The Deception of the Emerald Ring (39 page)

"Oh, go have a drink, Ellie. It will put you in a better mood."

"Who said I was in a bad mood?"

Pammy held up a hand, palm out. "You are just so lucky we've been friends for twenty years."

"Twenty-one," I muttered after Pammy's departing back. She never had been any good at math.

Not like it really made a difference. But in those twenty-one years, I was pretty sure that I'd put up with just as much from her as she had from me. More. I added tonight's party to the balance against her. She owed me at least a year of good behavior for that one.

She might at least have warned me.

Pammy aside, I wouldn't have minded a drink, just to have something in my hands. A drink, held debonairly aloft, goes a long way to inspiring social confidence. It's as much the pose as the contents. Combine it with a tinkling laugh and an appropriately rapt expression and, after a while, even I might be fooled.

But Colin was standing at the bar, like a linebacker guarding a goalpost, or whatever it is that linebackers guard.

Right, I told myself. This was it. Just to prove that he didn't mean anything to me at all, I was going to walk right up there and say hi, just as I would to any other random person on whom I had never had the teeny-tiniest hint of a crush.

"Hi!" I said brightly, following it up with a little wave. "How are you?"

Okay, maybe I was overdoing the gushing bit.

"I'm fine," said Colin. No gushing there. His entire demeanor gave a whole new meaning to the word "chill." "You?"

"Vodka tonic, please," I instructed the man behind the bar. Pammy's mother only allows drinks with a clear base, for the sake of her carpets. It's a long-established policy, dating back to their days in New York. Pammy and I were only allowed to have Coca-Cola in the kitchen and den. This, by the way, was in effect even before the Marshmallow Fluff episode.

"I'm doing well," I said over my shoulder to Colin. "Same old, same old."

The bartender fumbled with the tonic bottle, one of those funny little half-sized bottles, rather than the big, plastic ones we have at home. It was empty. Kneeling, the bartender started scavenging under the table.

Colin propped an elbow against the table. "You didn't bring Jay."

Jay? Oh, right. "He went home for Thanksgiving."

"And didn't take you?"

Under the table, the bartender's progress was marked by the clink of glass and crackle of cardboard. I was half tempted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him to give up already; I would just take my vodka straight. Anything so that I could take my glass and go.

"You know how it is," I said, trying not to peer too visibly over the edge of the table. "I had work to do."

"Hard on you." He didn't sound terribly sympathetic.

"I'll live." I accepted my long-awaited glass from the bartender, and smiled a stiff social smile at Colin. "I really should go say hi to Pammy's mother. Good talking to you."

"You, too." Colin raised his glass a fraction of an inch in farewell.

"Later, then. Bye-eee!"

Yes, I actually said "bye-eee." There is no accounting for what the brain will produce under stress.

Since I really did have to say hi to Pammy's mother, I wandered in that direction, wondering how I had contrived to sound quite so moronic in all of three or four sentences.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Colin, who was not glancing at me.

How dared he ignore me when I was working so hard at ignoring him? It was downright ungentlemanly of him.

Oh, wait. It wasn't supposed to matter anymore. I didn't care what Colin Selwick thought of me. I took a sip of my vodka tonic. Heavy on the vodka, light on the tonic, it tasted a bit like window cleaner (not that I've ever tasted window cleaner, but I imagine it has the same astringent properties). Drink any more of that, and not only would I not remember that I was supposed to be totally indifferent to Colin Selwick, I wouldn't be capable of coherent thought at all. Feeling my lips go numb from that one small sip, I deposited the glass discreetly on a small table next to an unnaturally lush potted plant and went to exchange hellos with Pammy's mother.

Mrs. Harrington was still holding court on the small sofa in the front room, her ash-blond hair cut in a neat shoulder-length bob, brushed to the shiny patina of the Bombay chest in the hall. Her face, with its retroussé nose and wide cheekbones, was more piquant than pretty, clear illustration while I was growing up that grooming and charm get you much farther than raw good looks.

Pammy was going to look just like her in another twenty years or so. I could see it happening already, although Pammy would vehemently deny it.

