Firestorm (2 page)

Angry with herself, Kate choked back her tears.

She had no reason to cry. No reason at all.

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

9

She listened to the roar of the huge drilling engine and the pounding of metal deep down in the rocky earth. She pictured herself alone but for that oil well, her loneliness appeased by staring at rough, hard men like him. Imagined her emptiness filled by fantasizing that he was ramming into her the way that drill was pounding the moist clay soil of her homeland.

A shudder wracked her body. Moisture pooled between her legs, tears shed for want of—

Him?

Until he looked up and saw her, she couldn’t stop staring at him. Even then, it took her a minute to turn and look toward the distant woods.

The sexual energy that suffused her body when she first saw him stayed as darkness began to settle, bringing with it a cooling breeze. Vivid in her mind was a picture of the man, as intimidating as the massive machines he had mastered, as magnificent as the land from which he would coax the magic stuff called oil.

Deep inside, she sensed that if she touched him, sparks would fly.

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

10

Chapter Two

“Ms. Black?”

The voice was deep, seductive, with just a touch of a Texas twang. A cultured voice, not the harsh drawl she’d expected to hear from an oil rig roughneck. A voice tinged with sarcasm, not unlike the voice that had rudely dismissed her fears when she called down to the rig this morning after the explosion.

That voice made Kate’s breasts tingle and fueled the hunger deep inside her. A tiny rivulet of moisture made its way down her thigh, the tear a silent plea to free the sensual woman buried inside.

“Yes.”

Suddenly she was afraid to face the stranger who had obviously watched her staring at him. He surely would see the need in her eyes, the heat that scalded her cheeks.

But Kate had to face him. “I was looking to see if the men had gone back to drilling,” she said. With luck he’d believe she had been staring at the well, not him.

“They have.” His sensual lips curled into what could have been a hint of a grin or a mocking smile.

Kate guessed it was the latter. “My first name is Kate,” she said, covering her discomfort with the cloak of polite conversation.

“Jake Green. GreenTex Petroleum. I talked to you when you called down to the rig this morning. Look, Ms. Black, we’re as anxious as you to bring in a gusher down there.

And Skip Ward’s the best driller around. You don’t need to worry, and you don’t need to look over our shoulders. There’s oil under that piece of ground, and we’ll find it.”

“Why are you here?” Mr. Ward had said GreenTex hired his company to drill the well. He’d also told her GreenTex, the large independent oil company that owned the leases on her land, wouldn’t be directly involved with the wildcatting operation until the well came in.

“Because someone’s trying to sabotage this operation.”

“Sabotage?” The word conjured up visions of shadowy men from warring third world countries, political intrigue, and senseless death and destruction. Things like that didn’t happen in rural Mississippi, or so Kate thought.

“Yeah, sabotage. As in exploding generators and broken drills,” Jake said, his lips curling in a half-smile that didn’t reach eyes almost black but for intriguing glints of gold. “As in delays we can’t afford. Delays that might make you wait a little while to reap the rewards from that well.”

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

11

There it was again, that implication that he considered her interest in the well to be singularly self-serving. “You said something like that this morning. What makes you think I can hardly wait to become rich?”

“Honey, you’re a woman.” He looked her over from head to toe, very slowly, apparently taking in every feminine curve.

It felt to Kate as if he were stripping her naked with his dark, brooding eyes.

“And you’re a chauvinist.” Kate shouldn’t care, but she didn’t like this man seeing her as some grasping woman on a quest for wealth. For that matter, she didn’t care much for getting wetter between her legs just because he’d seared her with his gaze.

“Sorry, I’ve got too much on my plate right now to bother with polite subterfuge.

You want royalties. I want money gushing in to GreenTex coffers from this well, not pouring out to the drillers and the security people who’ll be arriving tomorrow. No need in prettying up facts. Do you have any idea who might be causing us this trouble?”

“No.”

Jake ran a hand through sable-colored hair that looked as though it could use a trim. How would the different textures, soft on top where it was longer and crisp around the ears and against the tanned skin of his neck, feel against her fingers?

