In the back of his mind, in a place he didn’t like to visit very often, he wondered if a woman like Lauren could love someone like him.

A regular guy. A cop.

All at once Seth felt guilty. Here she was spilling her guts to him with no idea who he really was, or why he was here with her now.

“What about you?” she said. “Altex. Your job. I can see you’re good at it. Do you like it?”

He felt uncomfortable lying to her—which was ridiculous. On an undercover job like this, it came with the territory. He had to lie.

On Thin Ice
Debra Lee Brown

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

DEBRA LEE BROWN

Award-winning author Debra Lee Brown’s ongoing romance with wild and remote locales sparks frequent adventures in the Alps, the Arctic—where she has worked as a geologist—and the Sierra Nevada range of her native California. An avid outdoorswoman, Debra loves nothing better than to strand her heroes and heroines in rugged, often dangerous settings, then let nature take its course. Debra invites readers to visit her Web site at www.debraleebrown.com or to write to her care of Harlequin Reader Service, P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269.

For Michelle

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 1

Thirty-six below. Forty-knot winds out of the east. It was gonna be a big one.

Lauren Parker Fotheringay zipped her down survival jacket to her chin, cinched the fur-trimmed hood tight and peered out the chopper’s frosted window across an endless expanse of ice. In the dim winter light she could barely make out where land ended and the Alaskan coastline met the frozen Beaufort Sea.

“Whiteout comin’,” the pilot shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engine. He squinted into the blowing snow threatening to reduce visibility to zero. “Three hours, four tops. You sure you want me to drop you?”

Lauren shot him a wry look. “No, I changed my mind. Let’s turn this thing around and head for Hawaii.”

The pilot laughed, though she couldn’t hear him over the engine noise. She settled back in her seat for the last few minutes of the trip out to Caribou Island, the site of Tiger Petroleum’s latest oil exploration well.

It was simple, or should have been. Drill a ten-thousand-foot hole in the ground, collect rock samples over the target depth, document traces of oil, clean up the mess and come home. Your basic exploration well. Oil companies drilled them all the time on land leased from the government.

Caribou Island was nothing special, really, though it did sit just outside the boundary of a wildlife refuge, an area currently off-limits to oil exploration.

Tiger had leased the island’s drilling rights on an exclusive basis. The rock samples and data collected would be proprietary, giving Tiger an edge in finishing its geologic maps of the area, and when bidding on future land leases. In the oil industry, figuring out where the oil was, was only half the battle. The other half was managing to lease the land overlying it before anyone else did. Land was everything. The only thing. And competition among oil companies was fierce.

As Tiger’s most senior geologist and project manager, Lauren hadn’t done any real fieldwork for years. Her early successes had catapulted her to the top of the technical ladder, and this next promotion would take her even further. She couldn’t let anything screw it up. Especially a last-minute, routine assignment she had no time for, and that should have gone to one of her subordinates.

Both of the geologists originally assigned to Caribou Island had caught a nasty winter flu. Just her luck. Regardless, she was determined to get in, get her rock samples, and get out as quickly as possible. The well was nearly at target depth. A week should do it. Two, at most. She had three other projects to manage besides this one.

And she wanted that promotion. Bad.

Everyone expected her to get it, and she was never one to disappoint.

Lauren gazed out the window just as the chopper’s high beams caught an arctic fox scampering across the tundra on the prowl for lunch. She caught herself smiling. The assignment wasn’t really such a hardship. She was glad to be out of her hose and heels and into some comfortable clothes for a change. And she could breathe again. She’d forgotten how much she loved the Arctic. Untamed, fresh, real. So different from the life she’d been living these past few years.

On the corporate jet from Anchorage to Deadhorse, she’d slipped out of the expensive business suit Crocker had bought her on his last trip to San Francisco. He was always buying her gifts like that. No man had ever treated her with kid gloves before, not like Crocker did.

On board the chopper she’d coiled her carefully styled hair into a knot and stuffed it under her beat-up old hard hat. She felt good. Relaxed, almost. A break from the rat race was exactly what she needed. She grinned, wondering what Crocker would think if he were here with her now.

He’d never seen her in her field clothes: holey jeans, a turtleneck and the moth-eaten cardigan that had been her father’s favorite when he was alive. She twisted her two-carat diamond engagement ring inside her glove, imagining Crocker’s shock and her mother’s disapproval.

There was a whole side of her, come to think of it, that Crocker knew nothing about. They were to be married in New York in the summer. A big, traditional affair. Mother had it all planned, down to the last white rose and swath of expensive silk. Lauren supposed she should be grateful. Her commitment to her career left no time for such details.

Besides, Mother was wild about Crocker. Who wouldn’t be? As VP of finance for Tiger Petroleum, he was quite a catch, and one of the most respected oil company executives in the industry. Everyone liked him.

She was sorry, now, that they’d argued that morning. Crocker hadn’t wanted her to take on the Caribou Island assignment herself. He said he didn’t like the idea of her spending two weeks in close quarters with eighty guys—the type of men her mother called “oil field trash.”

Lauren had dismissed his concerns. The way she saw it, she had no choice. Caribou Island was one of her projects. Besides, the operation had been plagued with nothing but setbacks from the start. All the more reason for her to be on site herself.

“Roger that,” the pilot yelled into his communications headset.

She looked at him, her brows raised in question.

“It’s for you. Here.” He ripped the headset off and handed it to her.

“Me?” Who on earth was calling her out here? If it was Mother, Lauren would have a fit. She didn’t have time to discuss things like who was taking whom to Crocker’s birthday bash at the Fairmont next month, or what she was expected to wear to the latest charity ball.

Lauren’s life had changed radically after her father died and her mother remarried into the wealthy Fotheringay family. Mother had insisted her new husband legally adopt Lauren, so she might enjoy all the privileges associated with carrying the Fotheringay name. Sometimes Lauren wondered if her life had changed too radically.

Exhaling in exasperation, she pushed her hood back and slipped one of the earphones under the flannel lining of her hard hat. “Hello?”

“Hey, babe,” the choppy voice came back.

“Crocker!”

“Just checking on—” Static ripped the end off his sentence.

“Crocker, you’re cutting out.”

“—that everything’s okay.” His voice sounded a million miles away. Still, she’d know it anywhere.

“Everything’s fine, Crocker. Well, except for the weather.” She glanced out the window at the dry snow blowing across the ice. What little light there had been was now obliterated by the onslaught. She could barely see a dozen yards ahead of the chopper.

“Be careful out there, babe.”

“I will. And I’m sorry about this morning.”

“Me, too. It was my fault. Don’t give it another thought. Oh, and have Salvio call me on the satellite uplink as soon as you get there. Phones must be out. I want to—”

Another blast of static cut short his explanation. A deafening gust of wind blew the chopper sideways, and the connection was lost.

She handed the headset back to the pilot. “Guess we’re out of range.”

“Nope. It’s the weather. Damned dangerous to be flying. I’m droppin’ you and I’m outta here.”

“Okay.” She grabbed her duffel bag from the bench seat behind them, fighting a smile.

Crocker was likely going to ask Jack Salvio, Tiger’s “company man” overseeing the Caribou Island operation, to keep an eye on her. Make sure she didn’t run into any snags. Sweet of him, really. Crocker knew she was burned out and growing more and more disillusioned with the whole corporate scene.

Sometimes she wondered why she wanted the promotion at all. She’d even gone so far as to suggest that after they were married they stay in Anchorage instead of moving back to San Francisco like he wanted them to.

Crocker had not been very receptive to the idea, so she hadn’t even broached the subject of her leaving Tiger and the oil business altogether to do something more meaningful with her life. Like teaching, maybe. She could teach earth science to elementary school kids, just like her father had always wanted to do, but never did because of her mother’s objection.

She supposed it was a silly dream. And not at all in keeping with the ambitious edge that was her trademark. Oh, well. Maybe in the next lifetime.

She should make a point to spend more time with Crocker once this assignment was over. Between their two careers and his philanthropic commitments, they hardly had time to see each other. Crocker said all that would change once they were married, but she wasn’t so sure it was even possible given their manic schedules.

When it came right down to it, she wasn’t sure if they even had that much in common outside their jobs. Crocker had convinced her to push their wedding date up nearly a year. Lauren had wanted more time to get to know him, to make sure they were really meant for each other, but Crocker was insistent. He loved her, needed her, he’d said.

And she loved him, too. Didn’t she?

“There she is.” The pilot pointed a gloved finger to the north. Well, she guessed it was north, but couldn’t tell anymore with the blowing snow. “Altex rig 13-E. What a hunk a junk.”

Harsh sodium lights lit the site, bathing the island in a ghostly glow. Lauren’s lips thinned into a hard line as the rusted orange paint of the steel walls housing the tired-looking drilling rig came into view just ahead.

