Free The Reckless Engineer by Jac Wright Page A

your time here. You have been a rock, and I don’t know what I would have done without you.’
    You would have had everything under perfect control without seeming so .
    ‘You and Jack pretty much kept me alive when Maggie first left me, and Jack covered for me when I was drunk senseless for months and saved my job. It is the least I could do.’
    ‘Take one of Jack’s cars, Jeremy, the Audi or the Golf. Félipé will get the keys for you. Please, we’ve dragged you away from your life out here. Take one of the cars. I insist.’
    ‘Thanks, Caitlin.’ He smiled and nodded.
    She moved her heel lightly against Jasper and he watched them fly into the distance with magnificent elegance and power. He waited for them to reach the pond and take the turn into the woodlands adjacent to the back of their land, moving out of sight, and slipped into Jack’s workshop.
    The keys he was looking for lay on a key ring with the McAllen logo etched in black and gold onto a silver disc where he had put them while tidying the lab in the morning. He pocketed the keys and shuffled things on the desk back into a state of disarray so that the keys would not be missed.
    He had been counting on borrowing one of Jack’s cars. If Caitlin hadn’t offered first, he would have asked. He would take the Golf. He needed a car that was swift but one that would also blend in without attracting attention. Jeremy ran upstairs and quickly grabbed his case that he never went anywhere without as Félipé fetched the car keys.
    Before he had time to think of the significance of what he was getting himself into, he found himself putting Jack’s dark grey Golf into gear and racing out towards the McAllen BlackGold offices in Portsmouth.

CHAPTER 9
    Saturday, October 16 — one Day Later
    If this K.C. were any good Jeremy knew he would be too late to get to the offices before he did. He was right. As he approached the McAllen BlackGold offices he could see the lights on in one of the buildings. Caitlin’s Mercedes Benz SUV was parked by the side of this building and another SUV was parked next to it with its rear hood and two rear doors wide open. Jeremy slowed down. He would drive past inconspicuously, keeping an eye on the offices and the vehicles. The Sunday evening traffic on the road was sparse; there were only two other cars and one truck on the road as far as the eye could see.
    When Jack had started work for McAllen BlackGold all those years ago the only building here had been the large converted barn that housed the machinery and the supplies. The main offices had been housed in a rented building in central Portsmouth just a ten-minute drive away. Jack had bought the adjacent land for the company, two and a half acres, from the farmer who had been using it as grazing land for his horses and to store his trucks, tractors, vans, wheelbarrows, harvesters, and other equipment that he rented out. Jack had converted the barn on the new land into BlackGold’s new electro-mechanical labs, and on the rest of the empty land he had built the two-storey office building that now contained the staff offices. The company’s original barn had been further built up to accommodate BlackGold’s increasing array of supplies, manufacturing machinery, and the range of electromechanical products that the company built.
    Jeremy drove slowly past the three BlackGold buildings on his left, while a retreating sea possessively drained remnants of trapped water off the sands at low tide on his right. A little boy was running naked with his pup, collecting seashells into a bucket, while their mother packed up the picnic they had enjoyed earlier in the day. On Jeremy’s left, through the gaps in the row of thick hedges and trees that Caitlin had grown, he could see a medium built man carrying a pile of files out to the SUV that had its doors open.
    This must be K.C.!
    Having passed the BlackGold land, he slowed down further. On his left there were the farmer’s trucks, skips,