Even though she’d told them she probably couldn’t take the job, her interviewer had insisted on showing her inside. The kitchen was perfect, with counters so much wider than the tailgate she was used to cooking on, and walls so she could make pumpkin pancakes without dust blowing into the batter, or could even bake a cake. The whole thing would be perfect, if it had stood alone instead of arced along a circular driveway with four other cottages.
It wasn’t just a house, it was a home, and as soon as she had seen that, she’d turned it down.
When she’d left Brad, she promised herself everything would be different, that she could have a whole new life. Freedom, space, quiet. But not a marriage, or a home. There was peace in knowing and accepting your own limitations, and those were hers. The wind and the open land were where she’d found her place, and fantasies of soft throw blankets and cozy rocking chairs were just that: fantasies.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to settle down?” Lisa asked softly. “I mean, all of us dirtbags have lived in our trucks for years, but you were the first to sew curtains for the windows of your camper shell instead of taping up newspaper to keep out the sun. You were the first to put a little mat under your tailgate so you wouldn’t track in dirt. You were the first to hang Christmas lights so you’d have more light inside than just a headlamp.”
“Just because I fixed up my truck a little doesn’t mean I want to sign up for a whole house.” Or a permanent, traceable address.
Lisa was quiet for a beat longer. “Okay.”
Mari found herself scowling and tried to smooth her face.
“Well, anyway, a bunch of us are going to the Barn for beers after work tonight, if you want to come.”
“No, thanks,” she said automatically. She liked beer, though Brad always teased her that she looked masculine when she drank beer. He thought it was more attractive when women drank wine from delicate little glasses. But it was too easy to screw up in a group, especially if they’d all been drinking, and she didn’t want to be the pity invite.
She heard the sigh Lisa tried to stifle. “I’ll wear you down one of these days. Anyway, good luck with Wyatt. Only a few more days left on your sentence and I bet you can get Marcus to let you skip your next turn, since you held out for two rotations.”
They hung up, and Mari just stood there, holding on to her phone. She felt off-balance, and she checked her safety vest and hard hat, scanned the site for any animals she might have missed during her call. But still the feeling persisted. She’d been trying so hard not to think about that damn cottage. It had teased tears at the corners of her eyes to leave it, even during the interview. But she couldn’t risk Brad finding her, and she didn’t want to live with other people ever again. Not even in separate cottages, because they’d all have to work together as part of the park interpretive team, and she couldn’t stand seeing the looks on their faces when she disappointed them but they were still stuck with her. She’d seen it too many times.
But there was a pain in the center of her chest, sharp like a stab, when she thought about it.
Jack looked up from the tower plans on his tailgate, and caught her staring at the site. She blinked and started to look away, but before she could, he gave her a little nod.
She nearly dropped her phone. Jack Wyatt had nodded. At a biologist.
It was hardly the Nobel Peace Prize, but as far as she knew, he’d never said a single word to one of the bios that hadn’t come out as a shout or in four filthy letters. And she’d lasted more than a single week.
Her toes curled inside her shoes, holding on hard to the warmth of the desert sand beneath her. She felt a little dizzy, or maybe sick. Or hungry.
What if she could take that other job?
Move into that cottage and sew new curtains, close the front door and have a quiet place all to herself, where she didn’t have to worry about her habits annoying anyone else. Be part of a team. She really loved the national park that was hiring. They had the habitat for all her favorite animals, and the most beautiful cactus.
If she could get Jack Wyatt to let her train his men, and earn a nod from him, was it so crazy to think she could get along with live-in coworkers?
Her heart raced, even though she was only standing still with the sun pouring heat down on her suddenly heaving shoulders. Here was the perfect place to practice. None of her coworkers on the interpretive team would be as hard to please as Wyatt, and if she stumbled like she always used to, no one would even notice if she ticked him off. The man existed in a perpetual state of ticked off.
She could even, maybe, try a little with her fellow biologists. It was a small group, the only odd ducks who were rootless enough and tough enough to live in the desert year-round, with only the fragile protection of a hat brim from the sun that ruled brutally over everything. They all had their secrets and reasons why they drifted from one temporary assignment to another. It was why, she’d always suspected, they gave her space.
Rajni never talked about why she left the marines, and there was a rumor she’d lived in a cave in Italy once, for four straight months. Jorge slept on the ground in every kind of weather, because the back of his truck was stuffed full of bike parts and different copies of Shakespeare plays, even though she’d never seen him bike, or read. Hotaka refused to speak of anything but plants, and he whittled. Ferociously. All the time.
They certainly weren’t ordinary, well-adjusted citizens, and maybe they could be the training wheels she needed. After all, if she fell flat on her face, the job would end in a few months. She’d see most of the same people again on the next job, but she could get certified for different species and try to get work outside the desert if she had to.
That yellow cottage burned in her memory. Yellow had always been her favorite color. How could the park employees have known that?
Mari flipped her phone over and texted Lisa before she could lose her nerve.
Too busy to make the Barn tonight, but maybe we could do coffee sometime?
