Leaving Necessity

by Margo Bond Collins

  He frowned. Something about her clothing was off, despite his repeated reminders the day before to be sure to wear something she didn’t mind getting dirty.

  “Good morning.” She spoke coolly, settling herself into the seat and fastening her seatbelt.

  Mac handed her one of the two coffees he had picked up at the convenience store when he stopped to fill up the pickup with diesel. “Morning.”

  Holding the cup up to her face, she breathed in and closed her eyes. “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes popped open almost immediately, as if she had remembered that she needed to keep her defenses up around him.

  That guarded stance wouldn’t last. Mac would make sure of it.

  For right now, though, he needed to be all business.

  “I brought information sheets for each well site,” he said, picking up the folder on the center console between them and handing it to her. “It’ll take a while to get to the sites, so I figured you could look over the specs for each one on the way out there.”

  As he handed her the paperwork, something almost like electricity flashed from her fingertips to his, even as Mac tried to avoid brushing her with his touch. He suppressed a shiver and put the truck into gear.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched her long, slim hands flip open the folder, a frown creasing her forehead as she began perusing the long columns of numbers and calculations.

  The silence in the truck wasn’t as uncomfortable as Mac had feared. As she read, Clara made little muttering noises, and after a few moments, she dove into her black leather bag for a pen.

  When she began making notes on the overviews he had provided, Mac allowed himself a tiny smile. He knew when he created the printouts that Clara wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to study them and ask questions. That curious streak was something she had always shared with Gavin.

  It was one of the reasons Mac had been sure she needed to get out of Necessity when they were young.

  It seemed ironic that now he was planning to do everything he could to make her stay, at least for a while—but that was life. It never quite worked out how you planned it.

  It took almost half an hour to get out to the nearest site, and Clara hadn’t spoken again, choosing instead to bury herself in information about the wells they would be visiting.

  Fine. He could talk enough for both of them, if it came down to it.

  The last road into the site—maintained not by the county, but by the company—was little more than a bumpy two-lane track through rocky scrubland. At that point, Clara finally gave up even pretending that she was able to read, and instead stared out the window at the land stretching away from them.

  “This is the Hartley B site,” he said as he stopped the pickup truck and swung to the ground. Light brown dust still swirled behind them, and Mac pitched his voice to carry over the sound of the pump jack working the cricket-head pump up and down. “You might have noticed that we track the amount of salt water we pull up from the well. Dealing with water is probably one of the biggest issues we deal with on a regular basis.”

  Tilting her head back to take in the big pump, Clara leaned in toward him, drawn to learn everything she could despite herself. “You have to separate the oil from the water?”

  “Actually, it’s mostly gas, here. We get some oil, but by and large, Aerio produces natural gas wells. But yeah, we have to separate the water out.” Waving her to follow him, he led her to the small foamer tank over to one side. “One way we do that is by dropping soap into the well. That foams the water up out of the well and gets it out of the way of the gas. If the well’s too loaded up with water to flow, the foamer can get the well to kick off again. Plus it helps clean out the well bore—otherwise, iron ore deposits build up and gum up the works.”

  He had forgotten what a good listener Clara was, taking everything in and processing it. She and Gavin had been more alike than either of them ever wanted to admit. The same impulse that made her uncle eager to buy the company in the first place made Clara a good candidate for taking it over.

  Mac hadn’t allowed himself to consider the reasons Gavin might have set up his will to require Clara to spend so much time with Mac. The older man hadn’t ever asked Mac what had happened. In fact, he had rarely mentioned Clara at all. When Gavin had called three years ago to ask if he would be interested in learning the oil business from the ground up, Mac had been glad of the job offer. But now Mac was wondering if maybe Gavin Graves had been plotting to force his niece’s return for years.

  He shook off the thought. Gavin’s intentions didn’t matter. Making sure Clara didn’t shut the company or sell it to someone who would bring in outsiders and fire all the locals—those goals were important.

  Mac pointed out a pipe to one side, placing his hand on it and motioning for Clara to do the same.

  When her hand met the metal, she gasped, her gaze jerking up to meet his. “It’s hot.”

  Mac grinned. “That’s the temperature it comes up out of the ground.” Her answering smile, holding a hint of wonder, made his heart thump hard in his chest.

  Oh, hell no, he told it. This is strictly business.

  If only he could believe his heart would listen.

  Chapter Seven

  I had forgotten how big the sky is here.

  Clara moved to the side of the caliche road, sidestepping several larger rocks in order to make her way to the edge of the small oil field—the ‘oil patch,’ Mitch had called it. Drawing in a deep breath, she could smell the dust and mesquite, even over the scent of the gas that hissed out of the pressure valve Mitch let go.

  The orange rays of the sunset shot out from behind a distant limestone hill, streaking the clouds above with golden light. When she drew her eyes back down to the ground, everything seemed a little darker.

  She couldn’t help but compare it to her life in New York. Despite the rhythmic sound of the compressor running the cricket-head well pump behind her, there was a sense of peace out here that came from being truly alone.

