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‘I thought the monsoon season was over,’ Keira told him. The clouds were toppling over one another now, spilling out to cover the sky in a billowing rolling wall that was moving speedily towards them.
‘It is,’ Jay agreed. ‘This is obviously a freak storm of some sort. It can happen. Hold on,’ he warned her, as he pressed the accelerator even further and the car surged forward at a speed that sent them bouncing over the poor-quality road.
‘I wouldn’t normally want to travel at this speed on a road like this, but I’d rather not be caught out here in the open if the storm catches up with us. If a deluge starts this road could all too easily be turned into a river.’
Keira nodded her head, recognising the truth of what he was saying.
The sky was almost purple-black behind them now, and the branches of the scrubby sparse trees were bending and twisting in the ferocity of the wind that was pushing the storm towards them. Flocks of birds rose from the trees, wheeling and screeching before turning to flee. Eerily electric yellow-white lightning flashed behind them, followed by crashes of thunder that made Keira wince and cling to her seat.
She no longer wanted to look in the wing mirror, but of course she couldn’t stop herself from doing so. The storm was catching up with them.
‘Watch out.’
Jay swung the car to avoid hitting a cow that had strayed into the road, throwing Keira hard against both her seat belt and the arm he had flung across to protect her. Her own immediate instinct was to hold tightly to his arm, as much for comfort as anything else.
‘Sorry about that.’
His voice was clipped, and Keira could feel him tensing his arm, ready to pull away from her as though he was keen to break their physical contact. Just as she should be.
‘I’m just glad you managed to avoid the cow,’ Keira told him shakily, trying to make some effort at normal conversation to distract herself from the dangerous direction of her thoughts. She released him, and then had to fight not to grab hold of him again as another bolt of lightning lit up the bruised tungsten-dark sky.
Large fat drops of rain hammered down on the car’s roof and hit the windscreen, mingling with the dust to turn it into muddy rivulets.
‘I’m going to have to slow down,’ Jay warned her. ‘Otherwise we’ll risk aquaplaning off the road.’
Keira nodded her head. She was grateful to him for keeping her informed of what he was doing and why, but she didn’t want to distract him from his driving by talking to him.
Not that she could talk to him now and be heard—not over the noise of the thunder and the rain that was engulfing them.
Sheet lightning illuminated a torrent of rain so powerful that it was as though they were driving under a waterfall. In the car’s headlights Keira could see the muddy froth of boiling water where the road used to be.
Jay had cut the car’s speed, but Keira could still feel the dangerous suck and pull of the flooding water as it seethed beneath their tyres, threatening to wash them off the road.
Strangely, she didn’t feel as afraid as she knew she should. Because she was with Jay? Keira glanced briefly towards him. He was staring ahead, concentrating on his driving, his hands on the steering wheel careful and controlled rather than white-knuckled with anxiety. Somehow she knew that Jay would not let the storm beat him.
‘Ralapur’s up ahead,’ Jay told her, and sure enough, as Keira peered through the windscreen, she could see here and there the glimmer of lights.
Jay picked up speed again, leaving the storm behind, and they came to the new Tarmac road—commissioned and paid for, she had learned, by Jay’s brother, who was proving to be a forward-thinking and caring figurehead. The Tarmac gleamed wet under the drum of the rain, but at least it was free of any surface water.
By the time they reached the city car park the rain had actually almost stopped, but the storm was obviously following them.
‘If you want to stay here whilst I go and get you a raincoat and an umbrella—?’ Jay offered, as he switched off the engine.
Keira shook her head. ‘No, I’ll come with you,’ she told him. She’d rather risk getting a bit wet and having the safety of his presence than remaining dry and staying in the car on her own.
