Free The Passionate Sinner by Violet Winspear

strangely delicate flowers. Her forehead was beaded with moisture and dragon lizards scurried from her path, rough steps cut in the side of this immense bowl of fragrant tea. She could also smell nutmeg and pepper and the wild mimosa clustering at the edge of the valley. A benign and ancient stone god reclined beneath the entwined branches of a huge old banyan.
    Jiwamerah, she thought. Soul land where the women became the souls of the men they loved. It was like poetry, disturbing and sensual like the scents that were growing headier as the storm gathered its forces. Deep and primal, rooted in a belief that no longer seemed relevant in the modern world she had abandoned for this island ... that love was still the most passionate experience of a lifetime, whether or not it gave joy or pain.
    Merlin raised her eyes to the smoking gold of the sun ... leaves rattled sharply in a sudden gust of wind and almost stunning was the impact of tea-bush and spice trees. She clutched a handful of liana to hold her to the steps, for the wind had clawed at her shirt and swept her hair across her eyes, and she heard the monkeys chattering in a high-pitched way in the foliage of the forest.
    The typhoon was coming closer and soon it would roar its way across Pulau-Indah, smashing and uprooting and destroying, and whatever happened, whatever the cost, Merlin was glad she’d be with Paul. She flung back her hair and gave the sultry sun a defiant look ... she was part of all this, even if it tore out her heart.

CHAPTER FOUR
    THE day had grown forbiddingly dark ... a restless, menacing darkness. Merlin had found Lon and had it confirmed that a typhoon was heading this way. Already the wind had a high-pitched whine to it and the palm tree foliage was in perpetual motion, whipping back and forth, until quite suddenly a branch would snap off with a sharp click and go flying away.
    Relentlessly it was coming, and Lon had told her to return at once to the Tiger House and inform the tuan that the people of the village were going to shelter in the tea valley; they were nervous of the big wind and down in the valley it didn’t sound quite so forceful. She was to ask Paul if he would be coming down as well, but Merlin knew the answer in advance. He wouldn’t budge from the house, but he would probably suggest that she join the villagers and their children; he might even insist, and Merlin was all girded up for a battle of wills. There was no way, short of throwing her down the cliffside, that he would get her to leave him to face the typhoon alone. He wasn’t made of stone. As the storm intensified he’d need company like everyone else.
    She flinched at the heaving, creaking sound the palms were making, and the moaning that seemed caught in the big banana fronds. And deep in the forest she heard the devilish tattoo that Ramai had spoken about, the rain arriving on the mass of foliage that formed almost a solid roof over the tangled mass of bush and vine.
    The wind-chimes swung crazily as she mounted the steps to the veranda and paused to catch her breath in that section of the porch that was screened for coolness by a huge knotted creeper whose tough stems were thick with flowers, aromatic and deep gold. Her fingers combed the hair from her brow, and she watched as a great red-tinged cloud sailed into the sky and seemed to cast flame over the thatched roof of the house.
    Suddenly a young houseboy came running from the direction of the kitchen and seeing Merlin he came to where she was and brushed a hand across wet eyes. It was Tutup, the boy who led Paul when he wanted to go to the beach or the kampong. ‘Tuan say I must go to valley without him, nonya. He blind, not see, be killed by big wind up here! You tell him come!’
    ‘You tell him go.’ Paul’s voice seemed to leave a vibra-ation in the air. ‘The little pup dared to argue with me, but I won’t leave here, and I won’t have him up here when it really begins, and it’s going to, eh?