CHAPTER SIX

Yet More of the Interminable Nine Days to Deadline

 

 

Danny stands before me, shoulders set, ready to take his lumps. “I’m sorry, boss. I wasn’t sure how to handle her. But I know I shouldn’t have called you about it. It won’t happen again.”

So I’m not the only one who gets twisted up when she’s around. Beauty queens tend to make most men stupid. Even men in their thirties, like Danny. I’ve never seen him looking so hangdog. “Enough said about that. You had something else on your mind?”

Relief washes over his face. “Yeah. The guys are reporting stuff missing.”

“Stolen?”

“Looks like it. But not real serious yet.”

“Like what?”

“A couple have lost their gloves, a painter mentioned how two of his brushes had chunks of bristles hacked out of ‘em. A janitor told me he opened a new box of trash bags, and the next time he looked, half the bags were gone.”

“Odd.”

“The worst, though, was Zeke Culpepper. He took off his tool belt before using the portable, and when he came back out, it was gone.”

“His whole tool belt?”

“Yep.”

“Fuck.” Up to then, I wasn’t too concerned. Gloves go missing. Brushes wear out. Trash bags get appropriated for non-janitorial stuff. But a whole tool belt? That can’t be explained away so easily. “Just our guys are missing stuff?”

“No. It’s everybody.”

“All shifts?”

“Yeah, but mostly the night shift.”

Well, that narrows it down some, I guess. Could be happening in the chaos of shift change. “Okay, thanks. I’ll bring it up at dinner. In the meantime, find out what Zeke needs replaced, and get it ordered. Locally, if possible, and we’ll send Jilly for it. I can’t afford for Zeke to be out of commission.”

 

 

Why do we call it dinner when it happens at midnight and is carried in a lunch pail? The fact that that’s when I have my daily meeting with the crew just adds to the confusion.

Those are the considerations that occupy the back of my mind while I percolate on what needs to happen in the s-CO2 chamber, based on what we worked out in the control room when I got back there.

But the constant awareness, simmering underneath it all, is Jilly. What’s she up to? Did she find the bathroom? Did anybody bother to tell her to bring a lunch? Did they tell her she’d be eating it at midnight?

Just thinking about her makes me pick up the pace back to the pumphouse. I strip off my gloves and shove them in my back pocket.

Earlier, it was like we were playing a goddamn game of ping-pong. She’d volley, and I’d react, lobbing a shot to her, then she’d react and lob a shot back at me. Back and forth until I couldn’t recognize myself. But by the end, the more riled that woman got, the calmer I got. And she responded to the calm.

The really weird thing is, the whole time I envisioned winding my hands around her neck to throttle her, I was also thinking that as long as my hands are there, they might as well hold her in place while I shove her against a wall and release my frustration deep inside her lush body.

I didn’t want to yell at her. I wanted to pound into her.

I’ve never felt that conflicting set of urges before. I’m the guy who walks away when things get heated or complicated. If you’re a troublesome employee, I let you go. If you’re a high-maintenance chick, I move on.

Leftover lust from the pool party. That’s what this has to be. We were supposed to slake ourselves on each other that night and be done. Sleepy and satisfied.

But it hadn’t happened, and now I’m trapped. This is my livelihood. Others depend on me. I can’t just walk away. I could cut her loose, but I wouldn’t be proud of myself for it. Plus, it wouldn’t erase her from my mind.

That’s a whole other problem. The mental boner I can’t seem to get rid of. In fact, more often than not, even just thinking about her, that mental boner travels south. Making an extended stay. Taking up residence.

Cute, asshole. Nice metaphor.

The Jilly conundrum is too much to process right now. I need to be thinking about what to say to the crew at dinner.

When I step inside the pumphouse, she’s working the crowd, charming people, relaxed and laughing. My crewmen, department supervisors, and other clerical help have joined her and Danny for dinner.

I slow up and take in the wide pull of Jilly’s lips as she smiles at something somebody says, and the way she sparkles with pleasure. She likes my crew. And they seem to like her, folding her into the group, like she belongs there instead of at some swanky place.

She reaches to pluck a grape from Harry’s lunch. It forces her breasts together and her t-shirt to gape. It doesn’t pass the notice of several of the guys, who are less than subtle about leaning forward to get a better view. I stalk to the office, coming back with my lunch, to settle in close to her. She smells clean and fresh.