  Or at least, as alone as she could manage with another person around.

  Especially if that other person was Mitchell MacAllan.

  Something about him still attracted her. Not necessarily physically—though that was still in the mix. No, it was the way they slipped into simply being in one another’s company, as if the last ten years hadn’t even happened.

  As if that night hadn’t happened.

  “Sky’s pretty.” Mitch’s voice was pitched just loudly enough to carry over the sound of the machinery as he stepped up behind her.

  “Mm.” Clara’s noise of agreement was lost in the sound of the well working, but she didn’t think Mitch noticed. He had pulled out his phone and was taking photos of the sunset.

  “You still do photography?” She spoke without looking at him.

  “Some.” He shrugged. “Mostly on my phone when something catches my eye.”

  “I didn’t know I missed the sky.”

  The comment was mostly to herself, but Mitch answered her anyway. “Don’t get much of that in New York City, huh?”

  “No. It’s like. …” She paused, searching for the right words. “Like living at the bottom of a deep canyon. The sun never quite penetrates to the ground. And even if it does—on rare sunny days or in those places where the buildings let the light through—it’s only ever as bright as an early-spring Texas sun. New York’s hottest summer sun doesn’t have the intensity this does.”

  “You must like something about it, though. You stay there.” Clara couldn’t see Mitch’s eyes behind his sunglasses, but she could imagine the searching gaze.

  Suddenly, even his imaginary scrutiny was too much to bear—because, for the first time since she had left, for just a moment, she couldn’t remember a single thing about New York City she preferred to Necessity, Texas.

  She ripped her eyes away from his face, even as she acknowledged that part of her wanted to spend more time examining the planes and angles of his face—t
racing out the ways that the softness of youth had hardened into this adult man beside her.

  That way lies heartache.

  No. Better to change the topic.

  “Do you run this route every day?” she asked. They had spent all day going from well site to well site, while Mitch discussed how many barrels of gas and oil each well produced on a daily basis, how many loads in a week or a month, and how much water. She had seen the SWD, or salt-water disposal tanks, where the water pumped up from the ground was stored until it could be pumped back into the ground. She had seen the battery of storage tanks that held oil and gas and water. They had traced the pipeline across the countryside until it passed from one computerized meter to another and the pipes changed color to designate the point at which “gas pumped” became “gas sold.”

  Watching Mitch do his job had been something of a revelation. She had spent years convincing herself that their relationship had been a childish whim. In doing so, she had forced herself to forget his sharp, analytical mind. The way he could take apart anything—a problem, a motor, even a teenage girl—and get to the heart of its issue in moments.

  He was good at what he was doing out here.

  She was glad her uncle had seen that in him and hired him on as foreman.

  Apparently her uncle’s talent had been in finding the right people for the job.

  Where they had run across people working out on these remote sites—mechanics fixing compressor motors, a crew in a work-over rig scrambling high atop a rickety pump, a welder piecing together two pieces of pipe—Mitch had introduced her as Gavin’s niece and their new boss, and they had greeted her warmly, many offering their condolences on her loss.

  Her uncle had been well liked among his employees.

  How could Uncle Gavin have had this whole other career, and never mentioned it to me?

  Now it was late, and Clara was beginning to droop. They had been driving from site to site virtually from sunrise to sunset, and from what Mitch had said, they still weren’t done. Clara still had half a sheaf of paper printouts in her folder on sites she hadn’t yet seen.

  Mitch was shaking his head as he answered her question. “No. I usually spread it out over the week, interspersed with whatever troubleshooting I need to do in any given day.”

  “Are you usually out here this late?” Clara’s coffee had worn off before noon, and the Dr. Pepper she had grabbed when they crossed a rare highway and stopped at a convenience store wasn’t holding up much better. She turned to take in the view again. On the other side of a nearby fence, longhorn cattle grazed peacefully, their horns stretching out to the side, backlit by the sunset. A white-faced calf pushed its head under the bottom wire, stretching its neck to try to reach a tuft of grass on the other side.

  “Sometimes. But other days, I’m done before mid-afternoon. It all evens out eventually.” Mitch tilted his chin toward the truck. “You ready to call it a day?”

  For a moment, she considered trying to tough it out, to show Mitch …

  Show him what?

  Nothing. She had absolutely nothing to prove to him.

  And nothing to gain from it, even if she did.

  As entertaining as this had been—and as much as she had learned today—she wasn’t actually here to evaluate the company. She had already made her decision to sell.

  I’m only going through the motions here.

  As soon as I’ve done the bare minimum to meet the requirements of Uncle Gavin’s will, I’m packing up and heading home.

  She stared down at the scuffed toes of the worn cowboy boots she had, indeed, found in the back of her closet at her uncle’s house, and tried not to wonder why that thought didn’t make her feel any happier.

  *

  Today, Mac needed to show Clara why this company was important—not just to him, but to everyone in the town.

  Of course, Mac could make all the resolutions he pleased, but if Clara wouldn’t even speak to him, he was going to have a hard time convincing her that anything about Aerio was significant.

