Predator (Copper Mesa Eagles Book 1) (2 page)

Juliana smiled, glancing between him and the road.

“Better,” she said, shifting gears again. “Everyone calls me Jules, by the way.”

“That seems a little more fitting,” Seth said, settling back into the truck’s bucket seat. He redirected one of the AC vents so it was hitting him right in the face, letting the cool air wash over him.

“Juliana seems a little formal,” he said. “Princesses in poofy dresses, that kind of thing,” he said.

“Yeah, I think my mom was hoping for a girlier girl when I was born,” she said. “I’ve got three older brothers, so she put me in a lot of tutus and stuff, but I’d just get them muddy immediately.”

For a moment, an image came to mind: Jules in a mudpit, her clothes sticking to her curves like glue, her laughing and tugging on his arm.
 

Engines,
he told himself sternly, fighting an erection.
Serpentine belts and transmissions and brake fluid.

It worked, but barely.

“What brings you to Obsidian?” he asked.

“I’m a staff geologist for Quarcom,” she said. “I’m doing some testing on a big mining project that they’re doing out here.”

Seth frowned and looked at her.

“There’s a mining project?” he asked.

Deep down, he had a sudden inkling of trouble. A mine, in Obsidian? He’d seen other towns turn into little more than giant waste pits from big mining operations.

“Yeah, it’s way out in the middle of nowhere,” she said, gesturing at the desert. “They put me up in a trailer for a little while, and then I’m off to whatever the next place is.”

That
made his heart squeeze, like talons had closed around it

“How much longer are you here?” he asked. “That’s the turnoff, by the way,” he said, pointing.

“Just a few days,” she said. “I’m almost done, and then they break ground.”

She downshifted and the truck rumbled onto the side road, this one even rougher than the dirt road they’d been on.

“They don’t pave much out here, do they?” she muttered to herself, leaning forward in her seat, peering through the dusty windshield.

“There’s really no point,” said Seth. “The dirt is almost as hard as asphalt, it never rains so it never gets muddy, and we’ve all got high-clearance trucks already.”

Up ahead, construction equipment loomed, and Jules pulled in next to it. A few guys in hard hats looked up from pouring concrete to the girl in the truck.

“Thanks for the ride,” Seth said.

“My pleasure,” said Jules. Then she looked away from him quickly, and Seth thought that she blushed a little.

“I know you’re not in town for much longer, but I could show you around a little. As payment,” Seth said, grinning at her.

In his chest, his heart thumped, its wings beating at his ribcage.

Her eyebrows went up, and a mischievous sparkle came into her green-brown eyes.

“You gonna take me to the auto parts store?” Jules said, teasingly.

She had a good point.

“I can borrow a car,” said Seth. “I know people. Come on, I’ll pick you up in the nicest Ford from the 1980s that I can find.”

This time, she laughed out loud.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m sold.”

She reached into the glovebox and grabbed a pen and paper, writing her number down, then holding it out toward him between two fingers.

“If we don’t at least go to the laundromat-slash-bar-slash-diner-slash-general store, I’m going to be very disappointed,” she said, her eyes dancing.

Seth grabbed the paper and hoisted his arm over the back of his seat.

“Jules, I know the owner of the laundromat-slash-bar-slash-diner-slash-general store
personally
, and I will get you the finest slice of strawberry pie that Obsidian has to offer.”

Now her cheeks were bright pink, obscuring her freckles just a little.

“Sounds good,” she said, and then added, her voice a little more subdued, “Can’t wait.”

Seth’s heart soared.

He hopped out of her truck and then waved as she drove away, disappearing back down the road they’d driven in on.

Behind him, he heard a long, low whistle.

“Least you’ve got a good reason for being late this morning,” said Brad. He stood with his hands on his hips, his dirty t-shirt tucked into dirty jeans accentuating his paunch.

“My truck’s busted again,” said Seth, watching Jules drive away. “I got a ride.”

“I’ll say,” said Brad, waggling his eyebrows at Seth, who had to force himself to laugh.
 

