DrillingDownDeep (4 page)

“Excuse me.” He set the cases down. “I have to see to that.”

Shoving by him, O’Malley headed back up the stairs, with
Miss Donald following, to Michael’s surprise. He watched them go and then
followed as well—what the hell else was he supposed to do?—leaving the cases in
the hallway.

Once up the stairs, they headed in the opposite direction of
the helipad and ducked into a room with gauges and levers. The drilling control
room, he surmised from the pictures he had seen of a rig in his due diligence
before buying the company. A number of men in hard hats and orange jumpsuits,
like O’Malley and the woman’s but more used, mulled around.

One tough-faced spokesman came forward and addressed
O’Malley. “This fucking roustabout is trying to tell me my business, Mick. You
better get him out of my face or I’m going to beat the living shit out of him.”

“What’s going on?” O’Malley addressed the tall,
string-bean-thin man the spokesman had jerked a thumb at. He looked so young he
might have been in a high school shop class rather than on an oil rig.

“The cement ain’t dry,” the kid said quietly.

“Says you, you stupid prick. What the hell would you know?
You been on this rig no more than—”

“Hold on.” O’Malley stopped the tirade with a quick shove to
the other guy’s chest, effectively backing the man away from the
roustabout
he’d
been advancing toward. He then yanked the kid by the neck of his jumpsuit
toward a corner and rattled off a list of questions that Michel barely heard.

Rather than joining them, the safety officer rambled over to
the gears, examining each one, looking into a tube of some sort and then
crouching down to look at a gauge. She stood up, reaching into a cabinet, and
turned around quickly.

“Put this on.”

Michael just barely caught the toss of the yellow hard hat
and she didn’t check to see whether he had, going over to talk to the
hot-under-the-collar guy who was glaring at the kid still.

Michael put on the hard hat as O’Malley joined Miss Donald.
They conferred, again too softly for him to catch it, and then O’Malley said
loudly, “Show’s over. You’re okay to proceed, Kenny.”

“Like I told you,” he huffed. “Now get that asshole out of
my control room.”

Miss Donald shook her head. “He stays.”

“Fuck you, Vanny,” the guy shouted at her and she smiled.

“You wish.”

It stopped the big guy right there and after a moment of
hesitation, he whipped his hat off and wiped a bald head that Michael saw was
sweating profusely. “That I do, sweet cheeks,” he said, laughing.

“Put your fucking hat back on,” she responded mildly.

The kid hung back, but then turned to a shelf, his hand
shaking as he reached for a bottle of water.

“Everybody’s friends now, okay?” O’Malley said jovially
before hustling over to him. “Sorry about that, Mr. Reynolds. These things crop
up now and again.” He gestured toward the door.

Michael didn’t take him up on the suggestion. “I’m sure they
do. Wet cement. Isn’t that what happened on the
Deepwater Horizon
?”

The room, which had been buzzing with quiet talk, suddenly
became dead still. It was as if he had uttered the worst curse they could think
of. All eyes stared at him, the hostility not difficult to read.

Miss Donald spoke first. “We don’t mention that on a rig.”

“I’m sure you don’t want to, but I’d feel better if you
mentioned it a dozen times a day. If we don’t learn from our mistakes, Miss
Donald, we make them again.”

“It wasn’t our damn mistake,” one of the men muttered.

“This here’s Mr. Reynolds, boys. The new CEO of
Transcoastal,” O’Malley said hastily, undoubtedly trying to protect the men
from any ill-advised further remarks. He turned to Michael. “That’s ah, kind of
considered bad luck, if you know what I mean, Mr. Reynolds. To mention
that
.”

“I don’t believe in luck. Now is the cement on that really
dry or isn’t it?”

“It’s dry,” Miss Donald said. “And we’re done here.” She exited
quickly.

Fine. He’d rather have this conversation in private anyway.

When he caught up to Miss Donald, she was heading down the
same narrow passageway they’d started out in. He didn’t bother with the hand
rail and if the rig swayed he had no problem with it. She pointedly walked past
his bag and briefcase and O’Malley reached in front of him to pick them up,
taking the lead again.

