Radclyffe - Wild Shores

Austin grinned. “Well, now that you mention it…”

Gem’s face heated. “I guess you’re not so tired you can’t make trouble.”

Austin’s grin widened. “Never am.”

“I’ll just get my bags.”

“Wait.” Austin grabbed her hand. “Why don’t you call around from here, and then I’ll follow you to your place. The roads are really bad tonight.”

Gem should say no, but she didn’t really want to. The parking lot was empty and a little creepy in the fog. Visibility was no more than a few feet. The interior of the SUV was warm, and Austin was there. Gem flicked on the dash light and perused the town’s weekly magazine she’d picked up inside that listed all the restaurants, motels, B and Bs, and other businesses. Twenty minutes later, she closed her phone. “Other than going door to door, I think I’m out of options.”

“Nothing?”

Gem shook her head. “Well, it won’t be the first time I’ve slept in my car.”

Austin laughed. “It’s hardly going to come to that.”

“I don’t plan on sleeping in the airport.”

“Of course not. You’ll sleep with me.”

Chapter Nine

“I appreciate the offer,” Gem said, “but I’m afraid I can’t take you up on it.”

“I was kidding about the with me part,” Austin said. “But not about sharing quarters. I’ve got a room and you don’t. Not much different than me having a car and you being stranded.”

“I agree with the logic,” Gem said, “but the reality is a little bit different. I know what the rooms are like in these places where space is worth more than gold—if there’s three square feet to move around between the bed and the door, I’d be surprised. Which means there’s no extra room for an extra body.” She took a deep breath. After all, she had been the one to open this particular door, and Austin couldn’t be faulted for testing the waters. “And as appealing as the thought might be, I’m not sleeping with you.”

“I admit, I’m a little old to be sharing a bed in a purely platonic fashion with a woman I find attractive—summer camp this isn’t,” Austin said. “But given that we are two adults, we can probably rein in our teenage hormonal impulses for one night.”

Gem laughed. Austin was hard to say no to, and what she didn’t intend to say was that she was saying no more to herself—okay, completely to herself—than to Austin. She wasn’t entirely certain she could rein in those hormones as easily as Austin seemed to think she could. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t think twice about bunking with another woman in an emergency. She’d shared close quarters plenty of times out in the field with women she liked, including women she found attractive, theoretically. Unfortunately, her attraction to Austin was already far beyond theoretical. She trusted Austin not to push—she hadn’t so far—but she didn’t trust herself. She didn’t know what her body was doing. Well, she did, she recognized desire after all, but she didn’t know why . And she needed to. She simply did not have these kind of impulses, but there they were. Even now, desire kindled deep inside. The biologist in her understood the unconscious basis of attraction, the pheromones and hormones that governed physical responses, but she hadn’t been motivated by instinct in a long time.

Aware Austin was contemplating her patiently, Gem searched for some rational plan. “Let’s do this. Let’s make sure you actually have accommodations. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the people who had planned to check out today didn’t. And in this kind of weather, when it’s unlikely that people who had reservations would actually make it, the innkeepers might simply have ignored incoming reservations. We might both be sleeping in the truck.”

“I can just about guarantee that’s not going to happen,” Austin said. “But it’s a plan, and it’s better than leaving you here at the airport sitting on your luggage. Let me MapQuest this place and you can follow—”

“What’s the name of the inn? I know the town well, and new businesses are unusual. Chances are I’ve been there or at least by it.”

Austin thumbed through her emails and found the information from Eloise. “Gulls Inn.” She laughed. “Doesn’t every town along the shore have one of those?”

“Of course. It’s on Bay Street, the main road, all the way at the other end. I’ll go first.”

“See you there.” Austin pulled out behind Gem, the muted red glow of the rental car taillights the only illumination in the fog. She didn’t know how long her cell signal would last, but she figured it would be strongest near the airport. She needed to get in touch with Ray Tatum, if only to let him know she was on-site. From what Eloise had said, they weren’t in crisis mode yet, and there was nothing she could do out at the rig even if she could get there, which wasn’t happening tonight. She’d kept the email from Eloise open and squinted at the message by the greenish light from the dash, picked out the phone number Eloise had included for Ray, and thumbed it to call. He answered on the fourth ring, his brusque, faintly Irish-accented voice staticky.

“Tatum.”

“Ray, it’s me, Austin. I finally made it to Rock Hill. What’s the situation?”

“Fucking storm is killing us,” he said.

From experience, she knew something was always killing Ray. She’d worked with him enough times to know his hyperbole masked a hard-nosed bulldog of a personality. He’d do anything necessary to protect the rig, the oil, and by extension, the company. She liked him, but sometimes he was a pain in the ass to keep on a short tether. “Looks like there’s a break for a while.”

“My fancy-pants PhD meteorologist tells me it’s a false calm. Another front will be rolling in tomorrow night or the next day. We’ve got a small window of clear air starting around ten tomorrow.”

“Can you get me out to the rig for a look around?”

“Unless something blows wide open tonight, in which case I can’t get you out here by boat or air anyhow, midmorning should be fine. I’ll have a bird at the airport for you.”

“How do things look?”

“The rig foreman, Paulie Antanole, first noticed the pressure drop at one in the morning,” he said. “His boys were right quick about getting the sealer valves engaged. Kept a lid on things, but we haven’t stopped the leak.”

“Can you plug it?”

“If we can isolate the level, maybe.” Tatum sighed. “Hate to kill the well if we don’t have to.”

Austin didn’t have the authority to order Tatum to inactivate the well, and trying to explain to him that GOP would be happier losing a few million in profits from this one rig than having a PR nightmare that would cost far more wasn’t worth her breath. Tatum was an oilman—he’d do what he was ordered to do if all else failed, but he’d want to save the well if he could. “But you’re not blooming on the surface?”

“One thing the currents are good for in this fucking storm,” he growled, “is they’re dispersing it before it reaches the surface.”

Austin wasn’t assured. Dispersion that far from shore was safe, if it was really dispersing. When Deepwater Horizon blew in the Gulf of Mexico, underwater plumes of oil rode the currents as far as the Florida coast, fouling beaches and poisoning sea life. They couldn’t let that happen here. “Who’s watching currents?”

“Ali Farr.”

“He’s sure we don’t have a collection that’s going to get loose?”

“Fuck me if I know. He says we’re good so far.”

“What’s your gut feeling on this, Ray?”

“I don’t like it. If we can get the remote underwater vehicles down there and get a seal, we’ve got a chance. If the fucking storm doesn’t hit. Otherwise, my guess is we’ll see surface oil in the next thirty-six hours.”