"Hi, Mrs. Harrington!" Under the influence of old habit, my voice went up half an octave into schoolgirl sweetness. "Thank you for having me here tonight."

"Eloise!" Mrs. Harrington lifted her cheek to be kissed. After so many years in the States, her accent was neither recognizably American nor English, but faltered somewhere in between. "We couldn't leave you alone for Thanksgiving."

"Mom and Dad send their love."

"How is your sister?"

"Enjoying college."

Mrs. Harrington narrowed her eyes shrewdly. "Not too much, I hope."

"You know Jillian," I said, with a grin. "But somehow she always pulls through in the end. I don't know how she does it."

Mrs. Harrington wagged a finger at me. "It's those Kelly brains. I don't know how Pammy would have gotten through algebra without you."

Well, that much was true.

I made modest noises of negation, anyway. It was part of the ritual, a strophe and antistrophe of compliment and demurral as stylized and immutable as the recitation of the litany, with Mrs. Harrington's Chanel No. 5 taking the place of incense.

The amenities having been observed, she smiled and gestured to someone standing behind me. "Do come over! Don't be shy."

The word "shy" should have tipped me off. Most of Pammy's friends don't answer to that description. Like her, they tend to be the self-assured product of a transatlantic education. There was only one of Pammy's circle I could think of to whom the adjective applied.

Stepping aside, I made room in front of the couch for Colin's sister.

Serena didn't look anything like her brother. Where Colin was big and blond and tanned—like the worst sort of Abercrombie ad, I thought disagreeably—Serena invited trite and mawkish analogies straight out of Victorian children's literature, phrases on the order of "as delicate as a woodland fawn." She shared Colin's hazel eyes, but in her narrow, high-cheekboned face, they had the wistful cast of a Pre-Raphaelite Lady of Shallot gazing through her casement window at faerie lands forlorn. Her skin was as pale as Colin's was browned, and her hair was a sleek chestnut that vindicated all the conditioner manufacturers' claims about their products.

Under her shiny hair, Serena's face seemed even paler than usual, the hollows under her eyes more pronounced. In contrast to the bright raspberry of her pashmina, her skin had a sickly cast to it that suggested a lack of food, or sleep, or both.

Pammy had mentioned a bad breakup in the not so distant past, but I wondered if there was more to it than that. The wrists protruding from under her pashmina were as brittle as the winter-bare twigs outside the drawing room window.

"Eloise"—Mrs. Harrington's voice recalled me to the conversation—"have you met Serena Selwick? She was at St. Paul's with Pammy."

Not only did I know Serena, I had held her head over a toilet bowl during a sudden bout of food poisoning. That sort of thing enhanced acquaintance in a hurry. It was also not the sort of story one related to one's friend's mother right before the consumption of large quantities of food.

"We've met," I said instead, leaning in to brush a kiss across the air next to Serena's cheek. "It's good to see you again."

Serena brushed her already immaculate hair back into place in a habitual gesture. "I'm sorry I missed you in Sussex."

Sussex. Scene of my ignoble crush. I was glad Serena hadn't been there to witness me making eyes at her brother. For all her timidity—and that perfect hair—I rather liked Serena.

I just made a face, and said, "I'm sure you had much better things to do in London. I was mostly holed up in the archive all weekend, anyway."

"Colin felt awful about having to run off like that."

I shrugged. "Not a biggie. It was very nice of him to let me come at such short notice in the first place."

"And, of course, he had excellent reason for leaving," put in Mrs. Harrington.

Did he? I looked at her in surprise. What was I missing?

"I hope your mother is mending nicely," she said to Serena. "I was so concerned."

Mending? Concerned?

Serena nodded earnestly. "Thank you. It was very kind of you to send flowers."

"It was the least I could do."

Like a gallumping lummox, I barged into the conversation. "Has your mother been ill?"

"Didn't Colin tell you?" Serena looked genuinely surprised. "I had thought, when he left "

I shook my head in negation and tried to arrange my features into a proper expression of polite concern. I was beginning to wish I had held on to that vodka. Tendrils of apprehension unfolded in my stomach like the vines of a killer jungle plant.