It wasn’t that Brad was funny, it was that he was still giddy from getting Jules’s number.

“She was nice,” he said, trying to downplay the whole thing, even as his heart hammered in his chest.

“She new?” asked Brad. “Don’t recognize the truck.”

“Only here for a little while, doing something or other for a mine that’s going in,” Seth said.

He frowned, remembering that part of his drive. A mine near Obsidian?

Maybe it’s nothing
, he told himself.
At least, I hope so.

“Passing like two ships in the night,” said Brad, like he was trying to sound philosophical.

Seth gave him a funny look, and Brad just shrugged.

“It’s from a book or something,” he said. “Come on, this concrete’s not gonna pour itself.”

Seth grabbed his helmet, put his lunchbox in the lunch area under a tent, and got to work.

Chapter Two

Jules

Jules kept her eyes glued to the rearview mirror as she drove away from the construction site. Seth didn’t move, just watched her as she drove away.

She’d thought she might be having heart palpitations, and prayed that he hadn’t noticed how sweaty her palms were on the steering wheel. Inside, she was practically shaking with nerves, remembering the look in his gold-brown eyes.

I don’t even know whether to be pleased or angry,
she thought.
I finally find the one super-hot guy in town, and it’s when I’ve only got three or four more days here
.

 
The truck jolted over a pothole as she picked up speed, and she made an involuntary
oof
noise, hitting the brakes.

“So much for driving like a local,” she muttered to herself.

She had her GPS mounted to the dashboard, but it wasn’t much to look at: just one line stretching off into the desert with a red dot at the far end, the site where she was supposed to be testing dirt mercury levels after Quarcom had sunk a few preliminary holes.

Not for the first time, she felt bad about her job. It wasn’t the work itself that she disliked — far from it. She’d always been a big dork who liked getting dirty and playing in the mud, so hiking for miles to collect dirt and rock suited her pretty well. Plus, she actually
liked
the lab work, the puzzle of figuring out how to get the information that she wanted from what she had, and then trying to put it all together into a bigger picture.

It was Quarcom she wasn’t quite sure about. She told herself that someone was going to do her job, whether it was her or not, and that she was actually
helping
the world by making sure that Quarcom didn’t do too much harm to the environment.

The thing was, it still
felt
like a lot of harm sometimes. On her last job, in Canada, she’d watched as they razed mountaintops and flooded a river in the far north, all to mine toxic metals so that people the world over could have cell phones. Sure, someone was going to do her job, but did it
have
to be her?

She went over another bump in the road, lurching around, and the seatbelt across her chest dug in uncomfortably. Jules made a face and tried to rearrange the thing so that it didn’t dig
quite
so much into her boobs, but she knew a losing battle when she saw one. It didn’t help that the truck had clearly been made with someone about eight inches taller than her in mind, not to mention that the truck’s ideal owner didn’t have breasts.

I should have taken the USGS job
, she thought, and not for the first time. After college, she’d figuratively hit gold and gotten
two
job offers — especially amazing, since most of the other kids she knew were moving back in with their parents and working at fast food joints, utterly unable to find any kind of work in their fields.
 

The United States Geological Survey job had sounded interesting, and it could have led to more research and fieldwork, maybe even influencing environmental policy.

The job with Quarcom had sounded interesting, too, despite her reservations.

It had also paid fifty percent more than the USGS job.

She’d taken a night to think it over, staying in her parents’ little house in the mountains of West Virginia, a couple of hours from Morgantown, where she’d gone to school.

That night, after dinner there’d been a knock on the door, and her mom had answered it as her dad washed the dishes.

“Hi, Mrs. McCade,” said a vaguely familiar voice. Jules had gotten up from the kitchen table and stepped to one side to get a look at the guy at the door.

“Do you have ten dollars I could borrow?” he asked with a slight lisp.

Jules gasped when she saw who it was: Bobby Hale. They’d gone to high school together. She’d been wildly uncool, but he’d been the quarterback of the football team, dated the head cheerleader, the whole nine yards.