Nothing had changed in the three years since she’d seen it. The last field operation she’d worked had been on that very rig. Against her will, her eyes glassed. She swiped at the tears with a gloved hand.

“Still gets to you, don’t it?” The pilot shot her a compassionate look as he slowed the chopper into a wide arc skirting the site.

She focused on the line of beat-up Suburbans, their engines running to keep from freezing, in front of the prefab buildings that made up the camp. Ninety-foot stands of drilling pipe hung in the oil rig’s derrick, swaying in the near gale force wind. “Yes,” she said. “A little.”

Her father had been killed on 13-E when she was only eleven. He was a geologist just like her, working for a big oil company just like she did. But their reasons were different. He’d done it for the money. Her mother had nagged him incessantly about it. She remembered Mother’s tirades each time her father had talked about giving it up to teach.

Though the work was dangerous and the conditions harsh, there had been only a handful of serious drilling accidents in the few decades since Alaska’s North Slope oil fields were developed. It was a small, tightly knit community. Everyone knew about Hatch Parker and what had happened on 13-E. And everyone knew Lauren was his daughter.

“You’re sure, now?” The pilot set the chopper down smooth as glass on an ice pad built fifty yards from the camp. “Last time we had weather this bad there was no gettin’ in or out for weeks.”

“I’m sure.” Through the blowing snow she caught a glimpse of the brand-new geologist’s trailer out behind the rig, by the big open pit—the “reserve pit”—that acted as an overflow for the oil well’s drilling fluids. She checked her watch. Fourteen hundred. Two o’clock in the afternoon and it was pitch-black out. There was nothing quite like an arctic winter.

“Suit yourself, then. Take care, kid.”

A roustabout, the oil field equivalent of a ranch hand, dressed in a down jumpsuit and white bunny boots, yanked the chopper’s door wide. Lauren sucked in a blast of frigid air. Big mistake. Lung freeze. She’d forgotten you weren’t supposed to do that.

The roustabout grabbed her duffel as she hopped out of the chopper with her overstuffed briefcase. They made a mad dash toward a waiting vehicle. Fifty yards to camp was too far to walk in this weather. Climbing into the Suburban, she waved to the pilot who gave her the thumbs-up before he took off.

For the barest second Lauren wished she was taking off with him. Too late now. She was here and, given the weather, here she would stay for at least a week. In a whiteout nothing could fly, and Caribou Island was over a hundred miles from Deadhorse, Tiger’s outermost base camp. Too far to drive in these conditions, even if Tiger had maintained the ice road, which it hadn’t. Budget constraints, her foot. She’d remember to talk to her boss about that. Not that it really mattered. She had a job to do, and she’d do it. She always did.

Two minutes later the wind blasted her through the main door to the camp and into the break room. A dozen pairs of eyes focused on her as she pushed her hood back, snatched the hard hat from her head, and shook out her shoulder-length hair.

No, nothing had changed at all. There was still that momentary shock in the crew’s eyes that she was a woman. Probably the only one out here.

Nodding at no one in particular, Lauren snaked around the cafeteria-style tables littered with empty cigarette packets, disposable coffee cups and half-eaten glazed doughnuts, then pushed the door open into the mudroom.

A few seconds later, her steel-toed Sorels, hard hat and jacket tucked into an empty corner, she padded in heavy wool socks toward Jack Salvio’s office. It was just like riding a bike. She bet she could traverse every inch of this place blindfolded.

The air was stale, as it always was in these oil field camps. She wrinkled her nose at twenty-odd years of cigarette smoke that clung to prefab walls like the inside of someone’s diseased lung. This was not the Alaska she loved.

She turned into Salvio’s office and did a double take.

“Hiya, Scout.” Paddy O’Connor’s weathered face cracked in a wide smile.

“Paddy!” The old toolpusher rose from the stained Naugahyde sofa that had been there since 13-E was new. “What are you doing here? I thought you’d retired from fieldwork years ago.”

“Oh, no. Still at it, Scout.” He pulled her into a bear hug, and she fought a painful surge of emotion that threatened her composure for the second time that day.

No one called her Scout anymore. No one except Paddy O’Connor, owner of Altex Drilling, a company that had been on its last legs for as long as Lauren could remember.

Most oil companies, Tiger included, didn’t own their own drilling rigs and equipment. Nor did they employ the roughnecks and roustabouts needed to run an operation like Caribou Island. The job was contracted out to outfits like Altex. Only the geologist, an engineer or two, and company men like Jack Salvio who oversaw the whole operation, were Tiger employees.

Lauren’s father had coined the nickname Scout when she was just a kid, tagging along with him on field surveys in the Brooks Range. Paddy had been one of his closest friends. She looked warmly into the toolpusher’s bloodshot eyes and nodded.

His smile faded. “Lauren, we need to talk.”

“Yeah, just as soon as you get that sorry-assed crew a yours back to work.” Jack Salvio brushed past them, dropped into his creaky overstuffed chair and tossed his hard hat onto a desk covered in paperwork.

“How are you, Jack?” Lauren said and extended her hand.

Salvio waved it away. “I been better. We’re behind schedule. And I could do without this frickin’ weather.”

Lauren nodded, glancing at the computer monitors on Salvio’s desk, flashing stats on the weather, drilling depth, and a host of other specifics critical to the oil well’s operation.

Hmm, that’s strange…

Some of the measurements seemed to be off. Then again, these computer systems were always on the fritz. She watched as Salvio narrowed his eyes at the flashing readout on one of the monitors. Swearing under his breath, he abruptly switched it off.

Lauren had never liked Jack Salvio’s nasty disposition and bulldog tactics, but she did respect him. He was the best company man in Tiger’s history. He knew what he was doing, and she’d need his cooperation and his clout in order to get her work done on time.

“Where’s your bag, Scout?” Paddy moved past her into the hallway. “I’ll help you get settled.”

“No.” Salvio shot to his feet. “We got a well to drill. Get one’a your guys to help her.” He grabbed Lauren’s arm and steered her back into the hallway. No use protesting. On Caribou Island Jack Salvio was the boss. When he gave an order, everyone jumped.

The first shift break was over, and a few stragglers sauntered back down the hallway from their sleeping quarters toward the mudroom. Salvio whistled at one of them. “Hey, you there! Nanook.”

Lauren winced. Apparently Jack Salvio had not been paying attention during the series of workshops on ethnic diversity Tiger Petroleum required all its employees to attend.

At the end of the hall an athletic-looking crew hand with roughneck written all over him stopped dead in his tracks, his back to them. He was tall—too tall for a native—and sported a dark, unkempt ponytail.

Lauren’s gaze slid across the muscles barely hidden by his rumpled flannel shirt to the mud-spattered jeans hugging his backside like something off a Calvin Klein billboard. She suppressed the wow forming on her lips. His big, dirty hands fisted at his sides as he turned in response to Salvio’s inappropriate comment.

He was a native.

Lauren knew the shock registered on her face.

“Get your butt over here and take the lady’s bag.” Salvio nodded at her duffel and briefcase sitting in the corridor outside the mudroom.

But then again, maybe he wasn’t. It was hard to tell from this far away.

She guessed him to be in his early thirties, a year or two older than herself. His eyes were dark, his skin bronze, but the rest of his features didn’t fit. He had what her mother would have called an English nose. Narrow and arrow-straight. Mother loved the English. But neither she nor Crocker would love the way Lauren was looking at the roughneck.

Or the way he looked back.

She read a dangerous sort of instability in his eyes as he approached them. His gaze flicked from her to Salvio and back again. He passed her duffel, ignoring it. She fought the strangest urge to step back as he strode right up to Salvio and leveled his gaze at him.

“You talking to me?”

“Yeah.” Salvio had to look up to meet that murderous glare of his. He was tall. But since she was only five-three, everyone seemed tall to her.

“The name’s Adams.”

Adams. Not your everyday Inuit or Yupik name. He was half-native, she suspected. And apparently he’d done something to anger Jack Salvio. Jack wasn’t usually this nasty. Well, he was, but that was part of his nature. No, something else was causing the tension between them.

“I can take her bag out,” Paddy said. As he stooped to retrieve it from the floor, he shot Lauren a loaded look. “Come on, Scout.”

Paddy clearly wanted to talk to her alone. The way he fidgeted around Salvio, the tension in his expression, his bloodshot eyes… Something was wrong.

“No,” Salvio said, not breaking the roughneck’s gaze.

“But, Jack, I—”

“Nanook here will see her to her trailer. Won’tcha, boy?”

This was getting out of hand. Lauren pushed past them and grabbed her duffel and briefcase. “I can carry my own bag, thanks.” Before they could react, she ducked into the mudroom and made a beeline for her jacket and Sorels.