"Serena's mother was in an auto accident," Mrs. Harrington filled in for her. "In Venice, wasn't it?"

"Siena."

"Oh, dear," I said. Anything else seemed entirely inadequate. "I'm so sorry."

"It was just bruises," Serena hastened to assure me. "And a broken rib."

"Oh, dear," I repeated numbly. "How awful."

"Those are the sorts of phone calls," said Mrs. Harrington, her eyes going automatically to Pammy, entertaining a crowd of coworkers across the room, "that one never wants to get."

"I can't even begin to imagine," I said.

Only I could.

We had just come in from that crazy drinks party at Donwell Abbey when Colin's mobile had rung. I remembered the moment distinctly. He had taken one look at the number, wished me an abrupt good-night, and hared off. At the time I had assumed it was simply because he didn't want anything more to do with me.

"I couldn't go, but Colin caught the first flight he could find. He stayed the week with her." Serena fingered the fringe of her pashmina, her bowed head an eloquent expression of guilt.

She wasn't the only one feeling guilty.

It must have been about six hours after the phone call that Colin had found me in the library and asked if I could be ready to leave in fifteen minutes. That intervening time took new shape in my imagination. I could picture Colin hunched over the computer, cell phone crammed against one ear, veering back and forth between making travel plans, keeping tabs on events in the hospital, and updating an anxious Serena. All alone in the middle of the night, with his mother lying injured in a foreign country and the minutes ticking inexorably away, while he was stuck in Sussex with a snippy houseguest.

I felt like pond scum.

"I'm sure your mother must have understood." I patted her shoulder clumsily. "That must have given you great peace of mind, to know that Colin was there with her."

I was the bacteria that lurked beneath pond scum. No self-respecting pond scum would have anything to do with me.

I'd been so wrapped in my own self-centered mantle of wounded ego that it had never occurred to me that something might be genuinely wrong. Something real, and life-threatening, and frightening. Something that had nothing to do with me, or aborted flirtations, or silly crushes.

I tried to imagine how I would react if I heard that my mother was injured—possibly badly—in a foreign country. Even the thought of it made me jittery.

"But she's better now?" I pressed.

"Much," said Serena resolutely. "And her husband is there with her."

Not "my father." Just "her husband." It had never occurred to me to ask about Colin's family situation. I suppose if I had thought about it at all, I would have just assumed that he had sprung fully formed out of Selwick Hall, like Minerva from Jove's head.

"Where is Colin?" I asked, craning my neck toward the bar.

I had a vague notion of I don't know. Expressing my sympathies? Apologizing? It was nothing that coherent, more a generalized sense of wanting to make amends, although for precisely what, I couldn't say. After all, I couldn't very well apologize to Colin for being pissy with him because I thought he had snubbed me if a) he hadn't realized that I was being pissy, and b) he had no idea that I'd thought he had snubbed me. It was all a huge muddle.

He wasn't at the bar anymore, and I didn't see him in any of the small knots of people clustered around the front room. It didn't matter; I would have plenty of time over the multicourse Thanksgiving dinner to make up for past behavior by being punctiliously pleasant. I would be a model of grace and charm. Well, charm at least.

"There he is!" Serena, who had been scanning the room, looking for her brother, nodded toward the arched doorway that led into the front hall. As I watched, Colin's broad back disappeared into the hallway that had been conscripted as a cloakroom. "He's just leaving."

Come home with me.

Geoff's words hung suspended in the air between them, as real a presence as the pattern of green vines twining beneath their feet, and just as knotty. Letty would have liked to know just what he meant by "with." Such a simple little preposition, and yet so fraught with possible meaning. At least, it might be fraught. Or it might not. And there was the problem in a nutshell. They were friends again, certainly, after their little spat a mere two hours before. But whether they were anything more

"I don't even know where home is. Your home, I mean."

Geoff's long fingers rested comfortably against the edge of the dresser, but his eyes were fixed quite steadily on her. Unreadable, as always. There were distinct disadvantages to being married to a master spy.

"At present, a place on loan from a chap who's in London for the Season. You'll be quite safe there."

"But what about Lord Vaughn? If he knows we're married "