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.