On Thin Ice

by Debra Lee Brown

“So I’ve heard.” She brushed past him and started for Salvio’s office.

  “Where’s your gear? Don’t you need to—”

  “I’m not going.” Her declaration didn’t seem to surprise him one bit.

  She plopped into Salvio’s desk chair and snatched the red phone receiver from its hook. Dead. “Damn!”

  “Communications are down.” Seth looked at her hard, as if he expected her to react in some way to his comment.

  “Well, they were up at some point, now weren’t they? Long enough for Jack to call in that helicopter.”

  “Yeah, I guess they were.”

  She glanced briefly at the computer monitors on Salvio’s desk. They were blank. Figured. The whole system must be down.

  She had to call in. Had to tell someone what was happening. Her boss would be furious if he knew Salvio was trying to send her back to Deadhorse without consulting anyone else.

  “I’m going over there.” She pushed back from the desk.

  “Where?”

  “Sat-comm shack.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  She looked up at Seth, and their gazes locked. She realized he expected her to protest. To tell him no, that she didn’t need his help. Common sense told her to steer clear of this guy, but instinct told her different.

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  By the time they slipped out the camp’s rear emergency exit, the wind had started up again. Visibility dwindled as the gale whipped swirling, needle-sharp blasts of dry snow into her face. Lauren pulled her fur-ruffed hood tight as they jogged along the back side of the metal building.

  Where the snowdrifts deepened, Seth grabbed her gloved hand and guided her on, sheltering her from the wind with his body. He was so…what was the word? Chivalrous came to mind.

  She recalled the last time she and Crocker had been caught in a snowstorm. It was during that awful ski vacation in the Alps. She had wanted to ski down the mountain, leaving space on the cable car for children and seniors who hadn’t the stamina to brave the weather. But Crocker wouldn’t hear of it. He’d pushed his way onto the car. Lauren was so angry at him, she’d skied down alone.

  As Seth’s grip on her tightened, she felt a warm sort of satisfaction blossom inside her. No man had ever gone out of his way to protect her before. Well, not since she was a kid and her father was alive.

  “Wait here!” Seth shouted over the wind. He ducked inside the back door to the machine shop and emerged thirty seconds later with a pair of bolt cutters. Of course! The sat-comm shack was always locked for security reasons. Jack Salvio had the only key.

  Together they rounded the corner and peeked between the buildings. No one was around. He pulled her into the tight space between the two steel structures. “Come on.”

  A dozen paces later they stopped dead. The door to the sat-comm shack was cracked, light spilling from inside. The heavy padlock lay open on the ground.

  The door crashed wide, and Lauren’s heart leaped to her throat. Seth pushed her hard against the wall of the shack and flattened his body over hers. It was dark, and if they were lucky—

  Pinkie, the roustabout who’d given her trouble yesterday afternoon on the catwalk, stepped from the shack and stopped, not six feet from them. He ripped a cigarette from his pocket and tried, unsuccessfully, to light it.

  Lauren felt Seth’s body tense as Pinkie kicked the door shut, plucked the padlock from the ground and clicked it into place. She didn’t breathe until he’d rounded the corner into the yard.

  “That was close.” Seth stepped away and pulled her with him. “You okay?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Here we go.”

  As Seth sheared the lock with the bolt cutters, it struck her that he’d never even asked her why she wanted to access the operation’s communications equipment. He’d just come with her. No questions.

  And now, as if they were doing nothing out of the ordinary, he was assisting her in breaking into the one place on the island she had no business being. If they were caught, he’d lose his job in an instant.

  “Okay, it’s open.” He pocketed the broken lock, flipped on the overhead light, and followed her inside. “Now what?”

  Lauren studied the complex array of telecommunications equipment. The only familiar-looking hardware was a keyboard, monitor, and what looked like a high-tech scrambled-signal phone. “Now we try to call out.”

  Her knowledge was exhausted in the first thirty seconds. This was a system unlike any other she’d seen. Strange that Tiger would splurge on something this state-of-the-art for a routine operation like Caribou Island.

