Rapture of the Deep

by Margaret Rome

  'Are you frightened?' Leon yelled, leaning side­ways to distract her wide, fixed stare away from the transparent dome that made her feel encapsulated within a fragile glass bubble.

  'No,' she mouthed, then vigorously shook her head.

  And in a curious way she was not, for in spite of the noise filling the flimsy structure of a craft so small she felt exceedingly vulnerable, she was experiencing no panic, had the utmost confidence in the brown, sinewed hands so capably manipulating the controls.

  He had hustled her out of the house so quickly she had had little time to protest, to think, or even to do more than gasp a garbled explanation to her aston­ished aunt.

  'We'll be back before nightfall, Miss Dunross,' Leon had yelled above the revving engine of his silver Range Rover, 'keep dinner hot for us, I'm looking forward to some real home cooking!'

  Catriona strained her ears when once more he shouted above the noise of the engine. 'This is an expensive way to commute, maybe, but to come by boat would take us twenty-four hours. If you look closely, you can just see the outline of the rig appearing on the horizon!'

  She leant forward to peer into misty oblivion and at first could see nothing, then as her eyes became adjusted she spotted a bulky outline in the far dis­tance which gradually solidified as they drew nearer into an enormous superstructure perched on four concrete legs, with two huge steel-girdered towers poking upwards as if sending a message of defiance to a lowering sky. Seconds later she was able to dis­tinguish the shapes of cranes, masses of pipework, ducting, steel stairways connecting the lower, middle and upper decks of the man-made marvel that looked like a ship afloat with lifeboats attached to each deck, but which was actually a miniature town set on massive concrete legs with a framework of steel girders keeping it anchored firmly to the sea-bed.

  Rooted to immobility by a mixture of fascination and fear, she stared downward while Leon, respond­ing to instructions crackling through a radio receiver, hovered above the rig, then began lowering the craft towards a tiny square landing pad ringed like a target that appeared to her horrified eyes no larger than the area of paved yard behind her aunt's cot­tage. She glanced swiftly at Leon's face and saw that it was tense with concentration while slowly, as the screams of the engine and teeth-chattering vibrations intensified, he inched lower and lower until the craft touched down on to a surface covered with a tightly-stretched, open-weave rope carpet.

  'Congratulations, you coped with the ordeal well,' Leon grinned as he cut the engine and eased a brace of earphone radio receivers from his head. 'One of my earlier assistants reacted like a quivering jellyfish to his first chopper flight out to the rig.'

  She responded to the near-compliment with a blush, amazed by the warm glow of pleasure that encompassed her body as thoroughly as the bright orange survival suit, bagging around her ankles be­cause the legs were too long, with a drawstring hood that could be tied beneath the chin and a full length zip which, when it was fastened, made her feel like an astronaut prepared to take her first steps on the moon.

  The disguising effect of the suit was such that when she jumped gingerly down to the ground the man hurriedly approaching spared her no more than a cursory glance before striding past, making no effort to assist her.

  'I'm glad you set off early, boss,' he called out to Leon as he jumped from the cockpit, 'we've just received a weather report warning that a force eight gale is imminent! How come,' he challenged cheer­fully, his teeth flashing white against weather-browned skin, 'you always seem to manage to make an indefinite stay?'

  'The weather in this region is so darned un­predictable that a settled twenty-four-hour spell is considered not far short of a miracle, and well you know it, you old roustabout,' Leon growled, before turning towards Catriona to effect an introduction. 'Kate,' his effrontery set her teeth on edge, 'I'd like you to meet Geoff Barclay, my installation manager!'

  'Geoff,' he grinned, waiting narrow-eyed for his reaction, 'this is Miss Catriona Dunross, my new assistant and even newer fiancée!'

  If Neptune himself had suddenly risen from the surrounding waves he could not have met with a more stunned, mouth-gaping reception. Seeming bereft of words, the manager stood staring fixedly at wind-whipped hair flaying silken lashes across Catriona's flushed cheeks and appeared for a moment to be in danger of suffering a fit of apoplexy. But when she stepped towards him with a hand out­stretched and a smile pinned to her stiff lips his mas­sive shoulders squared beneath a yellow oilskin jacket and a kindling of warmth appeared in eyes shaded by the brim of a protective helmet.