Paddy followed her, Salvio and Adams in his wake. She laced her boots, shaking her head at their ridiculous behavior. This wasn’t exactly the Ritz, and she didn’t need a porter.

Adams plucked her bag from where she’d dropped it. “I’ll take you out there. I’ve got a few minutes left before the shift starts up again.”

“It’s not necessary.” She reached for the bag and, to her surprise, he let her take it. Their hands brushed in the transfer, their gazes locked, and for the barest second she imagined what those big hands would feel like on her body.

What was that about?

She shrugged it off and stepped around him, which wasn’t easy in the close quarters, given Adams’s size and the fact that she was dressed like the Michelin man in full survival gear.

“Suit yourself.” Adams watched her as she snaked her way around the break room tables toward the exit. Her back was to him, but she felt his eyes on her all the same. Black eyes. Black as a winter’s night in the Chugach.

“Scout, about that talk—” The door slammed behind her, cutting off the rest of Paddy’s words. She’d catch up with him later. Right now all she wanted to do was get settled and get to work.

Heading straight for the geologist’s trailer, she sucked in a blast of frigid air. On purpose. The lung freeze felt good this time. Hell, yes. She was back in the field.

She had a job to do. Failure was not an option. Not for the woman who was about to become Tiger Petroleum’s next exploration manager. Not for Hatch Parker’s little Scout.

Chapter 2

Seth Adams wasn’t a betting man, but if he had to guess who the corporate thief was that the Feds had hired him to finger, he’d put all his stakes on Lauren Fotheringay.

Last year, a small, foreign oil company that had never set foot in Alaska before snagged a land deal netting what turned out to be a fortune in oil drilling rights. No way was it just dumb luck. They’d had an inside track. Access to geological data the FBI knew, because of the position of the leases, could have only come from one source—Tiger Petroleum.

The Bureau had already ruled out the possibility that the foreign company simply stole the data. Tiger’s security was renowned in the industry. No, the data had likely been sold to them—and selling proprietary corporate data without that corporation’s knowledge or consent was a crime. A big one.

There was a criminal at work somewhere in the Tiger organization, and the Feds, along with Tiger’s CEO and some high-ranking Wall Street types, wanted that person caught. The Caribou Island operation was as good a place as any to start. Perhaps the thief would strike again. No one at Tiger knew, of course, that they were under surveillance, and the FBI wanted it kept that way.

Oh, yeah, Seth thought, as he watched Lauren Fotheringay out the icy window of the break room, lugging her duffel and briefcase across the site in near whiteout conditions.

The woman was tough as nails. And a hell of a lot more attractive in the flesh than she appeared in that society news clipping he’d seen showing her dressed to the nines with Tiger’s money man, Crocker Holt. Seth had read all about the two of them in the dossier Bledsoe had provided.

Those big brown eyes of hers had given him the once-over, too. More than once. In an irritating way, she reminded him of Kitty, his ex. They both had that same finishing-school, expensive-women’s-college, “hey, look at me, I’m a big lady executive” sort of arrogance about them.

Behind the scenes, women like that got their kicks from messing with the heads of men they considered a couple of rungs below them on the evolutionary ladder. Construction workers, auto mechanics, even a roughneck now and then. Yeah, he knew the type. Boy, did he ever.

What Little Miss Society In Geologist’s Clothing didn’t know was that he wasn’t a roughneck. Well, not anymore he wasn’t. Fresh out of high school he’d pulled pipe from Barter Island to Barrow, scraping together enough money to pay his way through college.

He’d graduated with honors with a B.A. in criminology from the University of Alaska, surprising the hell out of his old man. Seth would never forget the day he called him in his New York office with the news. Not that an important oil man like Jeremy Adams had time to attend his kid’s commencement.

Remembering, Seth made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.

The FBI had recruited him right out of school. Some affirmative action thing, though he could have easily made the cut on his own. He ended up second in his class at the Academy. Even so, Bledsoe, his section chief in D.C., had never liked him. The feeling was mutual.

Three years later Bledsoe had him dismissed for reasons Seth didn’t like to remember. He’d blown their cover on a major counterfeiting sting the FBI and Secret Service had spent six months and a bundle of cash setting up. The way Seth saw it, it was either that or watch his partner take one in the back. He’d had no choice. Bledsoe thought otherwise.

In the end, his partner nearly bought it. Bledsoe somehow managed to blame that on him, too. After Seth got the ax, he went home to his native village of Kachelik, and had worked as a borough cop there ever since.

It was a great job, and he loved the village. He had friends there, and family. His wife left him when the Bureau canned him and, in hindsight, he considered himself damned lucky. They were from different worlds, and Seth never intended to make that mistake again.

The past few years had been pretty uneventful. No real challenges, no serious girlfriends. Everything was rocking along just fine until a few weeks ago when two suits showed up at the village in the dead of night in an unmarked FBI chopper.

Bledsoe wanted him back. Needed him, was more like it. The Feds wanted someone undercover on Caribou Island, and couldn’t find one among the ranks of bright and shiny new agents who’d fit in on an offshore oil rig in the Arctic. Seth was elected.

Altex’s grim financial situation made it easy for the FBI to get him out on the island. Posing as a native Alaskan affirmative action group, Bledsoe’s men had paid Paddy O’Connor a subsidy to hire Seth as a roughneck for the Caribou Island job. In a roundabout way, it was the second time he’d been hired by the Bureau because of his ethnicity.

It would be the last time.

He hadn’t wanted the job at first, but a tribal elder had counseled him to take it. Seth wasn’t sure why. He’d finally agreed, but it wasn’t because of the elder’s gentle prodding, or because Bledsoe offered him his old job back in D.C. if he fingered the perp. But this was no time to reminisce about his motives. He needed to focus on the facts.

He’d been on the job six days now, and so far everything about the operation seemed above board. He’d gotten the usual cold reception from the crew. If he hadn’t, he’d have been suspicious. Jack Salvio was a nasty piece of work, too, but nothing Seth couldn’t handle. Everything seemed normal, in fact, until fifteen short minutes ago when Lauren Parker Fotheringay landed on Caribou island.

Already he smelled blood.

Seth zipped his survival jacket all the way up, slammed his hard hat on his head and yanked the camp’s front door wide. A blast of arctic air hit him full in the face.

Some routine maintenance had delayed the start of his shift, but he’d check in on the drilling floor anyway, just to make sure he wasn’t needed. After that, he’d have plenty of time to pay a surprise visit to his number one suspect out there in her shiny new trailer.

That was probably Money Man’s doing. The protective fiancé. Every geologist’s trailer he’d ever seen on the North Slope had been beat-up and barely livable. This new one, which was bigger and nicer than half the houses in Kachelik, had been brought in special a couple of days ago for Her Majesty.

Seth dashed across the yard, took the slick outer stairs up to the drilling floor two at time, then skidded to a stop on the landing. Squinting back toward camp through the blowing snow, he saw Paddy O’Connor—that red hard hat of his was unmistakable—fighting the wind as he made his way toward Lauren Fotheringay’s trailer.

Damn! He’d hoped to overhear their conversation. Paddy was also on his list of suspects, but only as an accomplice. The Feds knew the thief was someone on the inside at Tiger, someone with a technical background who could interpret the data. But to pull it off, that person would need help in the field. And a drilling company toolpusher one short season away from bankruptcy was the most likely candidate.

Bledsoe had told Seth little else about the case. Just enough to get him started. He was supposed to finger the perps, then call in the cavalry. He wasn’t authorized to take action on his own. That figured. His job was to stay undercover and report back to the almighty Doyle Bledsoe.

He jerked the door open to the “doghouse,” the small break room just off the drilling floor, and ducked inside. The crew was standing around, drinking coffee. Big surprise. None of these yokels lifted a finger unless Paddy O’Connor was right there, making sure they were working.

That was fine with him. He shot back down the stairs and started for Fotheringay’s trailer. Perhaps he’d get an earful of Paddy’s conversation with her, after all.

“Yo, Adams!”

He turned in the direction the shout had come from, but couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead of him. If the storm got much worse, they’d have to set up a rope between the rig and the camp, so no one would get disoriented walking back and forth.

A couple of roustabouts—Paddy O’Connor’s men—fought the wind as they made their way to Seth’s side.

“What’s up, guys?”

“How ’bout giving us a hand?” One of them pointed back toward camp, where Seth knew a pallet of equipment sat waiting to be carried inside. “Forklift’s down for the count.”

Seth glanced in the direction of the geologist’s trailer, but couldn’t see it anymore through the storm. He bit off a silent curse. He wanted to get out there and see what was going on between Paddy and Lauren, but he also didn’t want to arouse any suspicion, or give any of the crew any more reason to hate him than they already did.

Some of these good old boys didn’t take kindly to natives taking up good roughnecking jobs they considered theirs by right. In winter the Arctic was a deadly environment. There was an unwritten rule out here that everyone pitched in and helped each other.

