‘You okay?’ Stephen’s reassuringly deep voice took a while to work its way through the ringing in her ears.
Jo looked around wildly, trying to centre herself. She wasn’t a kid any more, she was grown up, in her own place. An adult. Standing in her own bathroom.
She looked up at Stephen’s large frame blocking the light from the hall, feeling like she was standing there naked.
‘Not really,’ she said in a tight voice, staring just over his shoulder.
‘Anything I can do?’ His voice had a hard, concerned edge, like Scott when he worried about her, and she felt herself tearing up again.
‘No . . . I’ve got it. Thanks.’
‘Sure? Because from what I could hear of your voice, it sounded pretty serious.’
‘It was nothing important. Just some . . . pissed-off guy from work,’ she fabricated on the spot.
‘That pissed-off guy live in the area?’
‘N-no. It’s just one of the dramas with doing what I do. It’s not a big deal. Really. Just . . . one of those things.’
Stephen made a low growling noise, conveying his opinion on the matter much more clearly than words.
Jo felt pressure building up behind her nose. If she didn’t change the topic, or at least get out of the bathroom and stop listening to Stephen’s deep sympathetic rumble in the dark, she was worried she’d do something stupid.
‘Uh, how do you feel about a cup of coffee?’ she asked unsteadily. Anything to keep busy and get him moving out of the doorway so she could pull herself together.
‘Coffee?’ She felt him studying her in the dark. ‘Ah, yeah, why not? I’ll just put on a T-shirt and help you make it.’
After taking a few deep, shaky breaths, Jo made her way out to the kitchen and turned on her espresso machine, going through the motions of filling it up with water and coffee beans to keep busy.
‘Want a hand?’ Stephen’s voice close to her ear caught her off guard, and she flinched, bumping into him. His large, warm hands steadied her shoulders, and she had to fight the urge to lean back against him. ‘Hey, I know it’s none of my business, but if you need to talk about this some more, I’m a good listener.’
‘It was nothing.’ Jo shook her head, guiltily revelling in his support. ‘Like I said . . . just an idiot from work. Nothing major. I don’t want to talk about it.’ She shrugged jerkily.
His hands flexed on her shoulders for a few seconds. ‘All right. How about you leave the coffee for a minute and come with me? Rachael—you know my twin sister, right? Well, Rachael says I give a pretty good shoulder massage.’
Jo started to shake her head in refusal but caught his concerned expression out of the corner of her eye and gave in. It was just so nice to have someone being this kind, and so unexpected that it would be Stephen.
‘That’d be great,’ she heard herself saying.
A few minutes later, she was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the couch in the living room. Stephen’s feet were planted on the floorboards either side of her, his hairy, tanned legs brushing up against the sides of her arms.
His strong hands gently kneading her shoulders were heavenly, but Jo was still too worked up to let the tension go easily. She knew she should be saying something complimentary or encouraging, but no words came out. Thankfully, it didn’t seem any were expected. They just sat there in silence, Jo’s head flopped forward, Stephen patiently running his hands over her shoulders and her neck, with the TV playing in the background and a large cat purring on the couch next to them.
Chapter 5
Jo stared blearily at her breakfast, sipping a truly awful lukewarm coffee, and tried desperately to block out Curly, who was bald, and Bud, who didn’t drink, having a quiet conversation behind her.
‘But since I got back from Phuket in Thailand, I’ve had this weird rash. It’s beginnin’ to worry me.’
‘Boy, get that looked at. Remember Bo?’
‘Sheeit. Yeah. You think that’s what this is?’
‘Never know.’
‘Didn’t his dick fall off?’
‘Hell no. He just pissed blood for months.’
‘Damn.’
That did it. No breakfast for her. Scowling, Jo pushed away from the table. Maybe she still had a chocolate bar in her room, although that was wishful thinking. Even if she did have one, she wouldn’t have time to make it back to the accommodation module before she was needed on the job.