  Seth took over, and seemed to know a whole lot more about the equipment than she ever would have suspected.

  “How do you know about stuff like this?” she asked as he yanked a screwdriver out of his pocket and took the back off of the biggest of the CPUs. “Computers and telecommunications, I mean?”

  He shot her a bitter smile. “What, you think I spend my days at the village hunting seals and carving totem poles?”

  “No, it’s just that—”

  “That what?” He tossed the screwdriver aside and peered into the guts of the main system. “That it’s amazing a guy like me, a native, would know anything about high-tech stuff?”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Shame heated her face. She realized that was exactly what she’d meant.

  As a child, tromping all over Alaska with her father, Lauren had spent time in many native villages. She’d never had preconceived notions about any group of people before.

  But when her father died and her mother remarried, whisking her off to New York, Lauren’s life had changed dramatically. Mother had made sure their world was populated only by the right kinds of people. And, when Lauren was old enough to date, only the right kinds of men. In her mother’s mind, that didn’t include native Alaskans, or any persons of color. Well, unless they happened to be rich. Then it was all right.

  Lauren shook her head, remembering.

  “What the—?” Seth grabbed a funny-looking connection coming from one of the inner components of the system. It wasn’t your typical computer connector. “Son of bitch,” he breathed.

  “What is it? Can you fix it?”

  He stared past her at the closed door, grinding his teeth, his mind working, as if he was remembering something.

  “Tell me. What did you find?”

  Men’s shouts interrupted both their trains of thought. Seth snapped to attention. “N-nothing. It’s just broken.” He quickly screwed the plastic cover back onto the CPU, then took her arm. “Come on, we’ve gotta get out of here before—”

  “Fotheringay!”

  They both froze. The gravelly, disembodied voice belonged to Jack Salvio, and he didn’t sound happy.

  “He must be right outside,” Lauren whispered.

  Seth grabbed her, pulled her with him into a corner, and flipped off the overhead light.

  “It’s pitch—”

  Seth’s hand covered her mouth, as he pulled her tight against him. They stood motionless for what seemed an eternity, listening to Salvio swearing somewhere in the yard.

  Lauren was aware, for the second time in as many days, of Seth’s size and strength, the warmth radiating from his body as he held her. She found herself relaxing in his arms.

  He brushed his thumb across her lips—her breath caught—then he slid his hand from her mouth. Awkwardly, she turned in his embrace.

  “He’s looking for me,” she whispered up at him in the dark. “I’m supposed to be on that chopper.”

  They both heard the sound of the helicopter’s rotor escalating to maximum rpm. The weather was coming in fast, and the pilot wasn’t waiting.

  “But you’re not going, are you?” Seth’s mouth was so close to hers she could feel his warm breath on her lips.

  “No.”

  A flurry of emotions clouded her thinking as they listened to the eerie shrieks of the waxing wind and Salvio’s shouts fad
ing in the distance.

  It was almost as if Salvio was deliberately trying to get rid of her. She’d read anger and something else, a strange sort of uneasiness in his eyes when he’d caught her looking at his computer monitor yesterday, and again when he’d found her and Seth examining rock samples from the mud vat on the rig.

  Thank God she’d had the presence of mind to pocket that last remaining sample from the confiscated crate before Salvio realized what it was.

  Something was going on at Caribou Island. Something fishy. And she was going to get to the bottom of it, if it was the last thing she did. They were a hundred feet from the target zone. A lousy hundred feet.

  Her promotion hung in the balance. Tiger’s senior execs would be counting on her to keep their interests in the fore-front, even if their number-one company man, Jack Salvio, had temporarily lost his mind.

  Crocker would be counting on her, too. To finish the job and get herself home in one piece. Though she found it difficult at the moment, in Seth Adams’s warm embrace, to keep Crocker on her mind at all.

  “It’s probably your last chance,” he said. “Once the chopper leaves, with the ice road ruined the only way in or out is by Rolligon.”

