Uncommon Pleasure (2 page)

Dark blond eyebrows rose ever so slightly above his Oakleys, but he said nothing. She slid into her car. A push of the button started the engine, and within moments cold air blasted from the vents, chilling the sweat at her hairline, hardening her nipples. She backed out, and in the rearview mirror she saw the door close and brake lights flash on Ty’s truck before she headed across the causeway connecting Pelican Island to the mainland.

Maybe she’d misunderstood the looks that lingered a little too long, attributed sexual interest when he saw only an oddity, a five-foot-ten female geologist working in the male-dominated oil industry. Whether he showed or not, she’d still be going to McGuigans, but she hoped he showed. She wasn’t just curious about Ty Hendricks. She wanted to know what it was about him that sped up her heart, made her aware of her body, and his, brought to the surface a very primitive female yearning. She knew exactly what she wanted.

She wanted Ty.

*   *   *

The unexpected conversation with Lauren Kincaid in the parking
lot sent a fairly predictable sensation coursing down Ty’s spine. After four tours and months of working two- to four-week jobs on isolated, confined oil rigs, he recognized the purely physical need for a woman that he suppressed when there was no chance in hell of having one.

She’d stood out from the moment she got out of the helicopter with the rest of the crew assigned to log the well and not just because
all loggers wore the same color jumpsuits. Ty noted endless legs and a full, wide mouth, then tried to dismiss her from his mind. Work relationships were too complex to make the payoff worthwhile, and a woman like that would want more than he would give.

Until he’d seen her standing by her car, realized she was waiting for him, and thirty days of repressed need became a physical ache, sitting low and tight in his spine, hardening his cock. But physical need wasn’t enough; he had numbers to text if he wanted to get laid. No, what got him under the tepid trickle of water that passed for a shower in his hotel room then digging through his duffel for clothes both clean and suitable for McGuigans was simple curiosity.

How would that mesmerizingly calm woman look in a dress?

The setting sun bled orange and red into the Gulf, the tips of the waves gilded silver as he drove to McGuigans, parked the truck in one of the lots near the beach, and walked the rest of the way to the bar. His phone buzzed with a text message. As he walked he flipped it open to see
New op 8 am my office
from John Langley. Good. Work, lots of it, helped mute the memories.

So did alcohol and sex.

The two-sided bar separated the restaurant from the back patio. Lauren was sitting on the patio side at the end of the bar, and when he saw her something very primitive flickered to life under the curiosity. Each of the four days she’d been on the T-22 she’d restrained her hair in braided twists just under the back strap of her hardhat, but now her hair streamed over bare shoulders and down her back.

He wanted to see that silver-brown silk caught on her wet lips, sliding against his thighs to pool in his lap.

A bottle of beer sat in front of her, and her long fingers trailed in the moisture sliding down the green glass as she watched the flat-screen TV over the bar. The Thursday-night college football game was on, the commentary competing with the music barely audible over conversations. He’d been out of the Corps over a year.
Civilian life should have felt normal, but crowds, noise, and no personal space still set his nerves jangling. Ignoring the internal clamor, he turned and worked his way down the bar to her. Something tipped her off to his presence, because she looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide with something he could only identify as
not flirtation
.

For a long moment silence stretched between them, tinged with the same heat currently climbing her throat to her cheeks. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

He signaled the bartender for a beer, then said, “I eat.”

She turned on the bar stool to face him, and all mental activity halted as her outfit registered in his brain. Lauren Kincaid’s idea of a dress was what his mother would have called poor judgment and his grandmother would have called a disgrace, but some years all a cotton farmer’s wife had was her respectability. He was the only member of his extended family to leave Camden County, Georgia. The Corps, travel, and life experience shone a different light on their attitudes. That perspective transformed him from local boy to outsider, and made it hard to go home even before his last tour. Now it was worse. He knew he was different, and they knew he was different. No one knew how to bridge the gap.

