to be sorted.’
    ‘No problem at all.’ In fact, it worked very well for me – even though I was dying to ask him what work exactly he had. Cows, perhaps. Or sheep. Or something left over from his City days. Or just catching up on email, which goodness only knows can be work enough after a long trip without Internet access.
    ‘Brilliant,’ Colin said, and flashed me a smile that almost made me want to reconsider this whole going our separate ways for the afternoon thing.
    But the archives were calling me. With one last, lingering kiss (yes, we were still at the stage where we kissed hello and goodbye on moving between rooms), I set out down the hallway toward the library.
    ‘Eloise?’
    Ah, clearly he could not bear to allow me out of his arms for more than a moment.
    ‘Yes?’ I called back, bosom heaving as best it could under a bra, a polo shirt, and a lambswool sweater.
    Colin’s lips were twitching, and not, I regret to add, with uncontrollable desire. He pointed at the other hallway, the one I had failed to take. ‘The library is that way.’
    I threw him a little salute. ‘Aye-aye, Captain!’
    God only knows why I do these things; sometimes my hands and mouth move of their own volition, without any input from my brain. Making a smart about-face, I scurried down the other hallway.
    ‘Just keep on going,’ Colin called after me. ‘The library is in the East Wing.’
    It was very sweet of him to assume that I had any notion where east was. The keep-going bit was more helpful. After a long and arduous journey past many closed doors and a broad hallway that gave onto the central stair, I hit what I presumed must be the East Wing. My presumption was based largely on the fact that the hall stopped going.
    As soon as I opened the door, I was back in familiar territory, surrounded by the comfortable smell of old paper and decaying bindings, cracked leather chairs, and musty draperies. It smelt like most libraries I had known (with the exception of certain branches of the New York Public Library, which smell more like disinfectant and eau de bum). Row upon row of crumbling books soared two stories into the air, bisected by an iron balcony that ran along all sides of the room, reached by a twisty iron staircase with tiny pie-shaped steps. Grey January light seeped through the long windows that looked to the north and east, the sort of winter light that obscures more than it illuminates.
    Groping along the wall, I found a light switch. After a brief resistance, it finally consented to flip, and a massive two-tiered chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling flickered into light. Some of the bulbs never bothered to go on, others blinked twice and then winked out, but there were still enough to cast a reasonable amount of light down over the warm blue carpet with its pattern of red flecks. I do love old libraries, and this was the real deal, a late-nineteenth-century Gothic fantasy complete with a baronial stone fireplace, tenanted with books that had been acquired, read, and loved over the course of more than a century. There was everything from early editions of Dickens, with broken spines and scribbles in the margins, to piles of paperbacks with the lurid covers so common in the seventies. Colin’s father had obviously had a taste for spy thrillers.
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