“Sure,” he said, casting an annoyed glance in the direction of the equipment. It would probably only take a minute.

Twenty minutes later, when the pallet was empty and the roustabouts were on their way inside, Seth crept around the side of Lauren Fotheringay’s custom-built trailer and peeked in the only uncurtained window.

There was nobody there.

At least not in the lab portion of the trailer. He scanned the clean white linoleum and sparkling steel countertops. A crate full of plastic bags filled with muddy rock samples sat by the door. Lauren’s briefcase lay open on the desk next to a top-of-the-line laptop computer.

There was only one other room in the trailer. A small bedroom and bath in the back. He didn’t think Paddy would be in there with her. But maybe so. He seemed to know her pretty well. What had he called her back in the mudroom?

Scout. Kind of an odd nickname for a society cupcake who wore the biggest diamond engagement ring Seth had ever seen up close, and who drove a seventy-five thousand dollar Porsche. Yet another little gift from her fiancé. Seth had done some last-minute homework on both of them using the Internet.

Skirting around the back of the trailer, he took care to avoid slipping into the murky-looking reserve pit. Due to the warm temperature of the mud and drilling fluids circulating in and out of it, it was the only thing liquid for miles. Everything else in the Arctic was frozen solid this time of year.

The wind was blowing so hard now, swirling dry snow up around him like an icy white shroud, he could barely see his hand in front of his face. The bright, overhead yard lights reflected off all that white, making visibility almost worse.

Then he heard it. A woman’s scream.

Seth froze in place, peering straight across the reserve pit from where the sound had come, ice and wind slicing at his eyes. It had to be Lauren. She was the only woman on the island.

It took him a full minute to traverse the narrow strip of ice sandwiched between the back of the trailer and the open pit. Where the yard opened up again, he took off at a run, then stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her.

She was kneeling at the edge of the reserve pit. In shirtsleeves! No jacket. No hard hat. Was she nuts? Her auburn hair whipped at her face. Up to her forearms in mud, she was trying to pull something out of the pit—or push it in—he couldn’t tell which.

As their gazes collided, he read panic in her eyes. “You!” she shouted at him over the roar of the wind. He took another step toward her, then caught a glimpse of something that made his heart seize up in his chest.

A red hard hat, lying next to her on the ice.

Only then did he notice what she was desperately clutching. Paddy O’Connor’s limp, mud-covered body.

Seth narrowed his eyes, but not from the sleet blasting his face. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

Chapter 3

For the first time in her life Lauren was knee-knocking, bone-shaking terrified.

Adams bore down on her like a predator. Once, years ago, she’d watched as a polar bear slaughtered a lone seal who’d drifted away from its herd. It all came back to her now as she felt a dazed sort of panic, the kind she’d seen reflected in the seal’s eyes the second before the bear took it down.

Three strides, then two. Adams was almost on her, but she couldn’t will herself to let go of Paddy’s jumpsuit and run. She locked gazes with the roughneck, her teeth chattering from the cold. Adams reached out and—

To her astonishment, he grabbed the collar of Paddy’s jumpsuit and in one smooth motion pulled him out of the pit onto the ice.

“Move away from him.”

“Wh-what?”

“You heard me, move!”

She slid to the side, her arms dripping mud that would be frozen in— Oh, God, it was already frozen.

Adams shot her an icy look as he checked Paddy’s body for a pulse. Lauren knew he wouldn’t find one. That was the first thing she’d done when she’d discovered him facedown, floating in the reserve pit.

“Get the medic.”

The world spun around her. Bright yard lights reflected off blowing snow. Bone-chilling wind sliced her skin like a razor. She sat back on the ice as visions of Paddy O’Connor and her father—collecting rock samples, inspecting a worn drill bit, sharing a beer after a job well done—screamed through her mind in an avalanche of pain and tenderness.

She was barely aware of Adams starting CPR.

“I said get the medic! Now!”

His command snapped her out of her daze. “Y-yes. Of course.” She scrambled to her feet.

“Wait. Here.” He stopped the chest compressions long enough to shrug off his survival jacket and toss it to her. Then he watched her as she struggled into it, teeth chattering, her gaze pinned on his. For the barest moment she read something in his eyes, something she wasn’t prepared for.

Accusation.

“Have them bring the stretcher. Tell Salvio to order a medevac out of Kachelik. It’s closer than Deadhorse. That chopper that dropped you here isn’t set up for it.”

She nodded, took a second to get her bearings, then took off at a run, Adams’s unzipped jacket whipping her in the wind.

Two minutes later the camp was in an uproar. Twenty minutes after that, in the camp’s tiny infirmary, the medic—a freckle-faced kid fresh from advanced life-support training—pronounced Paddy O’Connor dead.

Lauren felt sick to her stomach.

Salvio wrapped an arm around her and moved her toward the door. “Come on, I’ve got just the thing for you.”

She tried to wave him off through a haze of tears, but he persisted, steering her back down the hallway toward his office. They passed Adams, gathered with the rest of the crew just inside the camp’s kitchen. His face was hard, his eyes black and unreadable. Surely he didn’t think it was her fault that Paddy’d been, that he—

“Did he make it?” one of the crew asked.

Salvio shook his head.

Some of these guys had worked for Paddy O’Connor since the beginning. Lauren had known the toolpusher all her life. What on earth had happened?

They turned into Salvio’s office and he directed her to the beat-up sofa. “Sit down.”

“No, I—”

He pushed her down onto the stained Naugahyde. She watched, in a daze, as he fished something out of his file cabinet.

“Here. Drink it.” He handed her a small, silver flask.

It didn’t surprise her at all that Jack Salvio ignored Tiger’s strict rules prohibiting alcohol in the field. She stared blankly at the flask. Why not? It couldn’t make her feel any worse, and it just might settle her nerves if not her stomach. He opened it for her, and she took a healthy swig. Whatever it was, it burned all the way down.

“Good. Now get some rest. You look like hell.”

She’d shed Adams’s jacket in the mudroom. Her clothes and her hair were caked with drilling mud, but that could wait.

“No, I’ve got to call in.”

“Phones are out. The weather.”

That’s right. She’d forgotten. Crocker had mentioned it to her on her chopper flight in. “So there’ll be no medevac to transport Paddy’s body?”

“Nope.”

“What about the satellite uplink? I’ve got to call my boss and tell him what’s happened.”

“Walters can wait. Along with the rest of the world. The uplink’s down, too.”

“But—” The satellite link was never down. “How can that be?”

“Dunno. All I know is it is.”

“What are we going to do?”

Salvio shrugged. “Shut it all down, I guess. The whole operation.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I ain’t kiddin’ at all. The second we report what’s happened we’ll be crawling with Tiger execs, OSHA agents, borough cops—the whole frickin’ state’ll be out here. Might as well get a jump on the shutdown.”

She looked at him incredulously. “But the exploration well… We’re nearly at target depth. The rock samples… If we don’t get them, if I don’t get them—”

Tiger had spent a huge chunk of this year’s exploration budget on the Caribou Island project. Her boss, Bill Walters, was counting on her. The accuracy of their geologic maps, Tiger’s position in the next round of land leases, her promotion—everything depended on finishing the well.

“Uh, excuse me…” The roughneck, Adams, stood just outside the half-open door. Lauren wondered how much of their conversation he’d heard. “I thought someone might want this.”

With a shock she realized he was offering her Paddy’s hard hat. Her stomach tightened. A man was dead, and all she could think about was the damned job. Tears pooled hot at the corners of her eyes. By sheer will she beat them back.

“You were out there.” She rose and stepped toward Adams’s outstretched hand. “Why?”

“Who, me?” he said, far too casually.

Salvio got to him first, and snatched the hard hat from his hand.

“Yeah, you.” She narrowed her eyes at him, wondering what he was hiding. It was that chiseled expression of his that made her suspicious. He was just too cool about the whole incident.

“Whaddya mean he was out there?” Salvio stepped between her and the roughneck. “When?”

Adams didn’t answer. He just stood there looking at her, those black eyes burning an impression right into her—a heady fusion of danger and sexuality that hit her like a punch. A second later she looked away.

“Remember to tell that to the cops when they come,” Salvio said.

“I—I will.” She didn’t trust Adams. There was something not right about him.

Funny that none of the other geologists in her department had ever mentioned him before. Over the years Tiger had drilled dozens of exploration wells in the Arctic. It was a small, tightly knit community up here. You got to know the drilling crews pretty well. But no one had ever mentioned a half-native roughneck named Adams to her.

“Get back to work, boy,” Salvio said.

A healthy spark of rebellion ignited in Adams’s eyes. He stood there, unmoving, just long enough to piss Salvio off. A split second before she was certain the company man was going to deck him, Adams did an about-face and was gone.