  She’d seen the enormous vehicle out back behind the drilling rig, with its tiny cab and low-pressure tires suited to rolling across the tundra without harming the fragile environment.

  “I know. I don’t care. It’s just that—”

  She gripped him tighter in the dark, remembering the horror of finding Paddy’s body in the reserve pit, Salvio’s odd behavior, Pinkie’s warning, and now discovering the roustabout here in the sat-comm shack where he had no business being.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the rapid-fire beating of her heart. “Seth, I don’t know who to trust anymore.”

  He brushed a strand of hair from her face. His touch, his ragged breathing—even in the dark she knew what he intended, yet she made no move to stop him.

  His lips trapped hers in the gentlest of kisses. Heat suffused her body from the inside out.

  “Trust me,” he said, and kissed her again.

  Chapter 6

  T he job, his whole reason for being there, the fact that she was a suspect and he was a cop and that at any second someone might find them there together in the dark—all of it blazed away in a white heat as Seth felt the tip of Lauren’s tongue, silky and hot, dance with his.

  She was tentative at first. He felt her tremble in his arms, and both of them knew it wasn’t from the cold. Unable to stop himself, he deepened the kiss. Lauren responded with a whimper that hinted more of need than seduction, clutching at his jacket as he backed her against the wall of telecommunications equipment lining the cramped space.

  Somewhere at the edge of his awareness he heard the sound of the helicopter taking off, the thump of rotors barely audible over the shrieking wind. Salvio’s shouts and men’s footsteps died away.

  And then there was only her. Soft lips and hot breath and hair that smelled of apples.

  He knew he wasn’t acting. Not anymore.

  “Seth,” she breathed. “Don’t.” She pushed against his chest, but not convincingly.

  He kissed her again.

  Their hands slid together, fingers twining. He couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t concentrate on anything except her and the moment. Then something hard scraped his palm, a reminder every bit as jarring as a cold shower or a slap in the face.

  Her two-carat diamond engagement ring, emerald cut.

  The world came abruptly into focus.

  “We’d…better go,” he said, breaking the kiss and backing away from her.

  He couldn’t see her face in the dark, but felt a sobering jolt of reality laced with confusion fill up the space between them.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  Ignoring the overhead light, he grabbed her hand and guided her in the dark toward the door. A moment later, the coast clear, they were outside. She wouldn’t look at him. Maybe she thought not acknowledging what had just happened between them would make it go away.

  He wished it was that simple.

  Right now he had to focus on getting them both back to where they were supposed to be, without being seen. Then he’d allow himself to think about what the hell he’d just done in there, and what it meant.

  While Lauren fumbled with her gloves, he pocketed the sheared padlock and clicked a new one into place across the door latch.

  Her brows shot up when she saw it.

  “There’s a whole drawer full of these in the machine shop. I think they all have the same key.”

  She looked at him with an undisguised mixture of suspicion and disbelief.

  “Come on. It’s nearly four o’clock in the morning. Let’s get you back to your trailer. You’ll have hell to pay when Salvio catches up with you.”

  The weather was back—wind screaming like a banshee, dry snow blasting across the polished ice of the yard, pummeling them as he led Lauren quickly across the open space between the sat-comm shack and her trailer.

  Lucky for them, everyone—Salvio included—had gone back inside. The second shift was in full swing now. Seth glanced briefly at the rig as they passed, noting the ninety-foot stands of drilling pipe swinging in the derrick in the wind. He didn’t know how much longer they’d be able to keep drilling. They were just days away from target depth, but he hadn’t seen weather this bad in…hell, maybe never.

  Lauren let go of his hand long enough to fish her keys out of her jacket. A second later they were inside. Seth pulled the door shut and locked it, and for a moment neither of them moved. They stood there in the dark in their survival gear, breathing hard, their bodies drawing in heat from the trailer’s propane furnace.

  “If I turn the light on, Salvio will be out here in a second,” she said.