I’m suddenly ravenous. But not for a turkey sandwich.

The tic in my jaw makes a few of the men back off to consume their food elsewhere. I rein in my hasty reaction to the lust pulsing through my veins and motion them back, while Jilly samples a Goldfish cracker from the Baggie Danny offers her.

Our gazes connect, hers open and easy, which is a relief, considering the way we left things before.

“No food?” I ask.

She pops another cracker into her mouth and shrugs. “I ate it earlier.”

I’d better look into stocking my little frat fridge with extra food for her. Or for the men whose food she shares. My workers need to eat if they’re going to keep working at peak performance.

I pass her the candy bar from my lunch, as I begin the meeting. “First thing on the agenda: say hello to our new office staff member, Jillian Vickers. She’s a freelance journalist writing a piece on this project, including us. And she’ll be taking some of the load off you for administrative tasks. Introduce yourselves when you have a moment, and let her ask you a few questions.”

She waves and stands up. “Hi, I’m JT. I’ve been hired to write an article for a scientific blog dedicated to the greening of Texas, and I like to put a human face on things. If I pester you too much or ask something you don’t want to answer, just let me know, and I’ll back off.” She pauses to give a coy smile and flutter her lashes. “Maybe.”

The crew laughs, and I give my head a slight shake at her audacity. She’s inspiring. A master at massaging a crowd. The vixen swings her gaze my way, and I give her a hint of a wink before continuing with my meeting.

“Good. Now, I understand we’re having a problem with items going missing?”

 

 

The meeting over, I should head back to work. Instead, I find myself focused on the way she unwraps my candy bar, the way she nibbles at it, her lips holding it in place. My mind naturally moves to imagining those lips on me. I practically jump to my feet, trying to jar that thought out of my head. “Come on.”

She glances around at the crew packing up and trickling out the door. “Where are we going?”

A couple of men grin and stuff leftover food into their lunch pails. I bite back an oath. “You’ll see.”

I help her to her feet and head for the front door.

“You know where to get me,” I toss back as I usher Jilly into the pitch-black Texas night.

We walk around the man-made pond behind the pumphouse, out of the well-lit hustle-bustle of the project, to a desolate stretch of desert. I sit down in the dust and motion to Jilly to do the same.

After only a second’s pause, she does. I pass her half of a turkey and tomato sandwich.

“Thank goodness! I didn’t know how I was going to make it ‘til morning.” She bites into it and chews with relish. A girl with an appetite makes eating more pleasurable. I tear my gaze away from that tantalizing mouth and chomp down on some turkey and whole wheat.

It’s not really pitch-black out; the worksite around the plant is lit, and twinkling stars are all around us here beside the pumphouse, seeming to close in to form a sparkling cocoon around us as we sit, eating together in silence.

She inhales deeply, drinking in the clean night air. “What’s that underneath our office?”

I glance over to where she indicates and smirk. “The pumps.”

“Oh.” She giggles.

One side of my mouth curves up. “Have a chip.”

She reaches into the sack I’m holding between us. “It’s nice out here.”

“Yeah. It’s one of the things I like best about working nights.”

“But I’m sure it interferes with sleeping.”

“Yeah, it takes some getting used to. You’ll see. But I don’t sleep much on a job.”

“That explains a lot.”

I study her. “About what?”

“About your cranky mood earlier.”

My snort isn’t particularly gentlemanly. “Lack of REM had nothing to do with that, and you know it.”

“Maybe.” She sniffs defiantly. “But you took your anger out on Danny Chapman, too. I imagine he could use some positive feedback from you.”

“He’s all right. Now that you mention it, though, how did you make your peace with him? He wasn’t happy about being manipulated.”

“Well, he was stand-offish at first, no thanks to you.”

“But you kept at him.”

She nods. “Yep. It took some work, but he finally relented and let me back in.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah, I don’t like tension in the workplace.” Jilly raises a disbelieving brow, which I ignore. “Fruit?”

Delicate fingers reach for the plum, leaving me the yellow apple.

“You found the bathroom, I assume?”

She cocks her head at me and smiles. “Yes. Thank you. You could have told me, you know.”

“You could have trusted me.”

The stone in the plum’s center crunches when she bites too deeply. “I guess,” she mumbles from behind her hand, as she tries to stem the juice trickling down her chin. My tongue would like to take the place of her hand. I imagine plum juice would taste even sweeter being licked off her face.

