AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Good. On time.’
The helicopter door slammed behind her. She’d never been in a helicopter before. Her life didn’t include such adventures.
Just the two of them in a tiny little bubble with sleet and flurries of snow gusting around them.
She was shaking as he strapped her in but, even though she was in a state of anxious meltdown, her eyes skittered to him. He was in black, from his shoes to his black polo neck and the bomber jacket. Like her, he was wearing a woolly hat, which he kept on. It was freezing in the helicopter.
‘You’re scared,’ he threw over his shoulder, before opening the throttle so that the eerie silence turned into a cacophony of noise from the rotor blades. ‘Don’t be,’ he shouted. ‘You’re in safe hands.’
But Celia felt far from safe as the helicopter spun into motion, accelerating sharply upwards and then buzzing at speed over a vista submerged in darkness.
She hadn’t thought out what she was going to say to her brother when she saw him and she couldn’t think about that now because she was too busy clinging to her seat, eyes tightly shut, breathing all over the place.
Through a haze of fear, she was aware of the helicopter shuddering like a tin can in a tornado, taking for ever, and then the descent, sharp and fast and over in the blink of an eye.
The silence as the rotor blades slowed was as deafening as the noise of them rotating had been.
She opened her eyes to find that Leandro had unbuckled and moved towards her and was grinning.
‘Have you had your eyes closed for the entire flight?’
Busying herself with the safety belt, Celia glanced at him and blushed.
‘It’s my first time in a helicopter,’ she muttered. ‘How did I know that it wasn’t going to crash?’
‘Because I was piloting it,’ Leandro said with supreme confidence. ‘It’s pretty bad here. Leave your bags. I’ll take them. We can make a dash for the house. Snow here isn’t like snow in London. Up here, I find the snow is generally a little less polite.’
‘I know,’ Celia puffed breathlessly, ‘it’s the same in Shropshire where I grew up. It comes and then never knows when it’s time to leave.’
‘Well put. Let me help you.’ He cranked open the door to a white, barren and starkly beautiful wilderness.
For a few seconds, Celia looked out in awe at the splendid isolation. Pure darkness encased a wintry wonderland that shimmered under silent, falling snow. She forgot how cold she was, how anxious, how apprehensive. Dark shapes were visible, definitions of the landscape, but they could have landed on another planet.
The snow was thick and vicious, slicing through her clothes as he hoisted the various bags in one hand and propelled her through the darkness towards the looming vast shape of his country estate.
She couldsenseunease in his silence.
They hit the front door at pace. Massive front door. Behind them, the helicopter was a disappearing dark blot and behind that, Celia could only surmise, lay gates and trees and hedges and who knew what else. All the stuff of a country estate.
The actual manor house was so big as they stood in front of it that Celia could barely see where it began and ended through the densely falling snow.
It was shrouded in complete darkness and as they entered, Leandro banging on the lights, flooding the vast hall with light, bitterly cold.
He dumped all the bags and made straight through the hall, bypassing the grand staircases to the left and the right and towards the bowels of the house.
Celia followed. She had to half run because he was moving at a brisk pace but, even so, she still managed to take in the opulent grandeur of the surroundings. Pale walls, marble, exquisite panelling and chandeliers and paintings that looked as though they cost a fortune.
There was an urgency to his purposeful stride that ratcheted up her nervousness and, sure enough, when he flung open a cupboard to fire up the central heating and turned to her, she knew what he was going to say before the words could leave his mouth.
‘There’s no one here.’
Their eyes tangled and a frisson swept through her body as the ramifications of that simple statement took root.
No Dan. No Julie. No safety net of other people around, however thorny the atmosphere might have been. Just her and Leandro rattling around in his sprawling mansion with a snowstorm raging outside. One night here? Two? Or more?
As he’d said, the snow in this part of the world, as it was in Shropshire, was not polite. It didn’t fall for a couple of hours before packing it in. It outstayed its welcome.
What did that mean? What if they were stuck here?
