Chapter 6 #3
The jet was laid out like someone’s living room, not like a commercial airliner.
Instead of rows of seats, there was a conversation area with a couch and coffee table.
There were also a few seats that looked like they had workstations built in for those who might want to set up a temporary office while they flew from one place to another.
Mark had been seated in one of the comfy-looking chairs, so she chose the one next to him. She’d try it out. They could always move later, she supposed, if they wanted to.
“I’ve never flown in a helicopter before. It was seriously cool,” she admitted, grinning at him.
“I’ll have to take you up more often,” he said, smiling in what looked like approval. “We’d better buckle in for takeoff. The sooner we get off the ground, the sooner we get to the island. I can’t wait to show it to you.”
He sat in his seat, next to hers. They took a moment to buckle in, and when Shelly looked up, she realized they’d been joined by a few more people.
There was an older woman with a kind face, a younger woman who looked enough like her to be her daughter, two very large men who could have been twins, and Nick.
They were all buckling into seats farther up the cabin, closer to the cockpit.
“I’ll introduce you once we’re underway,” Mark told her quietly as the jet started taxiing toward the end of the runway.
He surprised her by taking her hand in his.
Their chairs were close enough that her left armrest brushed against his right.
He lifted her left hand to rest between them, entwining his fingers with hers. “I missed you.”
His softly voiced words rang true in her mind, and she realized she’d missed him too.
Odd as it seemed. She’d almost been counting the hours between the moment he’d left her last night and this morning when she’d see him again.
She couldn’t remember ever being this eager to see a man—even when she’d been a hormonal, daydreaming teen.
Only Mark elicited her stalker-ish tendencies.
The flight passed in a bit of a blur. Mark introduced the team once they were airborne, but the others kept a respectful distance for the most part.
The older lady proved to be Marie, Mark’s personal chef, and the younger woman was, indeed, her daughter, Janice.
They produced an array of breakfast foods they had packed to share among them all.
Shelly noted that they brought trays up to the cockpit, as well.
There was no real demarcation between Mark and his people. Sure, they all treated him with respect, but he treated them the same way. As if he valued each and every one of them. Like they were family, not mere servants. Shelly liked that.
For the most part, she sat and talked with Mark about his visions for the type of community he wanted her to design on the island.
He described some of the terrain and showed her a smaller version of that topographical map at one point, but she knew the reality of the place, when she saw it, would spark her imagination.
Although…some of the motifs Mark was describing were already causing creative thoughts to flow.
He’d brought along a portfolio of inspirational images.
Everything from penthouse apartments to ancient ruins in South America.
The jaguar motif was something he wanted to feature, not hide, and she thought of ways to include the cat’s attributes into her buildings.
There would be the obvious artistic representations, of course, but she also thought about doing something subtler.
Like using the sinuous tail of the cat as a model for the curved facade of one of the larger buildings.
It would be like nothing she had ever designed before.
It would be unique. Magical. Challenging.
She was looking forward to getting started.
By the time the jet landed, Shelly was ready for her adventure to begin. She peered out the window of the plane eagerly, not surprised to find a lush green landscape waiting for her. It looked like a tropical paradise. She could also see the classically-styled mansion set on top of a nearby hill.
“That’s the original owner’s house. We use it as a base of operations now.
After the new community is built, the mansion will serve as a buffer between our Clan home and the outside world,” Mark told her as the jet taxied toward a distant hangar.
“We don’t get a lot of outside traffic here, but there is some, and we do have to maintain the human fiction for the rest of the world.
As far as anyone outside the Clan knows, I’m going to live in that monstrosity over there, and you’re here to design unobtrusive staff housing.
” He shrugged. “We might even build a bit of it in plain sight near the mansion, in case anyone is watching via satellite, but the real work will be under cover of the jungle canopy, where eye-in-the-sky can’t see too well. ”
It was an ingenious plan. He’d hide his new community in the jungle where few, if any, would ever even suspect it.
She already knew all the building would be done by his Clan members.
They’d probably also be the ones bringing in the supplies.
It would be next to impossible for anyone outside his Clan to keep track of what they were building here. The plan was nearly perfect.