“I’d steer clear a that one, if I was you.” Salvio shot her one of his rare paternal looks, then dropped into his overstuffed desk chair. “He’s trouble.”

She wondered for the dozenth time what Adams was doing out by the reserve pit when he was supposed to be on shift. And how Paddy O’Connor—a seasoned professional who’d worked every major oil field in the world, from West Texas to Saudi to the North Sea—had drowned in a reserve pit that was only five feet deep.

She nodded at Salvio, promising herself she’d stick close to him and do as he advised. “Yes,” she said, and stepped into the hallway just as Adams turned the corner into the break room, flashing a cool look back at her. “Trouble is right.”

They drilled a hundred more feet of hole before the shift was over at midnight. Geologist’s orders. A man was dead, and they were still drilling. Seth couldn’t believe Salvio had bowed to Lauren Fotheringay’s demand.

In the claustrophobic bunk room he shared with three other guys, Seth stripped off his work clothes, grabbed a towel and headed for the showers down the hall.

The hot water felt good on his sore muscles. He’d been in pretty good shape when he arrived on 13-E last week, but roughnecking twelve-hour shifts, day in, day out, was enough to make any man bone-tired.

He threw on some jeans and a clean flannel shirt, then followed his nose to the kitchen. His stomach growled as his gaze zeroed in on New York strip steaks sizzling on the grill, stuffed baked potatoes and a half-dozen other side dishes ready and waiting for the crew to fill their plates.

A few guys pushed past him in line as he stood there contemplating his next move. He needed to check out that reserve pit now. Wind and blowing snow had probably already destroyed any evidence of what had really happened to Paddy O’Connor.

He swore under his breath as he palmed a couple of dinner rolls, then started back down the hall toward the mudroom, wolfing them down on the way. Salvio’s office was dark. He’d be sleeping this time of night. Good. Seth hoped he was having nightmares.

There was a lot about Jack Salvio that Seth didn’t like, but he had to keep his own personal opinions out of the investigation. The company man was a suspect like everyone else, but Salvio had been with Tiger nearly thirty years, and nothing like this incident last year—where someone had sold a foreign oil company stolen data—had ever happened before. Besides, Salvio hated foreigners.

No, it didn’t add up. Salvio was a pain in the ass and a bigoted jerk, but Seth didn’t think he had the smarts or the connections to put together a corporate piracy deal potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But Lauren Fotheringay did. Along with the technical knowledge required to know exactly which geologic data was valuable and which was useless. The question was, if Lauren was the thief, would she repeat last year’s caper, this time with data from Caribou Island?

Suited up in full survival gear, Seth battled the wind as he trudged across the yard toward the reserve pit. Three quarters of the way there, he made out the outline of the geologist’s trailer. The bedroom was dark, but an eerie light shone from the bare lab windows. Perhaps he’d pay the esteemed Ms. Fotheringay an unexpected visit.

First, he’d check out the reserve pit. Skirting around the trailer, he narrowed his eyes against the ice shards pummeling his half-exposed face. He was used to North Slope winters and the burning, biting wind. All the same, it was almost impossible to see anything.

As he’d suspected, the crime scene had been completely obliterated by the weather. No footprints, no outward signs of a struggle, nothing. “Damn.” He should have stayed out here and surveyed the scene instead of helping to get Paddy’s body inside.

Ten minutes after the toolpusher was pronounced dead, Salvio had rousted them all back to work, and had supervised the first part of the drilling shift himself. There’d been no way for Seth to slip out and investigate. Now, ten hours later, there was nothing left to see.

He kicked at the dry snow covering the spot where Lauren had been kneeling. The only evidence that she or Paddy had been there at all was a slick coating of muddy ice where she’d struggled with his body.

He glanced in the direction of the trailer, his mind made up. An open crate of rock samples, probably left outside by mistake, provided just the excuse Seth needed to intrude. He grabbed an armful of the frozen plastic bags, jerked the door open to the lab and stepped inside. “Anybody home?”

Lauren jumped at his voice, nearly upending the lab stool on which she was perched. She’d been looking at samples under a microscope with a black light that bathed the room in a ghostly bluish glow. Soft music strained in the background—a raw Celtic ballad. It surprised him a little. Given what he’d read about her, he would have pegged her for classical or jazz.

“Don’t you guys ever knock?” She swiveled toward him, then froze in place when she recognized him. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yeah. I was just—”

“Put them on the counter.” She hopped off the stool, strode past him and flipped on the overhead fluorescent lights. “Over there.”

He set the samples down next to the scope, then turned to face her.

“What do you want?”

She’d been crying, and she hadn’t slept. He could tell from the dark circles under her red-rimmed eyes. Brown eyes. Pretty, he thought, for the second time that day.

“I saw the samples outside and thought I’d give you a hand.”

“Right. You saw them. All the way from camp, in this weather.” She crossed her arms over her chest, and arched a neatly plucked brow at him.

She was smart as whip. Smart enough, he reminded himself, to commit murder and hide the evidence.

“No,” he said. “I was out here already.”

“For the second time today. Why?”

She was right to challenge him. Typically the crew didn’t lurk around the geologist’s trailer. It was off-limits to them unless they were acting under specific orders. Especially if the well they were drilling was important.

Data—especially rock samples with traces of oil—was the whole reason they were out here. Good geologists protected their data, and right now Lauren Fotheringay was glaring at him with all the mistrust of a grizzly protecting her threatened cubs.

He needed to figure out how to reach her, how to get close to her, and fast. If he didn’t, he’d never discover if she was the one the Feds were after. Or if she’d had a hand in Paddy O’Connor’s murder. The medic had called it a drowning accident. Not a chance. No one drowned in a reserve pit.

Seth decided to gamble and go for the truth. Part of it, at least. He had to get Lauren to trust him. If the truth failed, he’d try seduction. That always worked with women like her—cool corporate princesses out of their element, thrilled by a chance to drag the bottom for some rough company.

“Okay,” he said, flashing his eyes at her. “So the rock samples were just an excuse. I really wanted to talk to you.”

The gamble paid off, though he wasn’t sure if it was truth or the promise of seduction that roused her interest. All he knew was that her frosty stance softened, along with the hard look in her eyes. She nodded at the desk chair in the corner. “So talk.”

He sloughed off his jacket, set his hard hat on the counter, but ignored her offer to sit. She watched him like a hawk. Every move. He recognized the music now. The Chieftains. He liked this particular cut, in fact. “Nice music,” he said, and risked a smile.

Those warm brown eyes of hers instantly frosted over again. She snapped the CD player off and resumed her icy pose of a moment ago. “Paddy didn’t fall in that pit. And he didn’t drown. He was murdered.”

Her plain statement of the facts caught him completely off guard. For a split second he read something in her eyes, in the way she unconsciously bit her lip, that unnerved him. A feminine sort of fragility he wasn’t prepared for. A moment later it vanished, and her features hardened.

“You were out there,” she said.

“So were you.”

“You think I killed him?”

“Didn’t you?”

Her mouth dropped open. “You’re joking, right?”

“Am I?” Now he was getting somewhere. He’d push her right to edge and see exactly what she was made of.

“You’re insane. Get out.” She turned away and gripped the edge of the counter. He could tell by the way she wavered on her feet that she was exhausted.

Sheer instinct drove him closer. Perhaps she was more of a mystery than he’d first suspected. He’d thought he had her figured out, but he wasn’t always good at reading people on first impressions.

“What did you and Paddy talk about?”

“Nothing. I left the camp to come out here and—” She spun toward him and shot him exactly the kind of condescending look his ex-wife had been famous for. “What business is it of yours?”

“I’m a witness. I saw Paddy come out here to your trailer, myself.”

“He did no such thing. After I left the camp I didn’t see him again until…” She looked away, her cheeks flushed.

“I saw you with his body. You were—”

“Trying to save him.”

“That’s not what it looked like.”

She pursed her lips and glared at him, deadly silent, her small hands fisted at her sides. He could tell from the fire in her eye that she was mentally counting to ten. He used the time to consider the facts.

Paddy O’Connor had been in damned good shape for a man pushing up against the far side of sixty. Someone as petite as Lauren could never have muscled him into that reserve pit against his will.

Seth hadn’t had the chance to check Paddy’s body for marks. He’d been too busy trying to revive him. Now it would be nearly impossible to confirm his suspicions. Wrapped in plastic sheeting, the body was sequestered away in the big freezer in the camp’s kitchen, which was open around the clock.

Lauren could have hit him with something, right here in the privacy of her trailer. Could have knocked him out cold, dragged him to the pit, shielded by the weather, then drowned him.

