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‘You’re looking apprehensive. There’s no need,’ he reassured her, and then added wryly, ‘You’re safe with me, Beth, but has it occurred to you that you might not have been had you agreed to accompany your gypsy friends to wherever it was they claimed they were going to take you?’

Beth bit her lip and looked studiedly out of the car window. Alex seemed to think that she had given up her plans to go and visit the glass factory, but she hadn’t...not that she intended to tell him that—or anything else about her intentions. Why should she?

‘Not much further now,’ he told her as he changed down a gear for the steep hill they were climbing.

Beth gasped, instinctively clinging onto her seat as they crested the mist-shrouded hill and then abruptly started to drop straight down, the road in front of them almost perpendicular, she was sure. At the bottom they had to ford what amounted to a racing stream of swirling water.

Alex grimaced when he saw her expression as she looked out of the car window.

‘It’s the rain,’ he told her. ‘This culvert makes a natural channel for it. In the old days there was actually a river here, but it was diverted.

‘No questions,’ he warned Beth as she started to open her mouth. ‘Please close your eyes. We’re almost there.’

Almost where...?

Beth was just about to object when a sudden ferocious clap of thunder made her close them instinctively. The intensity with which the rain was drumming down on the car roof suddenly seemed to treble as they started to climb again. Beth could see the jagged flashes of lightning behind her closed eyelids, but the ferocity of the storm which was raging around them made her feel too apprehensive to open her eyes.

‘Where are we going?’ Beth protested, unable to keep the betraying tremor out of her voice.

‘It’s a surprise,’ she heard Alex repeating to her. ‘Have you still got your eyes closed?’

Obediently Beth nodded, then gasped as the car rattled noisily over what sounded like a wooden bridge and started to climb a steep hillside, before levelling out, crunching over gravel and then coming to a halt.

‘You can open them now,’ she heard Alex saying softly in her ear, his voice sending delicious little shivers of sensation, like subtle harbingers of pleasure to come, along her sensitive nerve-endings.

Quickly Beth opened her eyes, and then widened them in stunned awe as she took in the splendour of her surroundings.

‘Where on earth are we?’ she whispered a little hesitantly. ‘It looks like a castle...’

‘That’s exactly what it is,’ Alex replied promptly.

Stunned, Beth stared at the creamy white walls in front of her, with their small slit windows and their dome-capped turrets. Too solidly built to be the fairy-tale castle of a little girl’s fantasies, this one was built much more on the lines of an awesome stronghold. A curtain wall surrounded the courtyard they were in, and as Beth swivelled round she could see the steep incline they had climbed to reach the plateau area of the courtyard. In front of them a flight of stone steps curled away around the side of the building, and two huge arched wooden doors were ominously closed in front of them.

‘What are we doing here? What...what is this place?’ Beth asked.

‘Want to take a closer look?’ Alex invited her, opening his own car door.

Bemused, Beth nodded.

The air outside was colder than she had expected, and wetter. The rain she had heard beating down on the car roof during the drive had intensified in severity, striking her exposed face and legs so hard it almost hurt.

The mountainside the castle was built on was so high that it was actually above the mist. On a clear day the view must be awesome, Beth acknowledged. Right now she felt almost intimidated by the savagery of the lashing rain and the noise of the thunder rumbling in the distance.

‘Quick...this way,’ Alex told her, sheltering her in the curve of his arm as he hurried her towards the massive double doors. Once they reached them Beth saw that a small door was cut into them, which Alex unlocked with a key he produced from his jacket pocket.

Once through the door and out of the rain Beth saw that they were in a huge stone-flagged hall, with a fireplace along one wall that was almost the size of her sitting room at home. If anything the air inside the hall was even colder than outside it.

‘I hadn’t realised the weather was going to be quite so bad as this when I planned this trip,’ Alex told her ruefully as he led the way to the back of the hall and into a narrow passage.

As she followed him up a dark flight of stone stairs Beth felt almost as though she had strayed into an Alice in Wonderland setting.

The stairs turned and twisted, illuminated by the light from heavy wrought-iron fittings, flickering hazardously as though threatening to go out at any second, and then suddenly they were stepping onto a large wood-floored landing area, with larger, more graceful windows and an intricate design set into the parquet of the floor.

‘This is the more modern part of the castle. It was built on i

n 1760 by I forget which ancestor. My aunt gets quite severely cross with me for not being able to remember all the details of our family history. I suspect she thinks I don’t pay attention when she’s relating it to me.’

‘Your aunt...your family owns this?’ Beth gasped. He had already told her about the family’s castle, of course, but she had not expected anything so grand!

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
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