Debra Brown - On Thin Ice

A regular guy. A cop.

All at once Seth felt guilty. Here she was spilling her guts to him with no idea who he really was, or why he was here with her now.

“What about you?” she said. “Altex. Your job. I can see you’re good at it. Do you like it?”

He felt uncomfortable lying to her—which was ridiculous. On an undercover job like this, it came with the territory. He had to lie.

Award-winning author Debra Lee Brown’s ongoing romance with wild and remote locales sparks frequent adventures in the Alps, the Arctic—where she has worked as a geologist—and the Sierra Nevada range of her native California. An avid outdoorswoman, Debra loves nothing better than to strand her heroes and heroines in rugged, often dangerous settings, then let nature take its course. Debra invites readers to visit her Web site at www.debraleebrown.com or to write to her care of Harlequin Reader Service, P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269.

For Michelle

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Thirty-six below. Forty-knot winds out of the east. It was gonna be a big one.

Lauren Parker Fotheringay zipped her down survival jacket to her chin, cinched the fur-trimmed hood tight and peered out the chopper’s frosted window across an endless expanse of ice. In the dim winter light she could barely make out where land ended and the Alaskan coastline met the frozen Beaufort Sea.

“Whiteout comin’,” the pilot shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engine. He squinted into the blowing snow threatening to reduce visibility to zero. “Three hours, four tops. You sure you want me to drop you?”

Lauren shot him a wry look. “No, I changed my mind. Let’s turn this thing around and head for Hawaii.”

The pilot laughed, though she couldn’t hear him over the engine noise. She settled back in her seat for the last few minutes of the trip out to Caribou Island, the site of Tiger Petroleum’s latest oil exploration well.

It was simple, or should have been. Drill a ten-thousand-foot hole in the ground, collect rock samples over the target depth, document traces of oil, clean up the mess and come home. Your basic exploration well. Oil companies drilled them all the time on land leased from the government.

Caribou Island was nothing special, really, though it did sit just outside the boundary of a wildlife refuge, an area currently off-limits to oil exploration.

Tiger had leased the island’s drilling rights on an exclusive basis. The rock samples and data collected would be proprietary, giving Tiger an edge in finishing its geologic maps of the area, and when bidding on future land leases. In the oil industry, figuring out where the oil was, was only half the battle. The other half was managing to lease the land overlying it before anyone else did. Land was everything. The only thing. And competition among oil companies was fierce.

As Tiger’s most senior geologist and project manager, Lauren hadn’t done any real fieldwork for years. Her early successes had catapulted her to the top of the technical ladder, and this next promotion would take her even further. She couldn’t let anything screw it up. Especially a last-minute, routine assignment she had no time for, and that should have gone to one of her subordinates.

Both of the geologists originally assigned to Caribou Island had caught a nasty winter flu. Just her luck. Regardless, she was determined to get in, get her rock samples, and get out as quickly as possible. The well was nearly at target depth. A week should do it. Two, at most. She had three other projects to manage besides this one.

And she wanted that promotion. Bad.

Everyone expected her to get it, and she was never one to disappoint.

Lauren gazed out the window just as the chopper’s high beams caught an arctic fox scampering across the tundra on the prowl for lunch. She caught herself smiling. The assignment wasn’t really such a hardship. She was glad to be out of her hose and heels and into some comfortable clothes for a change. And she could breathe again. She’d forgotten how much she loved the Arctic. Untamed, fresh, real. So different from the life she’d been living these past few years.

On the corporate jet from Anchorage to Deadhorse, she’d slipped out of the expensive business suit Crocker had bought her on his last trip to San Francisco. He was always buying her gifts like that. No man had ever treated her with kid gloves before, not like Crocker did.

On board the chopper she’d coiled her carefully styled hair into a knot and stuffed it under her beat-up old hard hat. She felt good. Relaxed, almost. A break from the rat race was exactly what she needed. She grinned, wondering what Crocker would think if he were here with her now.

He’d never seen her in her field clothes: holey jeans, a turtleneck and the moth-eaten cardigan that had been her father’s favorite when he was alive. She twisted her two-carat diamond engagement ring inside her glove, imagining Crocker’s shock and her mother’s disapproval.

There was a whole side of her, come to think of it, that Crocker knew nothing about. They were to be married in New York in the summer. A big, traditional affair. Mother had it all planned, down to the last white rose and swath of expensive silk. Lauren supposed she should be grateful. Her commitment to her career left no time for such details.

Besides, Mother was wild about Crocker. Who wouldn’t be? As VP of finance for Tiger Petroleum, he was quite a catch, and one of the most respected oil company executives in the industry. Everyone liked him.

She was sorry, now, that they’d argued that morning. Crocker hadn’t wanted her to take on the Caribou Island assignment herself. He said he didn’t like the idea of her spending two weeks in close quarters with eighty guys—the type of men her mother called “oil field trash.”

Lauren had dismissed his concerns. The way she saw it, she had no choice. Caribou Island was one of her projects. Besides, the operation had been plagued with nothing but setbacks from the start. All the more reason for her to be on site herself.

“Roger that,” the pilot yelled into his communications headset.

She looked at him, her brows raised in question.

“It’s for you. Here.” He ripped the headset off and handed it to her.

“Me?” Who on earth was calling her out here? If it was Mother, Lauren would have a fit. She didn’t have time to discuss things like who was taking whom to Crocker’s birthday bash at the Fairmont next month, or what she was expected to wear to the latest charity ball.

Lauren’s life had changed radically after her father died and her mother remarried into the wealthy Fotheringay family. Mother had insisted her new husband legally adopt Lauren, so she might enjoy all the privileges associated with carrying the Fotheringay name. Sometimes Lauren wondered if her life had changed too radically.

Exhaling in exasperation, she pushed her hood back and slipped one of the earphones under the flannel lining of her hard hat. “Hello?”

“Hey, babe,” the choppy voice came back.

“Crocker!”

“Just checking on—” Static ripped the end off his sentence.