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