She itched to find out, to smooth back the wayward strands the hot wind had blown onto his sweaty brow. But she shook off that urge. Jake Green apparently had a chip on his shoulder so big it would knock her for a loop if she tried to slip beneath his prickly defenses.

“There have been other incidents at GreenTex wells. One man is dead. I have no reason to believe that whoever is doing this would target you, but I want you to be careful,” he told her, his expression solemn. “Let me know if you see anything suspicious.”

“I will.”

His expression softened, and he reached out and touched her hand. “Everything’s going to be all right, Ms. Black,” he told her. Then, as if he’d felt the same jolt of awareness that coursed through her veins, he snatched back his hand, turned, and strode down the hill.

For a long time Kate stood there, warmth radiating from the fingers he’d touched and melting the chill his warning had caused.

She’d never felt so instantly attracted to a man before—any man, let alone a man who was miles out of her league.

She had the feeling Jake Green would eat her alive.

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

12

Kate laughed. She hadn’t even been able to hold gentle, easygoing David, the only time she’d defied him and done what she had known was right.

She must be crazy, visualizing herself and this brooding scion of Texan oil royalty tangled up together in her sheets, skin to sweaty skin.

And fantasizing about the two of them in terms of romance, candlelight, and roses had to mean she was certifiable.

* * * * *

Soft music. Soft, naked skin pale under his hands. The smell of sex and some flowery perfume tickling his nose. The glow of flickering candlelight casting shadows on a face more intriguing than classically beautiful.

Kate Black’s face.

The following morning Jake slammed his fist onto the desk, cursing at the stinging pain. He had better things to do than fantasize that the woman who owned this land was as hot for him as his cock was hard and aching for her.

Damn it, why was he thinking about her anyhow? And why in hell had the thought of her stuck him with a raging hard-on?

Adjusting his jeans, he tried to tell himself his condition was a natural reaction to too many months spent without a woman. Hell, Kate wasn’t even his type.

He’d always gone for willowy blondes with long legs, big boobs, and slender hips.

Not brunettes so tiny that he’d have to bend to rest his chin on top of their tousled curls.

Or women so petite that the only way their bodies would fit together was fucking. With him standing up, holding her while she locked her arms around his neck and her slender legs around his waist.

They’d fit, too, if he took her from behind, lifting her cute little ass to keep her pussy lined up with his cock.

More blood rushed to Jake’s groin when he imagined him and Kate on a bed, belly to belly, his cock buried balls-deep inside her while their tangled arms and legs held their bodies as close together as a man and woman could get.

What the hell was wrong with him? Here he was, up to his eyeballs in trying to stop this sabotage before it destroyed GreenTex, and drooling over a woman he didn’t know and who by all that was holy shouldn’t even appeal to him.

Pity Alice hadn’t killed his libido along with his faith in women. If she had, he wouldn’t be nursing this painful hard-on that wouldn’t seem to go away.

Maybe after they caught the bastards bent on destroying the company his grandfather founded sixty-five years ago, Jake would stick around awhile and scratch Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

13

the itch Kate Black had so inconveniently awakened. If he didn’t come to his senses before then.

He picked up a core sample and tossed it between his hands.

Hell, maybe it was time he got married again, this time not for love but for the family his old man kept bugging him to start. The grandchild he never had the heart to tell his father Alice had killed before it had a chance to live.

Pounding boots on the wooden steps to the trailer distracted him.

“Jake?”

“Yeah, Skip?”

“Come on outside and take a look. If I’m not dead wrong, we’re gonna have a gusher on our hands sooner than we thought.”

* * * * *

“What’s all that racket now, Katherine?”

Whatever it was, Kate was grateful for the respite it offered from the woman’s diatribe about how the noise from the drill kept her neighbors from enjoying church services that were being held less than a mile down the road. “It sounds like men yelling, Ms. Gladys. And something rumbling up from deep down in the ground.”

From head to toe, Gladys Cahill was at her Sunday best. Her blue-tinged hair was arranged in tight curls and waves, and the pale gray shirtwaist dress she had on fairly crackled with starch. Kate didn’t know how she did it, but the woman’s low-heeled walking shoes of white patent leather looked pristine—even though she’d trekked from her car across Kate’s dusty gravel driveway.

