lump to Rose’s throat. Her sister had found the man of her dreams too. Why couldn’t Rebecca recognise that the only difference between them was that Nick had been available?
Was everything in life merely down to timing?
‘The Scottish Highlands! You know I can’t believe you’re actually serious about this. You’re mad, totally insane!’
Rose had defended her sanity but as a second sickening splintering sound issued from under her feet and the crack in the ice spread rapidly she was forced to consider the very real possibility Rebecca might have had a point.
Mathieu had risen early, long before anyone else in the house was awake. He enjoyed solitude, time to recharge his batteries and gather his thoughts without the distractions of phones and faxes, but moments like this one had become increasingly rare over the past months.
Not that he was complaining. Against all the odds he found he loved what he was doing, and he was learning all the time.
It was a steep learning curve, but he relished the challenge and knew that even if it ultimately proved impossible for him to work with Andreos he would take these new skills with him when he left.
And, on a less charitable note, in the meantime he had the pleasure of knowing Andreos, who had never disguised the fact that he didn’t think his bastard son had what it took, was struggling to hide his frustration when he hadn’t fallen flat on his face.
Yet, he corrected himself with a mocking grin. You know what they say about pride and falls, Mathieu.
Someone had recently asked if he hadn’t found the restrictions of riding a desk after the freedom of the racing circuit crushing. They had not understood why he had laughed, but like many they hadn’t had the faintest idea of the sort of physical and mental discipline both required to compete at the level he had.
They saw the glamour but not the struggle to remain at the peak in a competitive environment.
He slipped his rucksack from one shoulder to the other and rotated his neck to ease the tension that still remained in his shoulders. The chair in Jamie’s study was not designed with human posture in mind and he had worked long into the night, poring over the accounts, a flattering description for the collection of papers and illegible scribbles in the ledgers that Jamie had supplied him with.
They did not make for happy reading. Far from exaggerating the situation as he had suspected, Jamie had if anything underplayed the seriousness of his position.
It had been dawn when he had tackled the climb so, with any luck—his glance skimmed his watch—yes, he ought to make it back in time for breakfast and to place a few calls.
The post-climb general sense of well-being combined with the dregs of the adrenaline rush were still circulating in his blood as he made his way to the spot where he had parked the Land Rover. He glanced once more at the metal-banded watch on his wrist and quickened his pace already planning his strategy, though he suspected it would come down in the end to plan B. it was always good to have a plan B.
He was about half a mile from the Land Rover when movement in the periphery of his vision made him turn his head in time to see a red-hatted figure moving below. Someone else who enjoyed the morning, he thought, moving off again. He had reached a steep slope of scree directly above the loch when some instinct made him stop and seek out the distant figure.
‘Nobody is that stupid …’ He held his breath for a moment as the figure stepped out onto what he knew to be paper-thin ice.
He hit the ground running. He didn’t waste his breath shouting, knowing the person below would never hear him above the wind that whistled through the valley.
He was fifty yards away when the stillness was rent first by a loud cracking sound, then a woman’s scream. A final sprint brought him to the edge of the ice in seconds.
A girlfriend had once accused him of having too little imagination to be sensibly scared of anything, but she was wrong.
He just saw little benefit under the circumstances of wasting time to linger on the lurid details of death by drowning in cold, icy water. Instead as he pulled off his light padded outer jacket he scanned the ice estimating his chances.
His actions were swift but not hurried, his brain working out all the factors. It was his ability to think clearly in situations like this that had made him a successful racing driver. That combined with lightning reflexes, nerves of steel and, according to some of his competitors, more than his fair share of ruthless cunning.
Mathieu didn’t think of it in those terms, but he did know that his thought processes were at their sharpest when the stakes were high. Right now they were as high as they got—a life.
The situation did not allow for further preliminary evaluation so, sucking in a breath, he tucked his ice axe into the belt of his trousers and lay down flat on his belly to distribute his weight as evenly as possible on the thin ice. Then Mathieu began to crawl as quickly as possible towards the hole that stood like a gaping black wound in the silvered surface of the frozen water.
He saw the top of a red hat surface, heard the stifled yell and pushed himself faster regardless of the warning creaks of the fragile ice underneath him. He reached the edge of the gash in the ice in time to see the white hand vanish beneath the water.
He hauled himself to the edge of the hole and thrust his ice axe into the water. Relief flooded through him as it snagged on something. His face set in lines of grim determination, the sinews in his neck pulling taut, he began to pull.
Even as she opened her mouth to scream for help Rose was very aware that the chance of anyone being around to hear her was, at the most optimistic, remote.
The second scream of visceral fear remained locked in her throat as the ice beneath her feet opened up and she fell. She had never imagined that cold could be this extreme. It enveloped her, freezing the air in her lungs, its icy tentacles infiltrating every cell of her body. After the first paralysing shock she began to struggle, kicking out wildly in panic as she fought her way to the surface.
Rose was a good swimmer but the extremely low temperature of the water sapped her strength within minutes.
‘Help me,’ she screamed as she felt herself sliding beneath the surface. Cocooned in the icy darkness, aware only of the heavy thud of her own heartbeat as it continued to pump the oxygen-starved blood around her body, she refused to accept the inevitable.
I am not going to drown.
But she was.
Still Rose refused to accept the reality of it. Clinging stubbornly to the last flicker of hope, she kicked weakly for the surface even though she knew she wasn’t going to make it.
Only she did. Just as she had used up the last reserves of strength and her lungs were burning she felt something snag in her coat, then she was being dragged upwards.
Holding the bedraggled girl’s head above the icy water, Mathieu could just about make out her muffled words. The damsel in distress had reached the inevitable ‘what happened?’ phase. He didn’t waste his breath replying, though if she asked, ‘Who am I?’ he would have a harder time restraining himself. People called him a risk-taker, but any risks he took were of the clear-headed, calculated variety. If this girl wasn’t suicidal to pull a stunt like this she was … she had to be one of the most criminally stupid women ever to draw