The disgrace was the color of the sweet, milky chai tea he drank with the Afghan villagers, and thin straps exposed virtually all of her shoulders, neck, collarbone. The fine silk lay against the gentle slope of her breasts and her flat belly without the ridge that normally accompanied a bra or panties. He’d bet the next round that under her expensive-looking dress she was bare all the way down. With her legs crossed the skirt rode up to midthigh, revealing a good three-quarters-of-mile-long, smooth, tanned legs.

Breathe, Hendricks.

Under his gaze the pink staining her collarbone and cheeks darkened, and she bit her lip, looked away, then her eyes met his again.
Her position on the bar stool left her head below his as he leaned against the bar and began sharing body heat, the first step in the dance. Despite the air-conditioning blasting away inside the bar, heat radiated from her, and a clean, simple scent rose into the air between them. A hint of lip gloss, and dark shadow on her blue eyes that turned them storm gray. The pink on her cheekbones was all him, though, and by the time he was through with her mouth, that color would be all him, too.

Blood surged south, but there were manners and rules to this game. To cover his response, he looked out at the patio area, saw a table for two being cleared. “Let’s eat,” he said.

She picked up her bottle of beer and uncrossed her legs, all it took to get her feet flat on the floor. He led the way, spending the time it took them to snag the table trying to think of something else to talk about besides food and sex.

“How did the well look? Worth casing off?”

The corners of her mouth lifted, but whether she was laughing at his conversational gambit or enjoying the diversion, he couldn’t tell. “Preliminary logs look good,” she said. “There’s a solid pay zone around fourteen thousand feet. Everyone’s waiting on orders, and I need to finish my analysis on reserves, but it was worth the trip out.”

“Even if you were out there twice as long as you should have been,” he said.

The waitress arrived with menus. “Anything else to drink?”

“We’re ready to order,” Ty said, then glanced at Lauren. “Unless you’ve changed your mind.”

“No,” she said.

“A Thai chicken salad for the lady and a french dip and fries.”

The waitress tucked the menus under her arm, scribbled on her order pad, and disappeared.

Lauren picked up her bottle of beer and took a long swallow.
“Rigging down to clear the same bridge twice doesn’t make for the smoothest logging run,” she said. The driller all but yanked the drill string up through the sensitive sand section, a move that would at best partially collapse that part of the hole and at worst cause an underground blowout. “I thought for sure the driller would swab the hole, but he didn’t.”

“You got lucky,” Ty said. “Last run he did swab it. The geologist had to fly back twice to get four thousand feet logged. He was pissed. He send you instead?”

She smiled again. “He’s got a wife and two kids, hates to be away from them. I’m happy to go in his place.”

“Nobody waiting at home for you?”

“Just my dog,” she said lightly, her fingers trailing through the condensation again. “You?”

Where was home anymore? His sisters, brothers-in-law, and father waited for him to come home to Georgia, but that wasn’t going to happen. There was no one here. “No,” he said shortly.

“Dave said he’d fire the driller and give you his job,” she said, continuing with the work-themed conversation.

Ty shifted in his seat. The temperature hovered near eighty-five, and the indoor air swirled around his booted feet, doing nothing to cool his upper body. She’d know the job as driller paid more, had better hours, and he could pick his crew, but he didn’t want to go there. “He tried. I turned him down,” he said shortly.

She said nothing, just tilted her head and studied him. “You’re not from around here,” she said.

“Neither are you.” He was out of practice with dating and casual conversation, but remembered it wasn’t supposed to sound like a verbal fistfight.

“My parents are from Kansas, but my dad is career Army and we lived all over the world,” she said easily. “After two years in
England we had to break my sister of her English accent, but the rest of us just sound like Midwesterners. You’re from…?”

“Georgia,” he said.

“You do pronounce all the vowels in a word,” she said.

“Just talking,” he said, lifting one shoulder. As the silence stretched between them she idly rubbed her instep against her calf. The thin silk of her dress slipped down to pool at the tops of her thighs, but she made no move to push it down.

The sexy dress, the hair, the makeup all made her look a little younger, a little less professionally polished, but none of it changed the fundamental confidence and competence she radiated. She was studying him the same way she’d pored over the logging reports and the mud samples when she arrived, and the scent of her skin or maybe whatever she’d washed her hair with drifted into his nostrils, mixing with his blood like oxygen.