Ms. Cahill had always known how to intimidate her. Kate shifted her weight from one foot to the other, painfully aware of the old shorts and T-shirt she’d put on to scrub her kitchen floor.

“A body'd think that oil company would give those boys a rest, let 'em praise the Lord one day a week anyway. What are they, a bunch o' heathens?”

Kate ignored the not so subtle barb. “I don't know. But I don't have any control over when they work.”

“You don't? Well, you should make 'em stop. And you might even show enough respect toward your neighbors to put on some decent clothes on Sunday.” Ms. Cahill eyed Kate as if she expected her to grow horns.

Damn it. Just once, Kate would like to tell the woman exactly what she thought of her meddling and harping, and her sugarcoated reminders that the Blacks had never really belonged in Groveland.

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

14

She swallowed the retort she itched to make. Ms. Cahill had been her fifth grade teacher. Being rude to the woman would go against all Pop had taught her.

Deliberately, she pasted a smile on her face and spoke in a conciliatory tone.

“I told you, Ms. Gladys. When I leased the land, I gave the oil company the right to do their drilling whenever they feel like it. They've been here for nearly two months now, though, and this is the first time they've worked on a weekend. Maybe they're at a point where they have to keep going.”

“Well, I'll never.” Ms. Cahill's face turned an angry red, but her flat, slow drawl stayed the same. Kate had never heard the woman raise her voice, in all the years she'd known her.

“I'm sorry. They should finish the drilling soon.”

“I hope so. We've got no use for heathens coming here, corrupting our children and our town.” She paused, then continued her diatribe.

Kate stood silently, trying to ignore the woman’s soft-spoken rant. Instead of focusing on Ms. Cahill’s venomous expression, she stared over the short, squat lady's shoulder toward the noisy drilling site.

Suddenly the drone of the engines stopped, and a deep rumbling noise drowned out the men’s raucous shouts. Jake Green was sprinting her way. As he got closer, she saw he was covered with black, slimy stuff from head to toe.

“Excuse me, ma'am,” she told Ms. Cahill as politely as she could manage.

“Somebody’s coming up here from the well now.”

“We've got us a gusher, honey, and it's a big one!” he yelled from halfway down the hill.

Before she could gather her wits, Jake leapt onto her porch. He lifted her high in the air, squeezing out her breath as he twirled her around in circles.

Her second to last conscious thought was that he was getting her positively filthy.

Her last was that Gladys Cahill looked like a wide-mouth bass before she stormed away to her car, what with her vacant stare and her gaping jaw.

Then Jake kissed her, and Kate couldn't think at all.

Dazed, she watched Ms. Gladys's car wind down her driveway to the road.

She saw Jake kiss me.
And what a kiss it was! She could still feel it, clear down to her toes.

Knowing Ms. Gladys would pass on what she had seen with malicious glee, Kate wondered how long it would be until everybody in Calder County would know she’d let a filthy roughneck maul her—and, incidentally, that her oil well had come in.

Still tingling from his kiss, she turned on Jake. “Why did you do that?”

Ann Jacobs

Firestorm

15

“Hell, I don't know. To celebrate that gusher down the hill, maybe? Seemed like the thing to do.”

His dark eyes glittered with apparent amusement, and when he shrugged she noticed the way the muscles in his shoulders and chest rippled beneath the oil-soaked T-shirt that was plastered to his big frame like a second skin.

“Oh.” Emotions warred inside Kate. Embarrassment. Outrage. Desire for this enigma of a man to mold her to his hard, sinewy body and make her feel instead of think. “Pretty soon everybody in the county will say I'm having illicit relationships with all the men on the drilling crew.”

“It was just a kiss, honey. And there’s just one of me. Don't tell me no one's ever kissed you before.” His whole face lit up when he grinned. “Besides, why should you care what a bunch of old busybodies think? Come on down the hill and get a good look at your new moneymaking machine.”