Dammit, just when the crap cook had been run off the rig too. Rob, the company man in charge, had finally lost his cool after a particularly diabolical chicken-fried steak and had threatened to quit if a decent cook wasn’t sent post-haste.
Much to everyone’s delight, the company had sent a pastry chef, who wasn’t much better than the old chef in the meal department but made up for it with croissants and pastries that melted in the mouth.
Come to think of it, maybe Jo’s current fantasy of throwing Curly and Bud off the helideck into the jaws of a shark or two were a little harsh. They were practically doing her a service in stopping her from eating the generous helping of apple pie in front of her.
She made a point of swivelling around and giving the two of them the evil eye all the same. Not that they noticed. They were too busy talking about Jamal the suicidal ROV operator and his marriage problems. God, the men Jo worked with were old women. Always gossiping, always having a bloody melodrama.
She liked Jamal. She’d spent a pleasant hour or two yesterday keeping him company in the ROV shack, watching him control the tiny submersible submarine he was in charge of as fish floated by its cameras. They’d also had a bit of fun checking on Thermidor, the rig’s cranky and territorial adopted lobster who’d claimed the subsea wellhead.
She debated checking in on Jamal and Thermidor again before work but changed her mind. It sounded as if he had enough on his plate right now, and she was far from good company.
Due to a perennial room shortage, she was stuck sharing accommodation with Grumpy, a nightmarishly obese Texan driller, and even the most industrial-strength earplugs couldn’t block out his snore. The man had obviously been practising his earplug-puncturing technique for years. Maybe he could take a flying leap off the helideck too.
Now that was a pleasant thought. So pleasant that Jo ended up walking out of the mess hall to the mandatory morning safety meeting with a small, very malicious smile on her face.
As usual, the meeting involved some pencil-neck telling her to hold handrails when she walked up and down stairs. Which was all good and fine, but she heard it every morning. She stood at the back of the meeting room, trying to keep awake, and then filed out to the sack room, her daily domain, to meet up with Sanjeev, otherwise known as Hedgehog, for the morning handover meeting.
Familiar slivers of dread wriggled up her spine at the sight of his gangly frame in still-un-faded bright-red overalls. The man was going to be a great engineer.
One day.
If she didn’t kill him first. Or if he didn’t do something stupid and get himself killed without her assistance. Right now he was one of the greenest guys on the rig, and he had the uniform to prove it.
He’d gained his nickname from the Styrofoam coffee cups dipped in grease the roughnecks took delight in sticking to his hard hat when he wasn’t looking. This morning, after a twelve-hour shift, he’d accumulated three of them, all sticking out at odd angles. Jo shook her head, feeling her mouth twitch at the corners. Some of the reason behind her suppressed smile was relief that being the butt of stuff like that was far behind her, but if she was brutally honest with herself, there was a bit of vindictive pleasure thrown in there as well.
Hedgehog had been the reason she’d missed out on her last trip home and had spent four months on this godforsaken hunk of metal. Rick, her boss, had taken great delight in refusing her numerous requests to get the kid transferred. No doubt he saw him as fitting revenge for her lack of appreciation for his thirty seconds of glorified premature ejaculation yea
rs before. And revenge he had dealt her.
After only seven months on the job, Hedgehog had managed to create more bad luck than a sack full of black cats applied directly to the back of the head, under a ladder, standing on a pile of spilt salt. There was still a scrabble between the service company she worked for and the operating company that owned the oil field over who was going to pay for the three exorbitantly expensive batches of bad drilling mud he’d screwed up on his last shift on the rig.
Drilling mud was the rather mundane name given to the specialised drilling lubricant used when drilling an oil well. Jo, being the senior engineer on the job, was responsible for Hedgehog’s mistakes when mixing new batches and frequently needed an umbrella because of all the shit the kid regularly managed to get rained down on her head.
If she was honest, Hedgehog was a big reason she’d gone back home the last time wanting to quit her job. That and her lack of a social life, love life and last but not least, a sex life. Oh, and her growing intolerance for airports and flying long distances. And missing her sister, Scott and her cat, in that order.