As soon as she sent it, she felt ridiculous. The other woman was so nice, she’d probably feel obligated to say yes even if she didn’t want to. What would they even talk about? How many lizards they’d seen that day? Thirteen side-blotches, eight whiptails, and a double handful of zebra-tails.
Thrilling.
Her phone dinged and the message flashed before she could even decide if she had the courage to look.
Absolutely! Just tell me when.
6
Animals
Jack’s crew had been pulling overtime shifts for two days, trying to catch up after the tower-put-together-backward disaster. Which of course meant Mari was pulling overtime, too, walking endless laps around the construction pad to make sure animals wouldn’t get in the way of their work.
Today, they were doing crane work, which was terrifying to watch, even though they’d done it a million times and it was probably no more scary to them than changing lanes. They would put together a section of tower, all the metal lattice pieces bolted together, then the crane would lift that piece and set it atop the existing tower they’d already built.
The catch was that four living, breathing men had to perch atop the tower to guide the corners into place.
If Ricky, the crane operator, slipped or even moved too fast, the new section started to swing. That could impale a man, or knock him off the beam. They had safety straps to tie them in, but she could see that those would catch them at just the right height for them to swing face-first into the metal struts below them.
Four men climbed the four corners of the structure at the same time: Jack, Toby, Kipp, and Gideon. Joey the apprentice had begged to be allowed to help, and Jack had turned him down so loudly she was pretty sure the next crew a mile down the road had heard. For all the truly filthy names he called that apprentice, Jack watched out for him very carefully. But then, that seemed to be his way—he always scowled
the darkest when he was being kind, like he was afraid someone would catch him at it.
Hand over foot, the four of them swarmed up the tower so fast it looked like they were on an escalator. All they had to climb were fat metal bolts sticking out on both sides of the supports, and when they got higher than twenty feet, Mari had to close her eyes to keep her stomach from churning. They couldn’t clip their safeties in until they stopped climbing, and she didn’t want to see any of them slip.
When Jack’s gruff shout rang out, she opened her eyes again. She should do a sweep for tortoises, but instead her gaze glued itself to the sky, where Jack straddled a thin metal strut as comfortably as if it were a La-Z-Boy recliner. The crane swung the metal lattice of the new section over the top of them and started to lower it toward the waiting men. It was swaying so much in the breeze that the operator, Ricky, had to reel it in and try again on the approach.
“Damn it, Jack,” she muttered under her breath. The guys had argued about whether there was too much wind today to use the crane. It was two miles per hour below the safety cutoff . . . until it gusted. And it was the desert, so it gusted whenever it pleased.
But Jack thought they needed to push it to finish at this site today, so here they were, four tiny men on top of a tower, trying to catch the swinging metal thing that outweighed them by several thousand pounds. On the third try, Jack got impatient and stood up, balancing on a piece of metal narrower than an Olympic balance beam. And then he leaned out to grab the swinging piece.
Mari sucked in a breath, her hands flying to her mouth, but Jack caught the metal beam and locked on. His body stretched taut as he muscled the tower piece into place, the other men catching their corners now that he’d steadied the whole. It seemed impossible that they could fit something so huge into such an exact spot that the bolt holes would line up, but a moment later, it was done. The compressor blared as they slammed bolts home, and Mari shoved her gaze back to the ground, trying to remember how to breathe.
When they climbed back down, tossing taunts and insults jovially back and forth, she stepped forward to meet them.
Jack stopped, the slant of his eyebrows puzzled. “We fuck something up?” He glanced around. “Dunno what we could have hurt from up there.”
“No, no. That was incredible!”
His brow furrowed, like he thought she might be making a joke at his expense, so she cleared her throat and reeled in her tone a touch.
“Good work, I mean.”
She’d been determined to try to speak to the crew a little more, not just hide out with the lizards and the creosote, and yet Jack seemed more thrown off by her attempt than she was.
“Uh, right.” He glanced away toward his men, uncertain. She supposed compliments from the bio weren’t exactly part of their normal routine. “Ricky’s one of the best crane operators around. Asshole, but good at his job.” He paused. “Guess I’ll, um, get back to it then.”
“That’s not all,” she hastened to add, scraping up her courage. “I just wondered . . . you guys want to see something?”
* * *
—
Mari seemed excited, and his guys really had kicked ass today, so Jack went along with it, letting her lead his whole crew like the Pied Piper away from the construction pad. Leaving their tools behind and crunching over rocks, dodging cactus. Her loose swirl of a bun peeked out from under the back of her hard hat, exposing her long, slender neck. His gaze kept being drawn to it like it was a gap between her buttons, something he wasn’t supposed to see. And he kept reminding himself it was just a neck. Nothing sexual about that.
He cleared his throat and refocused his eyes on the sandy gravel under his boots. She stopped next to a hole in the ground and dropped to her knees, and he blinked with renewed interest. Was this one of those holes the turtles lived in? He bumped Toby out of the way, trying to see better. Was one in there right now? He wondered what had happened to the little cheeseburger-sized one he’d moved.