  Other than the numbers, anyway. As soon as she got in the truck that morning, Clara dug the folder out from under the center armrest and began poring over the various figures he had laid out for her.

  She was smart. She was going to figure out the main issue soon enough.

  He needed to convince her to keep the business before she put it all together.

  Not that he wanted to trick her, merely delay that realization for a little while.

  Mac set her coffee in the cup holder and headed out of town. About ten minutes into the drive, he spoke. “We are going to be spending a lot of time together over the next week. We have to talk about something.”

  Clara glanced from the paper in her hands.

  She stared out the window at the puffy white clouds.

  “I don’t think I could ever get tired of watching the sky.”

  “We covered that yesterday with the sunset,” Mac said wryly.

  The look she shot him was half eye-roll, half head-shake, all irritation. “Fine. You talk.”

  “What about?” Mac worked to keep his tone pleasant. He suspected that anything even as mild as amusement might send her scurrying back into the safety of the numbers in front of her.

  “How about Things I Would Rather Be Doing?” she suggested wryly.

  Mac’s snort drew a small smile from her, but she quashed it.

  She smiled. I can work with that.

  “It’s your topic. You start.” He turned the pickup onto the bumpy county road, sending Clara sliding across the seat, clutching the papers on her lap and grabbing for the handle above the door on her side.

  “Fine.” With a sigh, she straightened out the papers, tucked them back into the folder, clipped her pen to the top, and shoved the whole thing into the oversized purse at her feet. “I would rather….” Her voice faded off as she looked back up at the sky, then glanced at the clock on the truck’s dashboard. When she picked up the thread of her sentence again, her voice was quieter, more contemplative. “Right now, it’s eight o’clock in New York. I would rather be stopping by the bodega at the corner of my street to pick up a coffee and bagel. If I hurry, I can catch the subway train and be at the office in twenty minutes. But I don’t have to be there until nine—several of my clients are on the west coast—so I can take my time. I like to walk in the mornings. There’s a park across from my apartment building. Not a big one, but I like to follow the path through it. There’s another subway stop on the other side.”

  Again, she glanced out the window. “The sky seems a little bigger over the park.”

  When the silence threatened to expand, Mac glanced over at her pale profile. She had closed her eyes as the morning sun highlighted the lines of her face, and his heart squeezed in his chest.

  So beautiful.

  She had always been beautiful, from the first time he saw her, when they were only kids.

  He absolutely could not afford to allow his thoughts to turn that direction. Instead, he followed up on her spoken words.

  Keep it simple, man.

  “Is it still cold up there?”

  His words startled her out of her reverie. “Still cold? In New York, you mean? Yeah. It’ll stay cold, sometimes into May or even June.” A small smile touched her lips. “My first spring there, we had an unusual warm spell, and I went out and bought new spring clothes. T-shirts and capri pants and the sorts of things that usually don’t show up until summer there. The next day I wore one of my new cute, brightly colored skirts to work, and I nearly froze to death. My colleagues clearly thought I was insane.”

  It was more than she had said to him at one time in the last ten years. Mac could listen to her talk all day, he realized. It almost didn’t matter what she was saying; the sound of her voice alone soothed him, made him smile. Made his day seem better and brighter.

  It always had.

  He saw the moment she realized that she had opened up to him a little and decided to shut back d
own. It was like watching time-lapse photography of a flower blooming, then fading out and dying. His heart ached to see her close in on herself.

  He said the first thing that came to mind. “I’d rather be fishing.”

  The comment brought a small smile to her face, at least. “Of course you would.”

  Mac didn’t wait to see if she suddenly realized that comment betrayed her connection to him. She was clearly prepared to close down anything that seemed like a connection between them.

  He had to keep the conversation going.

  “Yep. We’ll start spring bass fishing soon.” He gestured toward the back of the pickup. “I’ve got some gear back there to drop off with Bobby later this afternoon for us to use next week.”

  “Spring bass fishing. Why bass in particular? Is that based on what you’re allowed to catch, or what’s available at a particular time of year?” She tilted her head as she glanced at him, her brown eyes bright and curious—the same eyes he remembered from all those years ago.

  Mac grinned. “Seriously? That’s your question? Where are you from, again? Where did you grow up? How do you not know that?”

  Rolling her eyes, Clara stared back out the window and spoke over her shoulder. “I could create a hell of an ad campaign for any product you handed me. I’m damn good at that. I don’t have to know about fishing in Texas.”

  He held up one hand in surrender. “Okay, I give. What do you want to know about fishing in Texas?”

  “Now that you mention it, I don’t want to know anything.” Her tone was teasing and light, though, not dismissive.

  “No. You had a question about why I fish for bass in the spring.” He made sure she heard his snicker and saw the exaggeratedly sad shake of his head.

  “Fine.” Crossing her arms, Clara turned to face him. “You have to have a fishing license, yes?”

  “I have a lifetime license, yes.” He matched her overly patient tone.

  “Does that fishing license limit what kind of fish you’re allowed to take home? Or how many? Or anything at all?”