Sometimes, more often than not lately, Jo wondered if the real reason she hadn’t quit yet was sheer stubborn pride. She’d made it in this world. Over the years, she’d taken all the crap her idiotic stone-age colleagues had thrown at her and had forced them to accept her, or, at the very least, fear her. She’d even made friends with a bunch of them, but lately any feelings of triumph she harboured over that success had diminished more and more, to the point where the smallest things were driving her insane.
Right now one of those things was the green kid standing in front of her wearing a sheepish grimace and too-new overalls.
‘So what’s been happening?’ she asked in a deliberately casual tone, leaning back against a wall that held a huge whiteboard listing the quantities of supplies and already mixed mud on hand. Next to it was a smaller corkboard with random photos of Jo’s redneck colleagues and the various guns they owned and animals they’d killed this hunting season. She couldn’t help but notice her roommate, Grumpy, was in the lead for this year’s hunting competition, having shot a bear. With a crossbow.
Hedgehog still hadn’t answered her question. Instead, he was inspecting his boots for the secrets of the universe.
‘What’s up?’ she prompted again.
He wobbled his head. ‘Nothing.’ That meant lots.
‘What went on last night?’ she asked. There was a trick to this. Ask the same question a few different ways; eventually the answer would be forthcoming.
‘Oh. Well, they started drilling through clay and needed another batch of mud.’ Hedgehog was prevaricating. Something was definitely wrong.
‘Okay, we knew that. So did you make it up?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘Was it the right sort?’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘For what they needed?’
‘Ah . . .’
Jo groaned. ‘Tell me you didn’t muck up another batch? Please?’
There was silence. And then the kid started gushing out the whole story, excuses and all.
Jo resisted the urge to scream, calmly listened to the sorry tale and prepared herself for a whole bunch of sarcasm from the drill floor for the next twelve hours. Just great.
By the time her shift was over, she was ready to take a dive off the rig herself. Surely that would be better than another four weeks like the day she’d just had.
Lugging herself to the mess hall for a welcome slice of pie, she realised she had a choice. She could either kill one of her colleagues or gain back her sanity through some non-violent, albeit less satisfactory, means.
In the end, she decided to call home. This involved standing near the small phone box in the mess hall, waiting for her turn and glaring at any man who came close to the phone. She heard one of the roughnecks snigger, ‘Krakatoa looks like she’s going to blow,’ and felt like saying too bloody right.
Her slow-burning but eventually explosive temper had earned her the nickname ‘The Volcano’ in her early days working on Australian rigs, but after she’d injured her leg and foot years before in a rig accident on the South China Sea, some sarcastic bastard had changed the nickname to ‘Krakatoa’, and it had stuck. She made a point of losing her temper every now and then to keep it up. It didn’t hurt to have the boys a bit scared of her. Gave her a much-needed advantage.
Not that it had worked today. Hedgehog had scarpered off to bed, leaving her to take the rap. The memory caused her frown to deepen, and two men walking past made a wide detour around her just so they wouldn’t put themselves within firing range.
The phone box finally came free after Matt the Kiwi finished up a call to his boss onshore. Rumour was going around thick and fast that he’d had a disagreement with the company man over the quality of his breakfast this morning. Apparently, he’d made his point clear in the end by tipping his breakfast plate over the big boss’s head before storming off to his shift. There was no doubt that he’d be run off the rig but that wasn’t a big deal. He’d easily find work elsewhere.
Last Jo had heard, the boys were already renaming him Mean Beans.
She breathed a sigh of relief when he finished up his call.
‘It’s all yours.’ He gave her a nod as he walked out of the booth.
‘Everything sorted?’ Jo asked, giving him a tired grin.
He returned it. ‘Yeah. I’m on tonight’s chopper.’ He clapped his hands together. ‘No more shit food for me! My missus is cooking me a lamb roast when I get home.’
‘Lucky bastard.’ Jo clapped him on the shoulder and watched him saunter away, shaking her head.