He glanced around the trailer at the neat stacks of papers, rock samples and supplies. Everything in order, neat as a pin. No blood. No signs of struggle, or obvious weapons in sight. Not even any mud on the floor, except for his own footprints. Lauren Fotheringay was either innocent, or very very good. Seth suspected the latter.

“I think you’d better leave.” She turned her back on him and shut down the microscope she’d been using when he’d arrived.

He wasn’t giving up that easily. He decided to try a different approach. “You knew Paddy pretty well, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. He was…” She paused, and for a moment he thought she might not continue. “He was my father’s best friend.” She swept some glass slides into a drawer and slammed it shut, her back rigid.

Four feet away he could feel her anger, and something more. A carefully shielded vulnerability evidenced by the way her hand shook as she again gripped the counter for support.

Seth knew all about her father. Everyone here did. But he hadn’t known Paddy O’Connor had been Hatch Parker’s friend. The dossier Bledsoe had given him hadn’t included that fact.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and on impulse stepped toward her.

“That’s okay. I’m just…”

He looked down at her from behind as her knuckles turned white clutching the counter. Her shoulders shook almost imperceptibly, then her ragged breathing seemed to stop altogether. With a shock he realized she was crying.

“Hey, don’t.” Without thinking, he gripped her shoulders to steady her. By accident he grazed his lips across her hair, catching a whiff of herbal shampoo as he leaned down to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay.”

A fierce sort of compassion welled inside him. That wasn’t good. He was a federal agent, for Christ’s sake. Well, an ex-federal agent. Still, he was a cop, and he had a job to do. He was supposed to be questioning a suspect, not comforting a weeping woman.

She turned in his arms. As her feet twisted between his, she faltered and reached for him. He caught her up, and her arms snaked around his neck. A second later her face was buried in his chest. She worked to get a grip on herself, but gave up the fight as he gently massaged the tight muscles of her back.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, again, and stroked her soft auburn hair. “It’s good to cry. Get it all out.”

What the hell was he doing? He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that she was warm and soft, and she needed him. Her father had been killed on this very rig, and now another man she’d been close to was dead, too.

He’d been too hasty, perhaps, in thinking her capable of murder. Selling proprietary corporate data was one thing. A nice, clean, white-collar crime. Lots of money involved, but no dirty work. And no one ended up dead. Lauren Fotheringay might be a criminal, but he sensed she wasn’t a murderer. Her anguish over Paddy O’Connor’s death was real.

Holding her close, feeling the soft weight of her breasts crushed against his chest, he thought about how long it had been since he’d really wanted a woman. Sure, he’d done his share of dating since he and his ex had split, but he hadn’t let himself get close to anyone again. Had never let his guard down.

As he stroked Lauren’s hair and soothed her with comforting words, he realized he was in danger of doing exactly that. His lips grazed her ear, her cheek. One more move and he’d be kissing her.

“Uh, sorry,” she said, and pushed against his chest.

He instantly backed off.

“I—I don’t know what came over me. I was just…” Her eyes darted away. She wouldn’t look at him. Her face flushed with embarrassment.

“Don’t worry about it.” He was embarrassed, too. As he turned to leave, she touched his arm.

“I stepped out of the trailer to grab some rock samples from the crate outside. That’s when I saw his hard hat.”

“Paddy’s?”

“Yes.” She gripped his arm tighter, her eyes locked on his. “I looked around but didn’t see him. That’s when I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“I wasn’t sure. I thought it was shouting, but the wind was so deafening, I couldn’t tell.”

“So you…” He nodded, urging her to continue.

“I picked up his hard hat and walked toward the sound. Over by the reserve pit.”

“Without a jacket, in this weather.”

She shrugged. “I know. Stupid. But that’s what I did.”

“And then?”

“As I got close, I saw something in the mud. When I realized it was Paddy…” She looked away again, struggling to keep her composure.

“You tried to save him.”

She nodded. “But he was already dead.”

He wanted to believe her. The thought of her killing someone bothered him more than he wanted to admit. On impulse he grasped her hand and squeezed it. “You’ll be okay out here?”

“Yes. I just need some sleep.”

He was halfway out the door, zipping his jacket, when she stopped him one last time.

“Thanks,” she said, and shot him a tiny smile.

“Any time.”

He stood there in the biting wind after she closed the door, wondering why he’d acted like a schoolboy in there instead of a cop. She was damned attractive, that was why. And not as tough as he’d first made her out to be.

Maybe she wasn’t the one he was after. He’d like to believe that. Hell, ten minutes with her and he half believed it already.

A flash of white shot across his field of view. “What the—?” Arctic fox. Two of them, racing across the yard in the direction of the camp. Seth knew exactly where they were headed. To the Dumpster behind the kitchen.

He jogged after them, fighting the wind and trying to forget how good Lauren Fotheringay had felt in his arms. A few minutes later his suspicions were confirmed. One of the cooks had left the heavy, metal Dumpster lid open again.

A half-dozen arctic foxes huddled around a black plastic trash bag that had blown off the overflowing pile of garbage. One of them had a glazed doughnut in his mouth. No wonder the EPA was all over these drilling companies.

Seth let out a whoop and the foxes scattered. What a mess. He reached for the open bag, then froze. “Son of a—”

He forced his eyes wide against the wind and blowing snow, not wanting to believe what he saw. The overhead yard lights lent a harsh reality to the blood-covered tool stashed amidst the frozen remnants of that day’s breakfast.

Its shaft was thick and sheathed in blue rubber, the head square. The claw end was like a pickax, long and curved to a single sharp point. Seth had seen plenty of them growing up to know exactly what he was looking at.

A geologist’s rock hammer.

Chapter 4

Where had these rock samples come from, the moon?

Lauren pushed back from the microscope and focused her eyes out the trailer window. Not that it helped. She couldn’t see a thing except blowing snow. The wind velocity had increased overnight to dangerous speeds. She’d woken with a start that morning when an empty fifty-five-gallon drum had blown up against the side of her trailer with a powerful thunk.

She grabbed her calculator and ran through the sequence one more time. “This can’t be right.” For the third time she checked the smudged label marking one of the small plastic sample bags littering her workstation.

Someone had clearly made a mistake.

As drilling progressed and the well got deeper, rock samples mixed with mud and fluids were sucked up from the bottom of the hole. At the surface they were collected and bagged by one of the Altex roustabouts. It was a dirty, thankless task, usually assigned to the lowest man on the totem pole. She wondered who among the Altex crew had been elected.

The Caribou Island well wasn’t at its target depth yet, so at this point Lauren didn’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary, like traces of oil, in the samples. And least of all rocks so unusual she was certain some mistake had been made.

She shut down the microscope and grabbed her jacket, then paused to consider her options. She wasn’t that anxious to make another appearance in camp. Earlier that morning she’d been bombarded with crew members’ questions—the same question, actually, over and over.

Are we going to keep drilling?

Didn’t they understand? They were so close to finishing the well, it didn’t make sense to shut it all down now. Tiger had invested a small fortune to get the data from Caribou Island. Her boss Bill Walters, the VPs—Crocker included—and Tiger’s CEO would be counting on her. On all of them.

And she wasn’t about to let them down.

Last night after she’d left the camp, Salvio had changed his mind about continuing the drilling. But only temporarily, he’d warned her this morning. Fine. She’d take whatever she could get. Once communications were up, they could let the bigwigs at corporate decide what to do. Until then, she wasn’t changing her position.

She breezed out the door, then locked it with her key. No one was touching these rock samples until she figured out who had screwed up. The bags were clearly mismarked. It was impossible for that kind of rock to exist at the Caribou Island location. She should know. She’d interpreted all the subsurface maps of the site herself, just last year.

There would be hell to pay with her boss if she didn’t get this mess sorted out. And fast. No way was she shipping mismarked samples back to Tiger’s lab in town. But with Paddy gone and all communications down, she wasn’t sure who exactly from Altex to talk to about it.

Adams, maybe.

Warmth washed over her as she recalled the feel of his arms around her last night in the lab. Strong, solid, comforting. When was the last time Crocker had held her that way? Stroked her back, soothed her? It dawned on her that she didn’t even know Adams’s first name.

The camp’s forklift rumbled past, jerking her from her thoughts. Sheesh. Forty below, winds screaming across the tundra like a banshee, and she was lost in some fantasy about a roughneck. Great. Just what she needed. To act like an idiot out here on the job.

A man was dead. Tiger’s operation was weeks behind schedule, and the biggest promotion of her career hung in the balance. She needed to focus, to do what was expected of someone in her position. Not break down like a crybaby and fall into the arms of one of the crew, for God’s sake.

It had taken her years to win the respect of her male peers, of Tiger’s senior personnel, not to mention the rough-and-tumble drilling crews, most of whom still believed women didn’t belong in the field.

She wasn’t about to throw it all away because the going got tough. Her father would have told her to buck up, meet the challenge. That’s exactly what she intended to do. She’d see Salvio right away about those samples.