  'Well, I'll be blowed!' She almost had to guess the words snatched from his lips by a stiff wind. 'I'm delighted to make your acquaintance, Miss Dunross!' Her hand became swallowed into his hearty clasp, then shaken until her arm felt like an ill-used pump handle. 'A woman aboard an oil rig is a rare sight indeed—usually the only birds we see are seagulls— but the news that the boss has finally branded himself a steer will cause more of a stir than a bleeding hur­ricane! Oh… er… begging your pardon, Miss Dunross, no offence meant, I'm sure.'

  'Don't apologise, Kate wants no special privileges,' Leon grunted, leading the way towards a flight of steps descending from the heli-pad to a deck below.' She insists that she's to be treated like just another guy—although as her fiancé I can't promise to follow her instructions to the letter,' he mocked, turning to flash her a wicked look. 'I'll leave it to you, Geoff, to explain the situation to the rest of the men. Tell them they're to carry on roughnecking as normal, that they've no need to curb their language or tone down their shouted abuses just because there's a woman aboard. In fact,' he instructed lightly, yet with a tight-lipped coolness that carried an unmistakable note of warning, 'be sure to make it plain that I shall be most annoyed if ever I'm given reason to suspect any one of them of treating my assistant in the way they're accustomed to treating young, at­tractive members of the opposite sex!'

  Sensing the manager's sympathetic scrutiny, Catriona hid her mortified expression by staring straight ahead as she followed in Leon's wake, re­lieving some of her anger by spearing dagger sharp glances towards a spot sited between his shoulder-blades where, had her weapon been lethal, she could have inflicted mortal damage. Shaken by the strength of emotions he seemed to delight in arous­ing, she quickened her steps to keep up with his rapid descent of an iron stairway leading down to a deck resounding with noisy activity.

  'Before calling a meeting of heads of staff, I'll take you on a quick tour of the rig,' he offered, halting at the foot of the steps to watch her hurried, breathless descent.

  'Please don't put yourself out,' she declined swiftly, 'I'm sure you must have more important things to do. If I'm not needed for a while, I'll be perfectly happy exploring on my own.'

  'If it didn't suit me I wouldn't offer to escort you,' he snapped, relieved of the need to impress an audience. 'The boss of an oil rig has the same re­sponsibilities as the captain of a ship, inasmuch as he needs to be familiar with everything that's going on on board and to be seen to understand it.'

  She ached to pull away from his grasp upon her elbow, but forced herself to appear unconcerned as he guided her closer to an area of frantic activity where a gang of men wearing protective helmets and filthy, mud-soaked boiler suits were turning, winch­ing, screwing and positioning heavy items of en­gineering equipment, all of which were coated with the slippery black gold for which the treasure-hunt­ing oil men seemed prepared to risk their lives.

  'This is the drilling platform, the core of our operations,' he told her tersely. 'Extracting the oil and pumping it ashore goes on twenty-four hours a day. Other work, engineering hook-up, maintenance and overhaul, also carries on continuously. This rig does two jobs, collecting and storing oil from three other platforms as well as drilling and extracting its own oil from a reservoir below. That's the only reason we're here, to drill and produce oil, conse­quently the platform is never allowed to sleep.'

  In spite of growing resentment of the bo
unty-hunting oil men who were despoiling and plundering her homeland as thoroughly as earlier Norse in­vaders, Catriona felt a stirring of respect for the sheer guts and determination being displayed by men eager to achieve their goal, who shrugged off the hardship of working in intolerable conditions, of being soaked to the skin, chilled to the bone, and made conscious each time they glanced upwards of a grey, angrily-heaving, icily-hostile sea.

