Firestorm

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

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Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

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Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

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FIRESTORM

ANN JACOBS

MS Reader (LIT) ISBN # 1-84360-365-9

Mobipocket (PRC) ISBN # 1-84360-366-7

Other available formats (no ISBNs are assigned):

Adobe (PDF), Rocketbook (RB), & HTML

(c) Copyright ANN JACOBS, 2003.

All Rights Reserved, Ellora's Cave.

Ellora's Cave Publishing, Inc. USA

Ellora's Cave Ltd, UK

This e-book may not be reproduced in whole or in part by email forwarding, copying, fax, or
any other mode of communication without author permission.

Edited by
ALLIE MCKNIGHT

Cover Art by
TRACE EDWARD ZABER

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

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Warning:

The following material contains strong sexual content meant for mature readers.

FIRESTORM has been rated borderline NC17, erotic, by three individual reviewers. We
strongly suggest storing this electronic file in a place where young readers not meant to view
this ebook are unlikely to happen upon it. That said, enjoy…

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

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Chapter One

Three deafening booms resounded, shattering the lazy silence of a sunny July day.

The wooden floor shuddered beneath Kate Black’s feet as she sprinted to the porch.

Except for blue-orange flames shooting obscenely from the drilling site at the bottom of the hill, an acrid wall of darkness obscured the source of the noise.

Coughing, she went back inside and stared out a window at the flaming sky. What was going on down at the derrick?

Looking away from the conflagration, she rooted through a drawer. Finally. She found the business card the drilling company man had left with her and reached for the phone.

* * * * *

Jake Green slammed on the brakes and sprang out of his car. Braced to find broken bodies in the aftermath of the explosion, he let out his breath when he saw Skip Ward and the rest of the drilling crew pumping foam on a burning generator.

“What the hell happened?” he yelled over the hissing of the pumps.

Skip let go of the hose he’d been steadying and mopped a filthy palm across his brow. “Jake. You picked a hell of a time to get here. Generator decided to blow up.

Looks like we’ll get the fire under control before it spreads to the fuel tanks, though.”

“How can I help?” The fierce heat from the fire, on top of a temperature already climbing toward triple digits, had sweat dripping off Jake’s brow.

“Go call the sheriff. This was no accident. That damn generator was less than a year old.” Skip cast a disgusted look at the twisted heap of steel still smoldering under a blanket of fire extinguishing foam.

“All right.”

As soon as he stepped inside the battered trailer, Jake heard the phone ring.

“Ward Drilling,” he snapped, annoyed that he’d have to deal with this call before contacting the sheriff.

The woman on the other end of the line sounded damn near hysterical. Her name was Kate Black, which was about all he managed to decipher between her sobs. Who the hell? Then Jake remembered. She was the woman who owned this southeast Mississippi land.

He tried to calm her. “No, no one was hurt. No, ma’am, the fire’s not going to spread to your house.”

“Will you keep on drilling?”

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Typical woman, fretting about where her next season’s wardrobe was coming from.

“Nothing’s going to stop us from drilling this well. Look, Ms. Black, would you mind getting off the phone so I can call the sheriff?”

“You’re certain it’s safe to stay here?” Her voice sounded calmer now. “Should I come down to your office?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Calm down and stay where you are. It isn’t as though we have an oil well fire down here. All that’s burning is a generator, and the fire’s under control.” He hung up none too gently and dialed nine-one-one.

* * * * *

“It’s sabotage. No doubt about it.”

Jake pried off his boots and rested his feet on a cluttered table. “This is the fourth incident at our oilfields in less than a month.”

Skip glanced up from the sink, his hair dripping wet but his face no longer coated with blackened grease. “Who’s doing this to y’all, and why?”

“Obviously someone who wants to drive GreenTex straight into bankruptcy.”

“Another independent oil company?”

“Could be. The bastards haven’t left us a hell of a lot of clues.” Jake met Skip’s sober gaze. “Dale Larson died last week in the explosion at our field outside Lubbock. Three of our most productive wells there are out of commission for God only knows how long. Now your generator blows up.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s almost as if the bastards knew the security team wouldn’t get here until tomorrow.”

Skip shrugged. “Hell, it’s almost as though they knew exactly when you’d be driving onto the scene so they could greet you with a big bang.”

“Can the graveyard humor,” Jake snapped. But he mentally replayed his friend’s offhand comment.

Had Skip just hit onto something important? “Who knew I was coming?” he asked.

“No one here, except me. What about at GreenTex?”

“Dad. Scott. Probably their secretaries and a handful of others. The security chief.”

