Chapter 15: The Keys

Fraser's POV

I reached the helipad half a minute behind her.

I had run, and Lena had run, and Ostby had stayed in the board room with his face in his hands.

The company helicopter sat on the big pad above the lagoon with its rotor blades tied down.

Corinna stood at its open door in her white suit, throwing laptops onto the seat.

She had an armful of them, four or five, and a banker's box under one elbow.

The pilot had come up behind us, panting, and he stopped ten feet from the aircraft.

"Start it," Corinna said to him. "We're leaving."

"No, ma'am."

"You work for me."

"I work for the company," the pilot said. "Mrs. Ostby is the acting head of it, and the board just said so."

Staff were coming up from the kitchens and the laundry and the guest cottages.

At least forty gathered, and more of them were walking.

A line cook, a gardener, the young nurse with the coffee still in her hand.

Phones came out, one after another, held up and steady.

Lena walked across the concrete to the aircraft and stopped an arm's length from Corinna.

She was not hurrying, and she was not loud.

"Put the laptops down," she said.

"They're mine."

"They hold the company's files and they're in my chair now. Put them down."

Corinna looked at the faces around the pad, and at the phones.

For a moment I thought she would throw one at Lena's head.

Instead she set the stack of laptops on the concrete, one at a time, with exaggerated care.

"And the keys," Lena said.

Corinna pulled a ring from her blazer pocket, heavy with fobs, and held it up.

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Gave Our Helicopter Away, So I Stopped Waiting to Be Rescued from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.