  Leon effected no further introductions to any of his tough, weatherbeaten personnel, but as they continued their tour of the rig she shrank from a battery of interested, lively, calculating, puzzled, anticipatory, and frankly flirtatious eyes that followed her progress past cranes unloading pipes and containers of food and materials from a supply boat anchored close by; through a galley preparing round-the-clock meals for an army of hungry men; around a power station big enough to light up a small town that had a desalinator to help out with the fresh water supply and a heating system to ensure that bedrooms and lounges were kept at a comfort­able temperature; through a computer room moni­toring information from hundreds of key instruments installed upon the rig and a laboratory where chem­ical checks were being made on the quality of the extracted oil.

  Their final destination was an area filled with lines of pipework, and cement storage tanks. Leon paused to wave an encompassing arm. 'This is the heart of Oilfield Lion, into which oil is pumped from the other three platforms to be discharged, together with our own, a hundred and twenty miles under the sea to the terminal at base. There's more wealth flowing through here in a couple of hours than any one man could earn in an extended lifetime!'

  Because of a smile that had appeared lurking around his mouth immediately he had sensed dis­comfiture caused by eyes probing her nymphish curves and the feminine undulation of a walk em­phasised rather than disguised by a survival suit usually worn by striding, muscular men, Catriona had begun dimly to suspect that she had been deliberately subjected not so much to a tour of in­spection as a challenge to test her assertion that she could mix without embarrassment in the company of sex-hungry males. Consequently she was stung to scoff,

  'Doesn't it bother you that while man may be coming first in the race for gold, Mother Nature is trailing last?'

  'That remark is typical of the narrow attitude we oil men have come to expect from Shelties who, in common with the animals they breed, seem ever ready to snap at the hand that feeds them!'

  As they glared mutual dislike across a narrow strip of gangway with just a stretch of metal railing mark­ing the edge of a drop into a fermenting sea, she tried to persuade herself that the tingling that had begun in her ears and then spread slowly to every nerve end was due entirely to the perpetual high level of noise being emitted by heavy industrial machinery; that the fluttering in her stomach, the sensation of floating in the air with her feet far above the ground was the natural response of a body unused to continuous vibration and had no connec­tion with a look of contempt in wild, tawny eyes or the derisive curl of lips which a lifetime ago had silenced her with a kiss that had been inflicted as a punishing stamp of authority, then had graduated into an exploring warmth that had melted through her crust of frozen resistance as persistently as a bee searches for honey.

  'In spite of the fact that we've leant over back­wards to meet terms that would have put Shylock to shame,' he continued angrily, 'you'd all like us banished as far out of sight as possible, still treat us as if we had horns jutting from our helmets like the invaders of long ago! After all, what did you have before we came to your island except solitude, isola­tion, and a precarious living dependent upon the caprice of herring shoals and the sale of Fair Isle woollens?'

  Clinging to the railing as support against a gradu­ally freshening wind that was already whipping spray on to the high top deck and churning the sea around the rig's massive concrete legs into a hissing, foam-flecked cauldron, Catriona released all of her storm-pent resentment.

  'We had beautiful landscapes where now we have sludge tanks; misty sunlight in place of arc lamps, gambolling lambs, contented ponies, and a mag­nificent seabird population that's now threatened with extinction because of heavy, treacly oil being spilled into the Voe waters!'

  'We've had one bad accident only!' he responded swiftly. 'Since then we've lightened up regulations regarding inspection and penalties for spillage to ensure that the same sort of incident can never happen again!'

  'Have you ever seen an otter caught in an oil slick?' Deliberately she ignored his boast.

  'Not since tankers have been refused entry to the terminal whenever spotter planes have seen oil slicks behind them out at sea,' he replied with such calm reasonableness she suffered a stab of remorse. Yet in spite of his air of assurance—or maybe because of it—she refused to back down.

  'Can you really be surprised at the attitude of islanders who've been forced to exchange peace of mind for a knife-edge situation in which more and more tankers will be prone to accidents during severe winter weather? If another calamity should occur, you oil men will discover to your cost that we Shetlanders haven't forgotten lessons learnt during hundreds of years of repelling "get rich quick and then run" invaders!'

  The howling of the wind combined with the din of heavy machinery to form a crescendo of sound that made it necessary for him to grab her by the shoulders and jerk her forward until the hot breath of his temper was searing past her ear.