I clear my throat to keep from choking on said tongue. “Why don’t you trust me?”

A chip of plum stone has broken off with her last bite. She bounces it up and down in her hand, as if testing its weight while she’s testing the weight of her response to my question. Finally, she pitches it to the ground beside her. “Truth?”

“Always.”

“I live with my father and two, grown brothers. And I love them to pieces. But I’m the little girl, the little sister, all the time. Even now that I’m through college. I barely get to breathe without their help.” There’s no mistaking the frustration in her voice.

Her situation rings a bell with me. I’m always fighting for a place at the table in my family. When my brothers aren’t pranking me, they’re smothering me. I learned to play my cards close to the vest, so I could make a few decisions on my own and find out what kind of man I am. Whatever sports they went out for, I shunned. Their social scene didn’t become mine. They drive expensive foreign cars, I have a motorcycle and a truck. They all went to Duke. I found a counselor to help me get into Bartlett at University College London. The list goes on and on.

It’s still a fight. This job is part of that fight. “I get it.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, Jilly, I do. But that doesn’t mean I don’t expect you to do what I say here on the job. My crew’s a team, and we all pitch in to get the job done. A lot of things on these projects are dangerous. Ask questions if you need to for help or clarification, but there’s no room for second-guessing the boss.”

“Okay. So, is that your idea of an apology for before?”

I grimace and throw a quick glare in her direction. “Don’t push it.”

She looks smug. That cocky look is just screaming for me to wipe it off her face. “This would be an opportune time to reciprocate, Jilly.”

There’s enough sarcasm in my voice to snag her attention.

“What?”

“Your apology. Are you having trouble with that concept? Here, I’ll get you started. Say after me, ‘Jack, I’m very sorry for being an insubordinate employee on my very first night on the job—’”

She sputters a laugh.

“Too fast for you?” I inquire solicitously. “Let’s try again. ‘Jack, I’m sorry—’”

“Stop it. I’m perfectly capable of composing a gracious apology myself—when it’s warranted.” She glares, but it’s feigned. “I certainly don’t need your assistance.”

“I’m just helping you.”

“Like the other men in my life?” She slices me a freezing look, then stares straight ahead. I’m unperturbed.

She waits a few beats longer, then sighs. “What was that speech again?”

I grin. “Jack, dear boss—”

“Now, hold on there—”

“Jack, my dear, sweet boss—”

Jilly’s head dips like she wants to butt me in the stomach. “I hope that grin splits your face in two.”

“Tsk, tsk. Try again.”

Her eyes narrow, but she’s fighting back a smile of her own. “Jack. My dear, sweet boss,” she mimics snidely, practically whining out the words.

“I am so humbly sorry—”

“Humbly?” she repeats indignantly, all trace of whine gone.

“I am so terribly, abjectly, humbly sorry—”

“Okay, okay, I get the picture. ‘Jack, my dear, sweet boss, I am so terribly, abjectly, humbly sorry—’.” She shakes her head in disgust. “Boy, you can say that again,” she mutters under her breath.

And she does. Many, many more times.

“Aaaaaa-men,” she chants at the end of a lengthy recital.

“Irreverent hussy.”

It’s ridiculous, the silly game, but we’re both enjoying the silliness, laughing along as I pour on more teasing, making her say things to me that she never would have under any other circumstances—outrageous, ego-stroking things. A couple of times, she goes so far as to embellish my own dialog, much to my surprised delight.

At some point, I stop laughing and drink her in—her lightness, her beauty, the softness of her laughter—and the desire to pull her onto my lap slams into me. Wrestling with it, knowing what a tremendous mistake it would be, I still reach for her, extending my arm to clasp her by the waist.

She shivers at my touch, and her eyes go wide. “Jack?”

If I don’t get a taste of her, I’ll be pawing the dirt like a crazed bull. My grasp tightens, preparing to drag her mouth close enough for me to capture.

Her gaze jerks to my lips descending toward hers. I can smell her shampoo and feel her body’s heat.

Suddenly, my name booms out over the loudspeaker—a soul-wrenching record-scratch—and my breath catches in my chest.

With a last longing gaze, we break apart.

The Project Manager internal mask drops over my features. We gather up the remainder of our shared meal. I help Jilly up, and we head in separate directions. Wordlessly. Crushed under the weight of what we almost let happen.

It’s only later, when I reach in my back pocket, that I discover my gloves are missing.