Mari bent forward, her head low to the ground and her bottom in the air as she flicked on a flashlight and peered down the burrow. Her jeans stretched taut across her hips and he was hit with a bolt of hard, fierce lust. It was basically a sex position, so he couldn’t help but imagine her bent forward like that for him, his hands clenching the pretty curve of her waist . . .
He choked and looked away, shifting his weight around before he remembered the burrow and looked to see what her flashlight revealed. There was an animal inside, and it was . . . fuzzy?
“You see them?” She looked back with a smile so bright he got distracted all over again. “Kit foxes. They’re about the size of a house cat, but with great big ears so they hear everything. You won’t often spot them out during the day, so it’s really cool to find them in a den like this. Can you see?”
She shielded the beam of her flashlight with her fingers so it wouldn’t blind them, but Jack could still make out the eye shine of three creatures, their sharp, furry faces poked inquisitively out toward the entrance. They did look like big-eared cats. Little buggers were kinda cute, actually.
“Why don’t you look deeper, sweetheart?” Ricky said. “Think I see something way back there.”
“What?” Mari unshielded the flashlight, craning her cheek closer to the ground. He could see the moment she got what Ricky was really saying, because her shoulders went stiff and she sat back on her heels, suddenly awkward.
Jack slapped a hand against Ricky’s chest, cuffing him toward the worksite. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up and go back to work?”
Ricky smacked his hand away. “What? We were just looking. Weren’t we, boys? At the fox.”
Itchy heat flushed up Jack’s neck. Those fox kitten things were cute, but they didn’t hold a candle to the allure of Mari all bent over like that. And he hated like hell that he’d been gawking at her just like this idiot.
Jack glowered, but when Ricky didn’t retreat, he gritted his teeth. Stupid cocky crane operators. But hell, if he wanted to play it like that, Jack was game. He stepped up into his face, the other man two inches taller but Jack moving with the absolute confidence that he could punch harder.
“Think you can wave your big paycheck around and stop taking orders? You’re working on my crew, and if you wanna be here, that’s what you do. Work.”
Jack saw the retreat in the crane operator’s face a second before he stepped away. But Ricky tossed out a parting shot, his eyes flashing with the humiliation of being forced to back down in front of an audience. “Better watch your mouth, Wyatt. Might be one day my hand slips.”
Jack scoffed but the other men on the crew looked pissed. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said on a job site. Fucking ever. But he’d deal with that later.
He didn’t look at Mari as he herded his guys back to work. He didn’t want to see how she’d shrunk into herself at his stupid crew mouthing off like he couldn’t control them. He didn’t want to see the disgust written in every line of her body because that was her real, undisguised reaction to guys like them wanting a woman like her.
He might have been the one smacking Ricky for opening his mouth, but he was no better than him, and he knew it. He just wished Mari didn’t know it, too.
7
Good Samaritan
At the end of the day, Jack normally headed back to the construction yard with his crew, swapped his work truck for his motorcycle or personal truck, and went back to the motel from there. But tonight, something about the tower plans kept bugging him. He couldn’t think with all those guys jawing around him.
So he stayed late, plans all spread out on the tailgate and weighted against the wind, and went over them until he was absolutely sure they were drawn wrong. Then twice more, because he really didn’t want to fight this. He’d have to put any changes through Rod, who’d have to battle with corporate to get a revision from the engineering department on the word of Jack, who didn
’t have an engineering degree. Hell, he barely had a high school diploma.
They were going to make it out like he was the one who was wrong, but numbers were numbers. Maybe in a court of law you could make it sound like two plus two equals seven, but when you had a bunch of tower pieces, those bolt holes just weren’t ever gonna line up.
He rolled up the plans and chucked them back into the truck. Better get home in time for an extra beer tonight. When he had to call Rod in the morning, he was going to wish he had had one more, whether it ever made it from his mouth to his stomach or not.
He glanced under his tires as he rounded the truck, thanking the God of Bad Knees that his work vehicle was jacked up high enough that he didn’t have to bend down to see underneath it. He kicked some dirt at a lizard to get it to run off. Didn’t know if it was a fancy lizard or a plain one, but better safe than sorry. He didn’t want to see Mari’s face fall if she found its little squished body on the job site in her morning rounds.
He’d seen her find the corpse of a mouse that got hit by one of the water trucks that kept the dust down on the roads. Didn’t say a word, just took her shovel and buried it out in the desert, like it deserved a burial, mouse or not.
He guessed that, to Mari, it probably did. She was the kind of woman who had enough in her to care about even mice.
The work truck coughed and sputtered, then roared to life when he gave it some gas. He pulled out, wondering what it said about him that he wouldn’t have buried a damn mouse. Maybe kicked some dirt over it, if it was fresh. Maybe not. He hated mice.
On his way out, he spotted another truck pulled off the side of the road. He squinted against the setting sun. Everybody should have been off the dirt access road by this time of night.
It was a truck the color of dust and old metal, scarred down both sides with scratches. He knew that truck. Every day, he watched a graceful, light-footed woman retreat to it for food and water and the refuge of shade, like it was some kind of surrogate mother. A desert oasis formed of steel and gasoline.
Breathe the Sky Page 5