  The line of his jaw seemed cast in bronze, his lips so tightly set words were ejected in a hiss.

  'Reading legends about raping Norsemen is apt to make modern man envious of his less inhibited ancestors, but having made your acquaintance, Miss Dunross, I now have no difficulty in understanding why raiders who abducted women from these islands are reported by historians to have received medals for bravery!'

  As if in sympathy with his sentiments, a howling streak of wind gusted powerful as a jet stream along the exposed gangway, shuddering across the corrug­ated wall of a workshop, catching Catriona's slender figure full force against her back so that she was flung forward and caught like a tattered flag against the bulwark of his rock-hard chest.

  Immediately his arms whipped out to lash her tightly against his braced frame, and with a gasp of fear she grabbed hold of his jumper and buried her head against his shoulder until the demoniacal gust had passed. Seconds later she attempted to raise her head, but discovered that she was held fast, her head level with his chin, by a tangle of long tresses flung cloakwise across one broad shoulder. If he had not discarded his survival suit the problem would not have arisen, but as it was, spun gold strands were clinging to his sweater as if loath to let go, maintain­ing a determined hold even while she tugged and twisted in an effort to escape from the steady heart­beat pulsating against her cheek.

  'I feel like a fly caught in a soft silken web,' Leon murmured with an undertone of laughter, sliding his palm across the nape of her neck with the obvious intention of sweeping his hand beneath the golden curtain to ease it from his shoulder. But immediately he made contact with smooth, warm skin upon a nape tender and secretive as a child's his touch lingered, arrested by a pulse kicking madly against his exploring fingers. Catriona jerked up her head and in the space of a gasp their glances met… and clung… and began tentatively probing.

  It seemed at that moment, while she stood locked in his tight embrace, hypnotised by a glittering, amber-flecked stare accustomed to exploring the sexual jungle, to sizing up, selecting and tracking down a mate, that the entire world sighed to a standstill—wind abating to a soft breeze; heaving sea to a gently rocking cradle, banks of grey cloud part­ing to make way for sunshine that bathed her frozen limbs in a molten glow.

  'Kate,' he husked, lowering his russet-red head until his breath was brushing smooth as pelt against her lips, 'you should always wear your hair down… I've never seen you looking more attractive, more excitingly responsive.'

  Her soft mouth quivered, then lifted trustingly towards his, drawn in spite of herself to experience for a se
cond time a kiss that had reacted upon her senses like a first sip of champagne, that had made her head spin, her mouth feel dry, her lips hungry for the taste of sparkling sweetness.

  With the triumph of a thief who has been handed the key to a guarded vault, Leon plundered with impunity, kissing her eyes, her cheeks, her ears, then burying his lips in the velvet softness of her neck until she was quivering with sensations she could neither control nor understand but which she in­stinctively knew had been taught by Adam to his newly-created Eve. Nothing seemed to exist except his fiercely demanding lips and the sound of two hearts pounding as one. But when his hands began fumbling beneath her sweater, shock jolted through her ingenuous body so that she stiffened suddenly, then caught him unawares by clawing like a wildcat out of his lusty embrace.

  From a yard away she directed a glare that was a combination of self-contempt and disgust of his audacious trespass.

  'What do you think you're doing?' she stormed. 'What sort of girl do you think I am?'

  For a second he appeared stunned, then he gathered himself together to complete her mortifica­tion with a slight shrug of amusement.

  'Responding as any man would to signals set at green, is the answer to your first question,' he drawled. 'But as for your second—well, I haven't quite made up my mind. Only a flirtatious tease or a naive fool would follow up a come-on with an in­stant freeze, so I'll decide later when I've had more opportunity to further our acquaintance.'

  This reminder that she had met him more than halfway, that some sort of brainstorm had egged her into displaying an eagerness for his advances she could neither explain nor understand, sent colour flaring into her cheeks. Suddenly the need to erect a barrier became imperative, an armour of indiffe­rence behind which she could hide her desperate vulnerability.