pretty much sums it up when you think about the alternative.’ He nodded to his secretary and glanced at his watch. ‘Two hours, Vicky. Think that will do it?’
‘I think so.’
‘In that case, I will see you both shortly. And, Miss Brennan...don’t even think about doing a runner.’
* * *
Over the next hour and a half Katy experienced what it felt like to be kidnapped. Oh, he could call it what he liked, but she was going to be held prisoner. She was relieved of her mobile phone by Lucas’s secretary, who was brisk but warm, and seemed to see nothing amiss in following her boss’s high-handed instructions. It would be delivered to Lucas and held in safekeeping for her.
She packed a bunch of clothes, not knowing where she was going. Outside, it was still, but spring was making way for summer, so the clothes she crammed into her duffel bag were light, with one cardigan in case she ended up somewhere cold.
Although how would she know what the weather was up to when she would probably be locked in a room somewhere with views of the outside world through bars?
And yet, for all her frustration and downright anger, she could sort of see why he had reacted the way he had. Obviously the only thing that mattered to Lucas Cipriani was making money and closing deals. If this was to be the biggest deal of his career—and dipping his corporate toes into the Far East would be—then he would be more than happy to do what it took to safeguard his interest.
She was a dispensable little fish in the very big pond in which he was the marauding king of the water.
And the fact that she knew someone at the company he was about to take over, someone who was so far ignorant of what was going on, meant she had the power to pass on highly sensitive and potentially explosive information.
Lucas Cipriani, being the sort of man he was, would never believe that she had no ongoing situation with Duncan Powell because he was suspicious, distrustful, power hungry, arrogant, and would happily feed her to the sharks if it suited him, because he was also ice-cold and utterly emotionless.
‘Where am I being taken?’ she asked Vicky as they stepped back into the chauffeur-driven car that had delivered her to her flat. ‘Or am I going to find myself blindfolded before we get there?’
‘To a field on the outskirts of London.’ She smiled. ‘Mr Cipriani has his own private mode of transport there. And, no, you won’t be blindfolded for any of the journey.’
Katy subsided into silence and stared at the scenery passing by as the silent car left London and expertly took a route with which she was unfamiliar. She seldom left the capital unless it was to take the train up to Yorkshire to see her parents and her friends who still lived in the area. She didn’t own a car, so escaping London was rarely an option, although, on a couple of occasions, she had gone with Tim and some of the others to Brighton for a holiday, five of them crammed like sardines into his second-hand car.
She hadn’t thought about the dynamics of being trapped in a room with just Lucas acting as gaoler outside, but now she did, and she felt that frightening, forbidding tingle again.
Would other people be around? Or would there just be the two of them?
She hated him. She loathed his arrogance and the way he had of assuming that the world should fall in line with whatever he wanted. He was the boss who never made an effort to interact with those employees he felt were beneath him. He paid well not because he was a considerate and fair-minded guy who believed in rewarding hard work, but because he knew that money bought loyalty, and a loyal employee was more likely to do exactly what he demanded without asking questions. Pay an employee enough, and they lost the right to vote.
She hoped that he’d been telling the truth when he’d said that there would be no interaction between them because she couldn’t think that they would have anything to talk about.
Then Katy thought about seeing him away from the confines of office walls. Something inside trembled and she had that whooshing feeling again, as if she had been sitting quietly on a chair, only to find that the chair was attached to a rollercoaster and the switch had suddenly been turned on. Her tummy flipped over; she didn’t get it, because she really and truly didn’t like the guy.
She surfaced from her thoughts to find that they had left the main roads behind and were pulling into a huge parking lot where a long, covered building opened onto an air field.
‘I give you Lucas’s transport...’ Vicky murmured. ‘If you look to the right, you’ll see his private jet. It’s the black one. But today you’ll be taking the helicopter.’
Jet? Helicopter?
Katy did a double-take. Her eyes swivelled from private jet to helicopter and, sure enough, there he was, leaning indolently against a black and silver helicopter, dark shades shielding his eyes from the early-afternoon glare.
Her mouth ran dry. He was watching her from behind those shades. Her breathing picked up and her heart began to beat fast as she wondered what the heck she had got herself into, and all because she had stumbled across information she didn’t even care about.
She didn’t have time to dwell on the quicksand gathering at her feet, however, because with the sort of efficiency that spoke of experience the driver was pulling the car to a stop and she was being offloaded, the driver hurrying towards the helicopter with her bag just as the rotary blades of the aircraft began to whop, whop, whop in preparation for taking off, sending a whirlwind of flying dust beneath it.
Lucas had vanished into the helicopter.
Katy wished that she could vanish to the other side of the world.
She was harried, panic-stricken and grubby, because she hadn’t had a chance to shower, and her jeans and shirt were sticking to her like glue. When she’d spoken to her mother on the phone, under the eagle eye of Vicky, she had waffled on with some lame excuse about being whipped off to a country house to do an important job, where the reception might be a bit dodgy, so they weren’t to worry if contact was sporadic. She had made it sound like an exciting adventure because her parents were prone to worrying about her.
She hadn’t thought that she really would end up being whipped off to anywhere.
She had envisaged a laborious drive to a poky holding pen in the middle of nowhere, with Internet access cruelly denied her. She hadn’t believed him when he had told her to the contrary, and she certainly had not been able to get her head around any concept of an unplanned holiday unless you could call incarceration a holiday.
She was floored by what seemed to be a far bigger than average helicopter, but she was still scowling as she battled against the downdraft from the blades to climb aboard.
Lucas had to shout to be heard. As the small craft spun up, up and away, he called out, ‘Small bag, Miss Brennan. Where have you stashed the books, the sketch pads and the tin of paints?’
Katy gritted her pearly teeth together but didn’t say anything, and he laughed, eyebrows raised.
‘Or did you decide to go down the route of being a good little martyr while being held in captivity against your will? No books...no sketch pads...no tin of paints...and just the slightest temptation to stage a hunger strike to prove a point?’
Clenched fists joined gritted teeth and she glared at him, but he had already looked away and was flicking through the papers on his lap. He only glanced up when, leaning forward and voice raised to be heard above the din, she said, ‘Where are you taking me?’
Aggravatingly seeming to read her mind, privy to every dark leap of imagination that had whirled through her head in a series of colourful images, Lucas replied, ‘I’m sure that you’ve already conjured up dire destinations. So, instead of telling you, I’ll leave you to carry on with your fictitious scenarios because I suspect that where you subsequently end up can only be better than what you’ve wasted your time imagining. But to set your mind at rest...’
He patted the pocket of the linen jacket