  “If he can see this far in the weather. And if he’s still up.”

  Salvio didn’t like to miss his beauty sleep.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” She moved across the linoleum to her workstation, then he heard her fumbling in a drawer. “Still, I don’t want to risk it. Tomorrow is soon enough for me to face the firing squad.”

  He heard a striking sound and smelled burning graphite. An instant later the room was bathed in a soft glow. She’d lit a candle. And not one of those plain, white emergency candles. It was pink and heart-shaped, and looked as if it had been lit before. For some reason this surprised him. She hadn’t seemed the candle type to him. In fact, he wasn’t sure any more what type she was.

  She shucked her jacket and boots, then turned to face him.

  “About what happened…” She didn’t look at him directly, and he could tell from the way she bit her lip she was searching for words. “Seth, I—”

  “It was my fault.” He moved toward her. Halfway there, she raised a hand to stop him. He nodded at her diamond ring, glittering in the candlelight. It reminded him of some of the jewels he’d seen in the Tiffany exhibit at the Smithsonian when he’d lived in D.C. “I forgot you were engaged.” At last their gazes met. “That is an engagement ring, right?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He risked a smile. “Lucky guy.”

  “Look, Seth—”

  A brash ringing startled them both. He spun toward her bedroom at the back of the trailer where the sound originated.

  “Oh, it’s my alarm clock. Just a sec.” She dashed into the bedroom before he could stop her. For a split second he wondered if someone was back there waiting for her. Then he heard the slap of her hand on the ringer, and the room went quiet. He breathed.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” she called from the bedroom. He heard what he suspected was the bathroom door closing. Water started to run, and he used the time to shrug out of his jacket and get his head screwed back on straight.

  Twelve short hours ago Seth would have bet the farm that Lauren was Paddy O’Connor’s murderer and Tiger’s corporate thief. Now he wasn’t so sure. And his uncerta
inty had nothing to do with the fact that fifteen minutes ago he’d held her in arms and kissed her with a passion he hadn’t felt in…well, he couldn’t remember how long. Besides, that wasn’t the point.

  The point was that Pinkie the roustabout—one of Paddy’s own men—had been in that telecommunications shack seconds before they had. He’d had a key, and from the casual way he’d clapped the padlock on the door and sauntered away, it was clear it wasn’t the first time he’d been in there.

  It was also clear that someone had sabotaged the equipment. But not permanently. One of the main CPU connectors had been altered. Disconnect it, and the whole system shut down. Connect it again, and everything worked.

  The question was why?

  Salvio’s behavior was also cryptic. Lauren was right. It didn’t make sense to fly the geologist off the site just days before the well reached target depth. What was Salvio’s hurry? Seth didn’t buy the obvious, that the company man wanted to go by the book, fly Paddy’s body out ASAP, along with a Tiger rep to make the police report.

  Jack Salvio, from what he could tell, didn’t give a rip about Paddy O’Connor or the law. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, and few people crossed him.

  The kicker in all this was that, now, Seth wouldn’t get the chance to examine Paddy’s body. To see if that bloody rock hammer he’d found in the Dumpster was the murder weapon. He hadn’t seen traces of blood in Paddy’s red hard hat. The funny thing was, the flannel liner had been missing. Nobody wore a hard hat without a liner in the Arctic in winter.

  “Hi.”

  He glanced up to see Lauren’s petite frame in the doorway of the bedroom. She’d combed her hair and washed her face. Her cheeks had a natural glow about them he found damned attractive. Her brown eyes were bright, alert, watching him.

  It surprised him that she didn’t wear any makeup. He recalled only a whisper of lipstick and mascara that first day she’d arrived fresh from Tiger’s offices in Anchorage. No fancy clothes, no perfume, her auburn hair loose or swept into a casual ponytail skimming her shoulders.

  She didn’t look a thing like the pictures in her dossier. She was beautiful standing there in the candlelight in that oversize, moth-eaten sweater and jeans.