Hand over hand, Lauren pulled herself along the rope that had been set up as a guide between her trailer and the main camp. The weather was the worst she’d ever experienced, and showed no signs of breaking. Visibility was a joke. It took her nearly five minutes fighting the wind to make it to camp.

Salvio wasn’t in his office.

“Damn.” She plopped down into his beat-up desk chair and raked her fingers through her half-frozen hair. Fine. She’d talk to him later. Until then, she’d ask around among the crew.

The first shift was on break, and she heard laughter coming from the kitchen. The greasy aroma of hamburgers sizzling on the grill and her growling stomach reminded her she hadn’t eaten yet that day. Lunch sounded good. Maybe she’d grab a quick—

The thought vaporized as her eyes focused on the drilling stats blinking at her from one of the computer monitors on Salvio’s cluttered desk. She leaned closer and scanned the real-time drill depth readout.

“Fifteen two?” She blinked her eyes a couple of times to make sure she wasn’t reading it wrong. Fifteen thousand two hundred and six feet. That couldn’t be right. They were at nine thousand last night, nine two this morning. The top of the target zone for the Caribou Island well was nine thousand four hundred feet. Straight down. Easy as pie.

Altex had drilled dozens of oil exploration wells for Tiger, just like this one, over the past twenty-five years. Caribou Island should have been a routine operation, but Murphy’s Law seemed to be in full effect out here.

She hit the side of the monitor with the flat of her hand and watched the screen. The green numbers jumped, then blinked back at her. Fifteen two. “This is crazy.”

“Fotheringay!” Jack Salvio’s gravelly voice made her jump. He shot through the door, a nasty expression screwed into his face. “I’m having enough trouble with this frickin’ equipment as it is.”

“I was just—”

“Damned thing is always screwed up.” He leaned over her, typed some two-fingered gibberish into the keyboard and hit the Escape key. The monitor did a split-second reset, then flashed back to life.

Lauren focused in on the depth measurement. “Nine thousand three hundred feet.”

“There. It’s fixed.”

Frowning, she studied the blinking stats again. Everything seemed to be normal now. The drilling depth looked fine.

“Don’t touch it again, ya hear?”

“Sorry.” Lauren had never seen so much computer equipment in a company man’s office before. Personally, she’d opt for a sheet of paper, a pencil and a plain old calculator any day over all the fancy analytical instruments Tiger had insisted they install at Caribou Island.

Bill Walters, her boss, had insisted, actually. She remembered a presentation he’d given months ago on the financial return of using some new computerized drilling system. It was supposed to have made the job easier, and to have saved them money. Funny that Bill even considered the financial end of things. That had been a first. Shaking her head, she gave the numbers on the monitor a final glance. The new system was clearly junk. As soon as communications were restored she’d give Bill a call to let him know.

Salvio grabbed his hard hat from a hook on the wall and turned to leave.

“Oh, Jack—wait.” She’d almost forgotten why she’d come to see him in the first place. “Do you know which roustabout was assigned to collect rock samples here last Tuesday?” That was the date scribbled on the bags of samples left outside her lab, though the crate they’d been boxed in was missing its label.

“Beats me. Why do you want to know?”

“There were some really strange samples in front of my trailer when I arrived, and—”

Without a word, Salvio jammed his hard hat onto his head and stormed out the door.

What’s with him?

Ignoring his trademark rudeness, Lauren scanned the messy bulletin board on the wall over his desk. A second later she found what she was looking for—the crew manifest detailing who was on shift last week. Maybe now she’d find out which roustabout had—

“That’s odd.” The routine paperwork indicated a whole new crew had come in last Wednesday. Roughnecks, roustabouts, two cooks, the medic, the housekeeper, everybody.

There was always a lot of overlap on an operation this big. Eighty guys staggered on four-week shifts, for as long as it took to drill the well. They never all changed out at once. It was hardly possible, just given the logistics of getting everyone on and off the island.

Lauren shook her head.

Strange-looking rock samples, computer stats that weren’t possible given their operational plan, the worst weather in years, and a complete crew change just days before their toolpusher was killed in what Lauren knew in her gut was not an accident.

Something was going on here, and she intended to get to the bottom of it.

Pushing back from the desk, she made a mental note to query the one person who didn’t seem to belong on Caribou Island at all. “Whatever-your-name-is Adams.”

“It’s Seth.”

His low, smooth voice startled her. With a shock she glanced up to see the target of her thoughts standing in the doorway, his broad shoulders filling it.

“Seth Adams,” he said, and shot her the most dangerous-looking smile she’d ever seen in her life.

That wide-eyed innocent look didn’t fool Seth for a second. Lauren held his gaze just long enough for her cheeks to warm to pink, then she wet her lips and pretended to study the numbers on one of the monitors.

“You called?” he said, adding the narrowest edge of seduction to his voice.

A beautiful woman was the hardest kind of criminal to catch. And once caught, the hardest to put away. There was always some gullible sucker around willing to do anything to help her. Seth felt himself slipping easily into the role.

How predictable. Bledsoe had wanted him on the job because he thought playing the dumb roughneck suited him perfectly. Maybe it did. But for different reasons altogether.

“Um, yes. I uh…saw you in the hall.”

He smiled again, thinking what a perfect touch that coy little flustered look was to her whole act. “And?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Go ahead, shoot.” He pulled a chair up close—a lot closer than he would have if she was a man—and shot her another smile.

“How long have you been out here?”

“Came in last Wednesday. Why?”

“No reason. I just wondered.” She gave up a smile.

“Matter of fact, a whole new crew came on that day. Was that your doing?”

“My doing? No, how could it be? Geologists don’t make those kinds of decisions. Only the—”

“Toolpusher?”

“That’s right.”

His eyes fixed on the tiny mole near her mouth. Sexy as hell. He’d noticed it for the first time last night in the lab.

“Who’s in charge of the crew now that Paddy’s…” All the light went out of her eyes, and he found himself feeling sorry for her again. All part of her plan, he reminded himself.

“Don’t know. Salvio, I guess.” Jack had been riding roughshod on them since the second Paddy O’Connor was pronounced dead. It made sense, since Salvio was Tiger’s senior man and in charge of the whole field operation.

“Jack wants to shut it all down,” she said absently.

“Makes sense, given what’s happened.” Seth cast a look out the window in the direction of the drilling rig, barely making out the outline of the derrick.

“I’m going out there to talk to him.”

“Hey, wait.”

She ignored him, and a minute later was suited up and out the door to the yard. Seth was right behind her. He was late as it was. Lunch was over and everyone was back on shift.

Lauren slipped on the ice as she grabbed the guideline connecting the camp to the rig. He caught her just in time.

“Thanks.”

He barely heard her over the wind. She smiled up at him, her auburn hair whipping around her face. He grabbed the fur ruff of her hood and pulled it snug, holding her close longer than he should have.

Again he had to remind himself he was acting. So was she. All in a day’s work. He was a cop, and she was a murderer. He hadn’t wanted to believe it when he was with her last night, but what he’d found in the Dumpster convinced him. He’d wrapped the evidence in a paper bag and stashed it in his duffel. It wasn’t enough. He’d bet his life there’d be no usable fingerprints on that rock hammer. All the same, he had to get a look at Paddy’s body.

As they pulled their way along the guideline to the rig, he mentally checked off what he knew about Lauren Fotheringay. Not nearly enough. Not yet. The homicide alone might be tough to hang on her. But proof that she was the corporate thief would likely buy her the murder rap, too.

His goal was clear to him now. Forget the murder. Finger her for the illegal sale of Tiger’s proprietary data. Rock samples and maps—that was likely what she was selling. The rest would follow if he could establish motive. This much he did know about her:

Oil industry papers had rumored Tiger’s CEO was thinking of promoting Lauren over her boss, Bill Walters, to VP of exploration. No small leap. She couldn’t be that good. There must be another reason. Maybe she was sleeping with him.

Maybe she was sleeping with all of them—Tiger’s CEO, her boss, not to mention that pretty-boy fiancé of hers. Seth watched her shuck her jacket off inside the first-floor stairwell of the drilling rig, his gaze pinned on the curve of her hip, the swell of her breasts against that ratty old cardigan she seemed to live in.

He reminded himself that even if she wasn’t a perp, she was still off-limits to him: a rich sorority princess with a fancy career and ice water in her veins. He’d gotten burned on that type once already, and wouldn’t make that mistake again. Women like Lauren Fotheringay didn’t love men, they used them. That fact made it easier to focus on his goal.

Bledsoe had ordered him to hold his cover even after he’d fingered the ringleader and his or her accomplices. They wanted to take everyone involved in this corporate piracy case down at once. No one was sure how high up in Tiger the fraud went, but Seth suspected pretty high.