Now, he was skinny, his hair dull, his eyes sunken in. He was missing at least half of his teeth, and the remaining ones were turning gray in his mouth.

“Bobby, you know I don’t truck with that,” Jules’s mom said, her voice stern.

“Please, Mrs. McCade, they turned the electricity off again so we ain’t got no way to cook...” he said, his voice trailing off.

“I’m sorry, Bobby,” her mother said firmly.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Bobby muttered, and then turned and walked away.

When her mom turned, Jules could see the tears just starting in her eyes.

“Was that Bobby Hale?” Jules whispered.

Her mom just nodded.

“There was an accident in the mine and he hurt his back pretty good, so he can’t work no more. Collects disability, and the doctors put him on pain pills. He found his own way to meth.”

Jules covered her mouth with her hand, and her mother fixed her with a steely look.

“There but for the grace of God goes you,” she said, her mouth a hard line. “If your father had ever gotten hurt like that, we’d be right where Bobby is, and don’t you forget it.”

The next morning, Jules had accepted the job with Quarcom. She put nearly half of every paycheck into a savings account, and the rest went to food, rent, and her student loans.

In the truck, Jules could see the red dot coming up on her GPS, even though there was still nothing that she could see out the windshield, no matter how hard she squinted.

Could be wrong
, she thought.
I used latitude and longitude, though. Ought to be something out here
.

Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, there was a tent and a table. Jules drove up next to it and stopped the truck, just looking at it.

As the dust cleared, she could just make out a brown, sluggish river in the distance. The river was downhill from where she was, and sharp, jagged steppes marked the distance between where she parked and the ugly water.

Wait,
she thought.
Is this really the mine site?

If this is the mine site, the tailings are going straight into that river
, she thought, digging again through her glove box for a map.

The Elk River,
she read.
Are there really elk out here?

It didn’t seem likely, but she had other things to worry about.

I’m in the wrong place
, she thought.
This can’t be it
.

With a sigh, she grabbed the big canvas bag from the space behind her driver’s seat and hauled it to the table under the tent, then grabbed a couple of big, sturdy rocks to hold down the corners of the map that she spread out.

She’d been right: the mine wasn’t going to be where she was standing.

It was going to be on the mesa over to her right, maybe a half mile away.

Technically, the mine was going to destroy the mesa.
 
Jules frowned, looking over the documentation, but her eyes weren’t deceiving her.
 

According to what was in front of her, mountaintop removal mining had been performed successfully on a mesa somewhere in the Australian Outback. Afterward, the mesa had been half as big as its initial size, and it looked more like a pile of rubble than a geological feature.

Jules’s heart sank.

This is awful
, she thought.
I can’t do this. It’ll destroy the mesa, and maybe worse, everything they dig up is going straight into that river
.

For a moment, she wondered how they had even gotten this far, but she didn’t have to wonder for long. Quarcom was a billion-dollar company, and they had lobbyists all over both Washington, D.C. and the Utah state house in Salt Lake City.

Looking at it from that angle, Jules was a little surprised that they hadn’t razed an entire mesa before.

Don’t worry
, she thought.
There’s no way that they’ll get to go through with this. You’ll run the tests, and point out that this is anything but legal, and they’ll have to mine somewhere else.

Hopefully somewhere that won’t essentially destroy an entire area
.

She didn’t have high hopes about that part of it, though, and even as she tried to make herself feel better, she couldn’t help but worry.

In particular, one face kept on coming back to mind.

Seth
.

Jules closed her eyes and tried to get him out of her brain — she was trying to focus on large-sale environmental destruction, after all — but it wasn’t much use.

If they were going to essentially destroy the river and the mesa in Obsidian, what might they do to the people? What was going to happen to the wild, rugged desert where they lived?

She saw his gold eyes again, his unkempt hair splashing around his face as he’d leaned back in the seat of her pickup truck as she’d tried not to stare. There had been a spot of sweat, slowly spreading down from the neck of his shirt, and she’d felt helpless to not watch it as it stuck to him, the ripples of his soft t-shirt barely hiding the hard, sculpted physique below.