“Now, let’s put these in your cabin.” The older man hurried
along and opened a door at the end of the hallway.

“Usually there’re two to a cabin, but you’ll have this one
to yourself, of course. Assuming you still want to stay after you get the
tour.”

Michael glanced inside the small room as the man put the
cases down. There was a vanity, what looked like another smaller compartment, a
bathroom perhaps, and something he had never seen, not even when he’d been sent
away to camp one summer as a young boy. Bunk beds. Built into the wall, they
had heavy, short curtains presumably to draw closed before sleeping.

Bunk beds.

His summer camp experience had included a lavish wood cabin
complete with servants.

“You do it by sex, I assume?”

“Pardon?”

“Assign rooms. You have women on board. Correct?” He didn’t
deign to refer to Miss Donald. “You bunk them together, I assume.”

“Oh yeah, sure. If there are enough of them.”

“And if there aren’t? Or there’s an odd number? What happens
then? Do they get their own cabin?”

“They’re drillers. Just like everybody else.” O’Malley
looked over Michael’s shoulder at Miss Donald, who remained in the hallway,
with what could only be interpreted as pride for some reason. “There’s no
favoritism.”

“So they bunk with men.”

Miss Donald piped up, sounding more subdued than she had on
deck or in the control room. “It’s not an issue anyway, since bunkmates are
always on opposite shifts. When one’s sleeping or in the cabin, the other is
working.”

He turned to her. “Who’s
your
bunk mate?”

“A roustabout named Lenny Krantz.”

“Roustabout. So what does that mean exactly?”

She shrugged. “A kid. He’s only twenty-one.”

“And you’re an ancient…what?”

She didn’t answer, her eyes narrowing in what she wasn’t
bothering to hide was annoyance.

“Vanny here’s old for her years, Mr. Reynolds. She
practically grew up on a rig.”

“Is your bunkmate sleeping now?”

“No.”

“Good. You can show me your cabin. And you can leave those
cases. Mick, is it?” Mick nodded, following orders as most people did in
Michael’s experience. “Thank you. I may have some questions for you later, but
for now, that’ll be all.”

The older man looked uncertainly toward Miss Donald.

“The safety officer was supposed to show me around as I
understood it,” Michael said deliberately. He nixed his earlier idea of getting
another tour guide, at least for now. He wanted to have a talk with this one
first to make sure they were on the same page in terms of safety on the rig. He
wasn’t going to watch his investment in Transcoastal float off on an oil slick
because of somebody’s bad attitude.

O’Malley nodded. “Sure. No problem. Catch you later.”

“Shall we?” he asked her when they were alone.

Her cabin was on the same level and, not surprisingly,
proved identical to the one he’d initially been shown to. She leaned against
the door frame as he went in.

Michael glanced around, noting the jumpsuits in the open
closet, no indication of gender other than the size, a few considerably larger
than the ones Miss Donald must wear. “Your bunkmate, this Lenny, he’s working?
I’d like to meet him.”

“Why?”

He looked at her coolly. “Why not?”

“Well, actually Lenny is on an off-shift.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s not on the rig. He’s on his twenty-one-day home
stretch. Wyoming, I think. We work fourteen days on, twenty-one days off.”

“Good. Then I’ll share this cabin.”

She froze and then ignored the word
share.
“Okay.
I’ll just gather up a few of my things and get out of your way.”

“No need. I’d like the whole experience.
Sharing
a
cabin and all.”

“The whole experience is that the bunkmate is not around
when you are,” she pointed out testily. “Since I’m supposed to show you around
the rig, that doesn’t quite work out. I’ll be going to bed when you go to bed.”

“I don’t mind,” he responded. When she looked uncertain, he
added, “In fact, I insist.”

She was still wearing her hard hat, but the angle of her
chin, jutting out stubbornly, gave him the clearest view of her face he’d had
so far. A lovely, golden complexion. That was his first thought. Young was his
second.

“Does your protocol require wearing the head gear,” he
gestured toward hers, “in the cabin?”

“No.”

He removed the hard hat he still had on. “Good. Let’s take
these off.”

