On Thin Ice. Debra Brown Lee

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      “But, Jack, I—”

      “Nanook here will see her to her trailer. Won’tcha, boy?”

      This was getting out of hand. Lauren pushed past them and grabbed her duffel and briefcase. “I can carry my own bag, thanks.” Before they could react, she ducked into the mudroom and made a beeline for her jacket and Sorels.

      Paddy followed her, Salvio and Adams in his wake. She laced her boots, shaking her head at their ridiculous behavior. This wasn’t exactly the Ritz, and she didn’t need a porter.

      Adams plucked her bag from where she’d dropped it. “I’ll take you out there. I’ve got a few minutes left before the shift starts up again.”

      “It’s not necessary.” She reached for the bag and, to her surprise, he let her take it. Their hands brushed in the transfer, their gazes locked, and for the barest second she imagined what those big hands would feel like on her body.

      What was that about?

      She shrugged it off and stepped around him, which wasn’t easy in the close quarters, given Adams’s size and the fact that she was dressed like the Michelin man in full survival gear.

      “Suit yourself.” Adams watched her as she snaked her way around the break room tables toward the exit. Her back was to him, but she felt his eyes on her all the same. Black eyes. Black as a winter’s night in the Chugach.

      “Scout, about that talk—” The door slammed behind her, cutting off the rest of Paddy’s words. She’d catch up with him later. Right now all she wanted to do was get settled and get to work.

      Heading straight for the geologist’s trailer, she sucked in a blast of frigid air. On purpose. The lung freeze felt good this time. Hell, yes. She was back in the field.

      She had a job to do. Failure was not an option. Not for the woman who was about to become Tiger Petroleum’s next exploration manager. Not for Hatch Parker’s little Scout.

      Chapter 2

      Seth Adams wasn’t a betting man, but if he had to guess who the corporate thief was that the Feds had hired him to finger, he’d put all his stakes on Lauren Fotheringay.

      Last year, a small, foreign oil company that had never set foot in Alaska before snagged a land deal netting what turned out to be a fortune in oil drilling rights. No way was it just dumb luck. They’d had an inside track. Access to geological data the FBI knew, because of the position of the leases, could have only come from one source—Tiger Petroleum.

      The Bureau had already ruled out the possibility that the foreign company simply stole the data. Tiger’s security was renowned in the industry. No, the data had likely been sold to them—and selling proprietary corporate data without that corporation’s knowledge or consent was a crime. A big one.

      There was a criminal at work somewhere in the Tiger organization, and the Feds, along with Tiger’s CEO and some high-ranking Wall Street types, wanted that person caught. The Caribou Island operation was as good a place as any to start. Perhaps the thief would strike again. No one at Tiger knew, of course, that they were under surveillance, and the FBI wanted it kept that way.

      Oh, yeah, Seth thought, as he watched Lauren Fotheringay out the icy window of the break room, lugging her duffel and briefcase across the site in near whiteout conditions.

      The woman was tough as nails. And a hell of a lot more attractive in the flesh than she appeared in that society news clipping he’d seen showing her dressed to the nines with Tiger’s money man, Crocker Holt. Seth had read all about the two of them in the dossier Bledsoe had provided.

      Those big brown eyes of hers had given him the once-over, too. More than once. In an irritating way, she reminded him of Kitty, his ex. They both had that same finishing-school, expensive-women’s-college, “hey, look at me, I’m a big lady executive” sort of arrogance about them.

      Behind the scenes, women like that got their kicks from messing with the heads of men they considered a couple of rungs below them on the evolutionary ladder. Construction workers, auto mechanics, even a roughneck now and then. Yeah, he knew the type. Boy, did he ever.

      What Little Miss Society In Geologist’s Clothing didn’t know was that he wasn’t a roughneck. Well, not anymore he wasn’t. Fresh out of high school he’d pulled pipe from Barter Island to Barrow, scraping together enough money to pay his way through college.

      He’d graduated with honors with a B.A. in criminology from the University of Alaska, surprising the hell out of his old man. Seth would never forget the day he called him in his New York office with the news. Not that an important oil man like Jeremy Adams had time to attend his kid’s commencement.

      Remembering, Seth made a derisive sound in the back of his throat.

      The FBI had recruited him right out of school. Some affirmative action thing, though he could have easily made the cut on his own. He ended up second in his class at the Academy. Even so, Bledsoe, his section chief in D.C., had never liked him. The feeling was mutual.

      Three years later Bledsoe had him dismissed for reasons Seth didn’t like to remember. He’d blown their cover on a major counterfeiting sting the FBI and Secret Service had spent six months and a bundle of cash setting up. The way Seth saw it, it was either that or watch his partner take one in the back. He’d had no choice. Bledsoe thought otherwise.

      In the end, his partner nearly bought it. Bledsoe somehow managed to blame that on him, too. After Seth got the ax, he went home to his native village of Kachelik, and had worked as a borough cop there ever since.

      It was a great job, and he loved the village. He had friends there, and family. His wife left him when the Bureau canned him and, in hindsight, he considered himself damned lucky. They were from different worlds, and Seth never intended to make that mistake again.

      The past few years had been pretty uneventful. No real challenges, no serious girlfriends. Everything was rocking along just fine until a few weeks ago when two suits showed up at the village in the dead of night in an unmarked FBI chopper.

      Bledsoe wanted him back. Needed him, was more like it. The Feds wanted someone undercover on Caribou Island, and couldn’t find one among the ranks of bright and shiny new agents who’d fit in on an offshore oil rig in the Arctic. Seth was elected.

      Altex’s grim financial situation made it easy for the FBI to get him out on the island. Posing as a native Alaskan affirmative action group, Bledsoe’s men had paid Paddy O’Connor a subsidy to hire Seth as a roughneck for the Caribou Island job. In a roundabout way, it was the second time he’d been hired by the Bureau because of his ethnicity.

      It would be the last time.

      He hadn’t wanted the job at first, but a tribal elder had counseled him to take it. Seth wasn’t sure why. He’d finally agreed, but it wasn’t because of the elder’s gentle prodding, or because Bledsoe offered him his old job back in D.C. if he fingered the perp. But this was no time to reminisce about his motives. He needed to focus on the facts.

      He’d been on the job six days now, and so far everything about the operation seemed above board. He’d gotten the usual cold reception from the crew. If he hadn’t, he’d have been suspicious. Jack Salvio was a nasty piece of work, too, but nothing Seth couldn’t handle. Everything СКАЧАТЬ