Thankfully, no one else was waiting for the phone, so she’d have it to herself for a while. She glanced at a clock on the wall and did a bit of time zone calculating. It would be midnight back in Australia. Scott would be up still. He’d always been a night owl, unlike Amy, who tended to pass out around ten and needed an alarm clock that could double as a fire alarm to wake up.
Scott answered on the second ring.
‘H’lo,’ he murmured huskily.
‘Were you asleep?’ Jo asked, worried.
‘No, no.’ His voice was muffled, and there was the sound of movement. ‘I was, ah. Busy,’ he whispered, and she had to strain to hear him.
‘Busy as in solo or busy as in company?’ She laughed softly.
‘Ahhh, company,’ he replied just as a female voice in the background called out something.
‘Oh. Sorry. Want me to call back later?’
‘Ahh.’ She could practically see him running a hand over his face the way he did when he felt awkward. ‘Ahh, yeah. Miss you, though. Everything all right?’
‘Yeah.’ It was a lie, but Jo didn’t think now was the time to offload.
‘Cool . . . Cool . . . Well, I gotta go. Oh, Stephen’s been trying to get hold of you. Can you call him?’
Jo straightened from her slouch against the wall. ‘Oh yeah? Anything urgent?’
‘Not sure. Just said he wanted to talk to you. It’s probably something minor about the house. Don’t worry.’
‘Okay,’ Jo said, feeling more awake than she had for days.
‘Well . . . ahh.’
‘Piss off.’ She chuckled at the discomfort in Scott’s voice.
‘Thanks.’ His relief was palpable.
She hung up, a smile still on her face and a whole lot of questions buzzing through her mind. Stephen wanted to talk to her. She wondered why and cursed the fact she’d have to wait until a respectable hour to call him.
The question was still playing on her mind while she stared at the top bunk that night, trying to block out the sound of Grumpy returning to the room from his shift. She hoped it wasn’t anything serious. Especially nothing to do with Boomba. She experienced a moment of worry about her cat and then shook her head. No, if it had been a problem with her cat, he would have told Amy or Scott. Same went for anything else equally serious. She’d paid all of her b
ills online . . . with a quiet groan she sat up and peered at the small alarm clock sitting by her pillow. It would be nine in the morning in Australia. Maybe she’d be able to catch Stephen at home. If he was there. There was a good chance he’d be either working already or with his girlfriend, or friend with benefits, whatever that meant.
In Jo’s experience, there was no such thing as a friend you slept with and stayed a friend with in the long term. Sex confused things. Not that she’d had any in quite some time. Well, other than a couple of completely unexpected steamy dreams about her housemate which had left her so edgy the past few days, the men she worked with were joking that she should be put on the agenda for the morning safety meeting.
The phone was blessedly free when she arrived. The call had almost rung out when a curt female voice answered. ‘Hello, Stephen Hardy’s residence.’
Jo held the receiver away from her ear and stared blearily at it. ‘Uh, hello. Is Stephen there?’
‘He’s indisposed at the moment. May I ask who is calling?’ the woman answered brusquely.
‘Tell him it’s Jo. He wanted me to call,’ Jo replied, frowning.
There was a brief muffled conversation at the other end before the phone changed hands.
‘Hi, Jo?’ Stephen’s voice was deep and infuriatingly sexy. ‘It’s great to hear from you.’
‘Hi. Who’s your secretary?’
‘Ah, that’s Bridgett. We were just about to head out. You in town?’
‘No. No I’m in the middle of nowhere on the Atlantic Ocean on a large bucket of rust,’ Jo replied, getting impatient. ‘You told Scott you needed to talk to me, so I’m calling you. Can you spare a couple of minutes or not?’
There was a silence for a few seconds and a muffled curse. ‘Honestly? I can’t. I’m really sorry about this. Can I call you back?’
Incredulous, Jo held the receiver away from her face and looked at it again.
Unforgettable You: Destiny Romance Page 8