No one Jake didn’t trust implicitly.

But then he’d trusted Alice, only to have come home from a quick trip to the company’s Venezuelan fields to learn she’d destroyed his child and betrayed him with a long-time business rival.

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“You back to stay?”

Jake shrugged. In the week since he’d flown halfway around the world to see firsthand the damage some madman was doing to GreenTex Petroleum’s domestic oilfields, he hadn’t had time to think about the state of his own self-imposed exile. “I’ll be around until whoever’s doing this is behind bars. You mind me barging in here?”

“We can always use another pair of eyes, not to mention a good strong back.”

Skip’s grin gave Jake a stronger feeling of welcome than his words. “Hell of a thing about Dale,” he said, his expression sobering.

“Best foreman I ever worked with.” Good-hearted, dirty talking Dale Larson, dead at forty-five because some son-of-a-bitch wanted GreenTex Petroleum out of business.

Jake would never get used to Dale not being there, yelling orders and making things happen in the GreenTex oil fields where he’d lived and died. “Who, damn it?

Who has it in for us?”

“I don’t know, Jake. I’m gonna bring this well in for you, though. Soon. You certain no one else knew exactly when you would be getting here?”

“Hell,
no one
knew exactly when I was going to get here. Not even me. I’d planned to leave Houston about the time the explosion happened. I couldn’t sleep, though, so I took off about two in the morning and drove straight through. Only times I stopped were for gas—and breakfast, at a little café about fifty miles south of here.”

“You didn’t call anybody from your car?”

Jake shook his head. “Didn’t even pick up the cell phone.”

Spending eighteen months at remote oilfields in the Saudi Arabian desert had cured him of the habit of talking while he drove. He’d damn near jumped out of his skin a week ago when the car phone had beeped while he drove his Porsche out of the GreenTex hangar at Houston’s Hobby Airport. “You don’t suppose someone at the café—“

“You saw somebody?”

“No one I knew.” But Jake remembered the creepy feeling he’d had, that somebody had been watching him while he ate. He’d wondered why, because he didn’t look all that different from the other men in the dilapidated café.

Sure, his jeans and pearl-snapped chambray shirt had seen less wear than some.

And his olive skin, baked from spending months under the blistering desert sun, was dark enough to make the locals stop and stare, take notice there was a stranger among them. But he didn’t think he’d drawn much attention from the rest of the customers.

Hell, he hadn’t even been the only high roller in the place. Jake pictured a pot-bellied, ruddy man who’d lumbered out of a mud-spattered, brand-new Lincoln, his Tony Lama boots caked with damp red clay.

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“I didn’t talk to anybody. Wait, I told the waitress I was coming here when she asked where I was headed.”

“Doubt some waitress in a country café would be tied up with these bastards. Don’t worry. They’ll slip up. And when they do, you’ll catch them.” Skip scratched his chest through a filthy, oil-soaked T-shirt. “I need a shower.”

“Go on, clean up. I’m going outside for a while.”

Stopping at the base of the derrick, Jake gave his thoughts free rein. He would find the saboteurs—and he wouldn’t go back and hide in GreenTex’s Saudi oilfields when this was over.

This was home. He hadn’t run from the smell of fresh air and raw petroleum, or from the American countryside with its piney woods and mesquite forests. And he didn’t want to miss the rush he always got when the drillers brought in another GreenTex gusher.

What he had run from was betrayal. And since there was no way in hell he’d give another woman the power to hurt him the way Alice had done, he had no need to hide and lick his wounds.

“Goddamn you,” he muttered, both to whoever was trying to destroy GreenTex and to his faithless ex-wife.

* * * * *

From the top of the hill, Kate stared down at the piece of ground where the drillers were so certain they would find oil.

The hour before nightfall was Kate’s favorite time of day. She liked watching the skeletal derrick sparkling eerily, its fluorescent lights mingling with reflected rays from the setting sun.

A man strode out of the trailer and stood alone at the base of the derrick. A stranger, she decided, knowing that she’d remember if she’d ever seen him before. He made her pulse race, her breathing turn ragged.

The man looked like a modern Adonis, one with the tensile strength and eerie beauty of the drilling rig beside him. The waning sun highlighted his wavy dark hair and emphasized the power of long lean legs encased in worn denim and dusty leather.

Shadows obscured his face and blurred her view of his torso.

>From a distance, he epitomized tough, muscled masculinity. The macho kind of man who had always put her off and sent her running to the safety of Pop’s arms—or David’s, until he’d made her choose between him and taking care of her father.