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She felt herself being checked over, starting with her straight blonde hair, now held back in a neat chignon. Then his eyes took in her creamy skin, her slightly hollowed cheeks and photogenic high cheekbones that sometimes caused her to seem aloof. She wasn’t particularly aloof, she didn’t think. It was just that she usually had some problem on her mind—most often something to do with Justine.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard any further news?’ she enquired, as he let go of her hand.

He shook his head. ‘We’ll just keep hoping,’ he said shortly, and that was about the sum total of their conversation until someone came to show them to the private jet.

They had little to say to each other throughout the journey, either. While she knew Gideon Langford was busy with his own thoughts, Ellena lapsed into thinking of her years with Justine since their parents’ deaths. They had been killed on a mountainside—she couldn’t bear it if Justine, too, perished... No, no, she wouldn’t think that way; she just wouldn’t.

She had been just seventeen; Justine fifteen—and on the point of being expelled from school for some misdemeanour. Which of her misdemeanours it had been exactly was lost under the weight of all the others when word had reached them of their parents’ accident.

They had both been much loved by their lively, bubbly parents, but Ellena had had to do some instant growing up. Prior to the accident, she had been hopeful that her father, as he had before, might have been able to persuade Justine’s school from taking such drastic action as expulsion. But, he didn’t come back and, while they were both devastated at losing their parents, it was Justine who had adored her father—he who, it had to be said, had indulged her endlessly and had refused to see anything wrong in a few high spirits and who had been inconsolable for months.

During this time Ellena had realised that her plans to go to university to study accountancy were not going to happen. Although in the light of the tragedy the school had relented, and allowed a much subdued Justine to stay with them, Ellena had felt there was no way she could leave her.

Hiding her own heartache, she’d set about the practicalities of living without their parents. Out of necessity she’d checked into their financial security.

Their finances weren’t brilliant, but they weren’t too bad either, she’d discovered. Both she and Justine were aware of an investment which their father had made for them both in the years of their birth. They would each receive a quite substantial amount—but not until their twentieth birthdays.

Meantime, their parents’ house was heavily mortgaged and there were a few debts outstanding; they had all lived well, but there was nothing left over for a rainy day.

Ellena had left school straight away and, excelling at maths, obtained a job with a firm of accountants. She was reasonably well paid for her junior position, but it was nowhere near enough to pay the mortgage.