Based on what he knew so far, if he had to guess, he’d make Lauren as the kingpin here in the field, and Paddy O’Connor her accomplice. Paddy must have gotten scared or screwed up, done something to make it dangerous for Lauren to let him live. Maybe he was getting ready to blow the whistle on the whole operation.

Seth didn’t know, but he was going to find out.

Amazingly enough, his own father—a shrewd businessman who watched the movements of oil companies operating in the Arctic like a hawk—had been the one who’d tipped off the Feds to what he’d first thought was some kind of illegal collusion between Tiger and that foreign company. How ironic that Seth should catch the case. He wondered if his father knew. And if he did know, if he’d care.

Oh, he’d care all right. The great and powerful Jeremy Adams would expect Seth to screw it up somehow. Just like he thought Seth had screwed up his career with the Bureau and his marriage. Not to mention a hundred other things growing up.

Lauren started up the metal stairs, and Seth followed, his gaze fixed on her jeans-clad behind. Mmm, nice. The view drove all thoughts of his father from his mind.

The higher they climbed and the closer they got to the drilling floor, the more deafening the noise became. The screeching sounds of machinery one floor above them told Seth they’d already started the rest of the shift without him. He’d catch hell from Salvio for sure now.

He swore silently under his breath. One of these days he and Jack Salvio were going to have a serious disagreement.

They topped a landing, and Lauren stopped short. Seth crashed into her from behind. “Whoa, sorry.” He grabbed the greasy metal handrail to keep from falling backward down the stairs.

Over the noise, he heard her rattle off a litany of cuss words the average society cupcake shouldn’t even know. But her tirade wasn’t on his account. She pointed across one of the catwalks circling the central drilling pipe that stretched from ground level up five stories to the drilling floor just above them.

Seth looked past her and saw two roustabouts—the same guys who’d corralled him yesterday into helping them move that equipment. He’d found out soon afterward that they’d lied to him about the camp’s forklift being down. The question was why?

His hunch was that they’d deliberately wanted to divert his attention. Away from a murder being committed not fifty yards away as he humped crates off a pallet? Maybe. Maybe not.

Seth filed that question away for the time being, and watched them scoop samples out of the big metal vat of drilling mud and rock being circulated out of the well. “Want me to—”

Lauren didn’t wait for him to finish. In three seconds she was across the catwalk, shouting something at the two roustabouts that Seth couldn’t make out over the noise. A second later he bumped up behind her again.

“What’s going on?” Seth looked to Pinkie for an explanation. The roustabout had gotten his nickname when he lost one of his little fingers in a drilling accident years ago, so Paddy O’Connor had told him.

“Nothin’,” Pinkie said.

“Yeah, nothin’.” Seth looked hard at Pinkie’s greasy-looking friend. The name Bulldog was painted in crude letters across his hard hat. “We was just takin’ samples like—”

“Like we’re supposed to.” Pinkie shot Bulldog a cautionary look.

Something was off about these two. Seth had thought so since his first day on the job. They were thick as thieves and strangely aloof from the rest of the crew. Come to think of it, neither of them had seemed overly concerned, as had the rest of the men, when Paddy O’Connor turned up dead in the reserve pit.

Lauren grabbed a half-full plastic sample bag out of Bulldog’s hand, yanked off her glove and ran a finger over the crudely marked depth measurement on the plastic. “Ninety-three ten.”

“Yeah,” Pinkie said. “What of it?”

Lauren shook her head. “Nothing. I just wanted to have a look, is all.” She dipped a finger into the muddy, crushed up rock and sniffed it.

Seth leaned down and smelled the open bag. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just—”

“We gotta get back to the floor.” Pinkie tried to squeeze past them, but Seth blocked his way.

“Salvio ask you two to take samples?” Seth remembered that another roustabout, a young kid, new to the oil field, had been doing the sampling up until now.

“Yeah. Why?”

“No reason.” He let Pinkie pass.

“I’m going with you.” Lauren handed the sample bag back to Bulldog.

Pinkie turned on her. “Salvio says no one who ain’t needed is supposed to come up there—geologists included.”

“What?” Lauren’s mouth gaped.

That figured, Seth thought. And it made sense. You didn’t want too many people around distracting the drilling crew. He’d been more than distracted himself the past twenty minutes.

“Salvio put me in charge a-makin’ sure.” Pinkie flashed a hardened look at her. “Know what I mean?”

Seth had had enough of these two. “Get going.” Oil field hierarchy, punctuated by the fact that Seth was bigger than both of them, insured their compliance.

Pinkie smirked, then nodded at his partner. Bulldog zipped the sample bag closed and tossed it into an open box beside the mud vat. Seth followed them both out onto the catwalk.

“Damn split-tails,” Pinkie said, to no one in particular. “Women shouldn’t be out here, if ya ask me.”

Lauren stood there, face flushed, her whisky-brown eyes flashing anger, as she watched the two of them jog up the metal staircase toward the drilling floor.

“Ignore him,” Seth said. “He’s an idiot.”

“If he’s assigned to sample collection I’ve got to work with him, now don’t I?”

“Yeah, I guess you do.” The thought bothered him more than it should have. Seth nodded at the samples in the box. “What’s up with those rocks anyway?”

She shook off her foul temperament and turned her attention on the box. “You wouldn’t understand.”

She’d be right, if Seth was who he was supposed to be—just another roughneck working another job. If he was smart, he’d stick to that role. But years ago, in college, he’d taken an introductory geology course along with a handful of other science classes needed to fulfill his degree requirement. In the end, his pride got the better of him. “Try me.”

She looked at him for a cool moment that seemed longer than a winter in Kachelik. Hell, what was she doing, sizing up his intellect? His ex used to do that all the time.

“Forget it,” he said, and started for the catwalk.

“No, wait.” She grabbed his arm. “I—I’m sorry. It’s just that so few people are ever interested in my work. It surprised me, is all.”

He shrugged, annoyed at himself for letting her get to him.

“Come on.” She pulled him toward the open box of samples.

The machinery noise was so loud, he had to invade her personal space so he could hear her. At least that’s what he told himself as he edged close enough to her to catch the lingering scent of shampoo in her hair. He knew being this close to her was dangerous. He couldn’t think straight, couldn’t focus. Come on, Adams, get a grip.

“These are totally normal,” she said, snapping him back to the topic. “Exactly what I’d expect to see at this location and this depth.” She snatched one of the sample bags from the box and handed it to him.

He pulled off his glove and squished the heavy plastic between his fingers, squinting in the bad overhead light, studying the grayish-brown rock chips floating in mud. “Shale, right?”

“That’s right.” She smiled at him. “That’s exactly what we should be seeing at this point.”

“So, what’s the problem?”

“That’s not what’s in the samples that were waiting in the crate outside the lab when I arrived.”

“You mean the ones I saw you looking at last night?”

Their gazes locked, and for the barest second he knew she was remembering what had happened between them in the trailer. Their embrace, the delicate kisses he’d brushed across her temple and her hair. The recognition in her eyes told him she knew he was thinking about it, too.

She snatched the bag from his hand and broke the spell. “Um, yes.” Her cheeks flushed with color. Clearly, she was uncomfortable with the bit of spontaneous intimacy they’d shared last night.

He was uncomfortable with it, too. Damned uncomfortable. But he was determined to get close to her. Close enough to learn her secrets—exactly what information she was selling, and how. She’d responded to him last night, and whether it was all an act or not didn’t matter.

For whatever reason, Lauren Fotheringay wanted him on her side, as an ally. Maybe more than that, given the way she stole a glance at him when she thought he wasn’t looking. That’s exactly what he’d become, then. Another dumb, unsuspecting primate she could use for her own purpose.

It couldn’t be more perfect. Once he proved to her she could trust him, he’d be able to glean the facts he’d need to collar her and her cronies here in the field, and anyone else in on the scheme back at Tiger Petroleum.

Time to move in for the kill.

“If there’s anything I can help you with,” he said, drawing her gaze back to his, “let me know.”

“Thanks.” She smiled again, and this time he marveled at how genuine it seemed.

Looking at her standing there in her field clothes, her expression open, eyes wide and trusting, he could almost believe she was innocent. That she knew nothing about Paddy’s murder or the illegal peddling of information worth millions to the right buyer. He wanted to believe it. More than anything.

Watch your step, Adams.

She tossed the sample bag back into the box and slid past him, pausing at the catwalk. “See you later?” It was more than a question. Her eyes held a subtle plea.

“Yeah,” he said, and forced a smile. “Later.”

As he turned toward the metal staircase leading up to the drilling floor, he saw Jack Salvio leaning casually against the railing at the top, watching them. Lauren saw him, too. Salvio flashed her a hard look, then waved Seth up to the floor.

Time to go to work.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.