He shrugged out of the windbreaker he’d worn to combat the
brisk temperature of the helicopter and held it up with the head gear. “Which
bunk is yours? Upper or lower?”

“Lower,” she said through what sounded like clenched teeth,
unexpectedly causing Michael to smile.

He rarely smiled at an employee during the honeymoon phase.
Reynolds Industries didn’t buy companies unless there was at least a little
reorganization involved. No matter how well run a company—not that he was
saying this one was well run, that remained to be seen—there was always room
for improvement in his book, and in his father’s. So Michael usually focused on
that in the honeymoon phase, with not much to smile about.

He tossed his jacket and hard hat on to the upper bunk and
turned back to her. She hadn’t taken her hat off. He dropped the smile.

Even the occasional malcontent didn’t disobey a direct
order. “Take it off,” he repeated, feeling an odd sense of déjà vu. When she
didn’t, still jutting her chin out at him, he said, “I’m assuming Mick or
whoever is in charge of you has laid out the current facts of life, or if not,
that you can read a newspaper. Reynolds Industries has taken over Transcoastal,
for a hefty price tag and with the full consent of the board, right before we
kicked most of its lazy members off it, that is. I run Reynolds Industries and
now I run Transcoastal. So you know what that means?”

“Yeah. I know what it means.”

“Good. I’m the boss. So take the hat off.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.”

“What? Are you going to fire me for not taking my hat off in
your mighty presence? Is it some screwed way to show respect? Because where I
come from, Mr. Reynolds, men earn respect through their actions, not by
snapping their fingers and spending their daddy’s money and acting like some
petty dictator.”

He was not amused. On the other hand, he was not surprised
either. She was simply saying out loud what most of his employees thought
anyway but were afraid to say to his face. Part of him even admired her for it.

Of course admitting that wouldn’t help to bring this
particular employee in line.

“I sincerely hope your entire workforce doesn’t have this
recalcitrant attitude, Miss Donald. I’d hate to have to
snap my fingers
and fire everybody. It’d be very inconvenient.”

She folded her arms across her chest. “Well, I sure would
hate to inconvenience you, Mr. Reynolds.”

They stared at each other, affording him the opportunity in
the fluorescent light of the cabin to notice that her eyes, when they weren’t
narrowed in disdain, were really a quite appealing shade of green.

She whipped her hat off and held it in front of her, as if
she actually thought he was demanding it in a show of respect. In fact, he had
been trying to get on a less hostile footing with her, although he seemed to be
accomplishing the opposite.

With the hard hat off, she glared at him. He registered that
she was a blonde.

And gorgeous.

Vanny took a deep breath. Christ. What was her problem? He
was never going to recognize her as his one-night stand from two months ago. To
reassure herself, she ticked off in her mind the reasons exactly why that was.
Her hair was her natural golden blonde and short and curly now, not long and
brown and straight. The contacts had hidden her true eye color too. So that
wouldn’t ring any bells. And of course her tanned, scrubbed-clean face wasn’t
the perfectly made-up pale it had been that night either.

He probably wouldn’t have remembered her even if she
had
looked exactly the same. The night had undoubtedly not made the same impression
on somebody like him as it had on her. Maybe that was what she was mad about.

She hated to think she really could
not
keep her
temper for one short tour, which unfortunately now seemed to be morphing into a
slumber party. She knew she was lousy at sucking up, but she could be civil
when the occasion demanded it. And this was one occasion that sure had demanded
it.

She’d screwed up royally.

She ran a hand through her short curly hair, shoving it out
of her face now that the hat was no longer in place to do so. He stared at her
as if she was a bug he was about to step on, but at least without the slightest
bit of recognition. And she was. As insignificant to him as a bug he could step
on. But she’d be the one who’d be squashed if he did.

If he fired her, who knew how long it’d take her to get a
space on another rig with another company? She was good, but her whole career,
her whole life in fact, had been with Transcoastal. Not that that would make a
damn bit of difference to Reynolds and his cronies if they wanted to “reduce
the workforce” as they so euphemistically called it. But it made a difference
to her. And it made a difference to her father, who was still loyal to the
company he’d slaved thirty years for, even after being unceremoniously fired.