They may not have much to talk about, but he’d bet his truck Lauren didn’t want to talk.

The waitress came back with their food. He ordered another beer, and for a while, they ate. She used her knife and fork to eat her salad, cutting the fancy, dark green leaves into bite-sized pieces, watching foot traffic go by as she ate.

“They ebb and flow like the wave patterns,” she said after a while. “Watching the ocean from the helipad is still my favorite part about being on a rig.”

He finished chewing a mouthful of fries as he looked at the pedestrian traffic. At the back of his mind he wondered what it must be like to see only this moment, not a steady stream of possible threats or unwary victims. “I felt the same way about being on the deck of an aircraft carrier,” he said.

“I should have known,” she said, “but I thought with that hair, no way. Navy?”

“Marines,” he replied.

A light flicked on behind her eyes. “NCO?”

“Staff sergeant,” he said. The montage of images he could never fully turn off brightened and sharpened in his mind—the acrid stench of high explosives, smoking rubble, bodies laid out under shrouds. Children wailing.

“How long have you been out?”

He startled. “A year,” he said, then before she could make a reply, added, “Twelve years in. Four tours, two in Iraq and two in Afghanistan.”

Her smile faded as her eyes sharpened. She tilted her head and considered him, her fingers toying with the liquid slipping down the side of her beer bottle. “So, Ty, what’s a former Marine doing working as a roughneck on an oil rig?”

That was the million-dollar question he didn’t want to answer. “Gotta do something.”

She waited, like she expected something more, details, an explanation, a lifelong fascination with drilling into the earth’s crust in search of a nonsustainable fuel source, and when the silence grew, her smile slowly disappeared. The girls he picked up the first night off the rig usually chattered more than Lauren did, so he’d reached the end of his small talk capabilities. But her storm gray eyes met his without flinching, and the living, breathing, beating thing hovering in the air between them swelled in his ears, drowning out the high-pitched laughter in the background, the street traffic, everything.

He braced his elbows on his knees to reach down and brush the back of his finger over the delicate knob of her ankle, thin, silky skin over bone. She blinked slowly, watching him move his finger an inch higher to stroke the hollow above her ankle. Slow, small moves on a patch of skin no bigger than a Post-it note, nowhere near an erogenous zone. Not too much pressure, just enough to register intent, purpose.

Her mouth softened as her breath eased from her and his body
felt the chemistry like he’d hooked himself up to a battery charger. “Tell me what you want, Lauren.”

“You.”

No playful flirtation, no licked lips or flicked hair or sexy bump-and-grind on the dance floor at No Limits. Objective stated, terms agreed to, decision made. “Pretty bold,” he said.

“Welcome to the twenty-first century,” she said softly.

Twenty-first century or not, the primitive male urge to claim flared in the muscles and bones of his arm, and he shifted his finger up the swell of her calf, to her inner knee. Shivers raced along the taut skin of her thigh and, more to the point, hardened her nipples under the thin layer of silk, catching his attention.

“What do you want, Ty?”

Oblivion.
Hot, dark, mindless oblivion. “I want to know what you’re wearing under that dress,” he said, then drew his finger over her knee, letting the bump of her kneecap break the connection, transforming the movement into an open palm as he stood. A quick glance up at his face, then she put her hand in his and followed him out of the restaurant.

“Where?” she asked as they cleared the front door.

“Your place?”

“Not a good idea,” she said. “I’ve been gone for four days so my dog’s a little possessive right now. Plaintive whimpers aren’t my idea of mood music.”

She probably had one of those sleek silver dogs, a Weimaraner, and he didn’t feel like dealing with a big, growling, overprotective guard dog. “I’m at a hotel,” he offered. He owned his truck free and clear, hell, he had the money to buy a house outright, but there was no point putting down roots when he might crew out of Louisiana or go overseas. This way there was no roof to repair, no pipes to burst, no lawn to mow or windows to clean. Nothing to take care of. Nothing depending on him.