AllFreeNovel
Share Us
At first, things had gone as she’d expected. Her foreman had greeted her with polite resignation when she’d stepped down from the pickup truck.
“Miss Angelica,” he’d said, “I mean, A.H. What a nice surprise. We had no idea you were comin’ to visit.”
Angelica had smiled as she offered her hand. “I brought someone with me, Tom,” she’d said. “He represents Landon Enterprises and he’d like to take a look around.”
It had been hard not to laugh at the look that had come over Tom’s weathered face.
“That’s just what we need, on top of everything else,” he’d muttered. “A guy who don’t know oil wells from inkwells, come to tell us how many drill bits we should use and how many feet of pipe—”
“Hey, man, you’ve got it all wrong.” Cade’s voice had been as cheerful as his smile as he’d stepped past Angelica, his hand outthrust. “You guys are the experts here. You’re gonna have to explain things to me.”
Angelica ground her teeth in frustration as she remembered the look—part shock, part quizzical recognition—that had come over her foreman’s face.
“Don’t I know you?” he’d said, and Cade had grinned modestly, all but scuffed his toes in the dust and said, well, maybe, considering that he’d spent his life—his life, damn him!—in the oil business, yeah, maybe Tom just might have seen him around.
“I’m Cade Landon,” he’d said, and Tom had gone white.
“Cade Landon? That’s the Landon Miss Angelica— I mean, A.H.—brought us?”
“Yeah,” Cade had said, while Tom pumped his hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Cade Landon,” Tom had repeated, still stunned. “For crissakes, A.H., why didn’t you tell us… Oh. Hey, sorry. I didn’t mean to cuss, Miss Angelica, I—shit! I mean—”
Cade had slapped the man lightly on the back. “The lady understands, Tom. In fact, she wants you to forget about calling her by her initials. Isn’t that right, Angelica?”
By then, Angelica had been incapable of saying anything. Not that it had mattered. Tom was too busy. He’d called the other men over and soon the whole bunch had been clustered around Cade as if he were either the patron saint of oil exploration or the latest incarnation of Elvis Presley, and from that point on it had been all downhill.
A hard male arm came looping around Angelica’s shoulders. She stiffened, looked up into Cade’s smiling face and whispered a word that made his eyebrows lift toward his hairline.
“Why, sugar,” he said softly, “I’m shocked! I never dreamed they let you talk that way at Miss Palmer’s.”
“You—you liar,” she said. “You cheat! You no-good, miserable son of a—”
“Miss Angelica?”
Angelica looked around, glowering. Her foreman was standing at the center of a little group of roughnecks, beaming at her.
“Yes?” she snapped. “What is it?”
“We just want you to know—the boys and me, that is—look, maybe we ain’t always done things the way you’d have liked. It wasn’t nothing personal, Miss Angelica, it was—the thing is, you don’t know this business.” He shuffled uneasily from one foot to the other, looked to Cade for a nod of approval and cleared his throat. “If only you’d said it was Cade, here, who’d be okaying your orders—”
“She’s speechless,” Cade said quickly, as Angelica drew in her breath. “Isn’t that right?” His eyes flashed a warning as he drew Angelica to her feet. “Just give us some room, boys. I want to walk Miss Angelica around, explain some of what we discussed.”
When they’d put some distance between themselves and the crew, Angelica jabbed her elbow into Cade’s ribs.
“Let go of me,” she snarled.
“Only if you promise to behave.”
“Why should I? You’re a lying, cheating, no-good-”
Cade laughed softly. “What’s that old saying about the pot calling the kettle black?”
Angelica flushed. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll just bet you don’t. Anyway, you wouldn’t want to upset the guys, would you?”
She swung to face him, bracing her hand on a pump jack for leverage.
“The guys,” she said through her teeth, “can go to hell.”
“You don’t mean that. They’re a damned good bunch. I even know a couple of them, had them working for me in the Gobi—”
“Why didn’t you tell me you were an oilman?”
He smiled. “You didn’t ask.”
“Ask? What do you mean, I didn’t ask? I didn’t have to ask, dammit. You should have said—”
“Why would I have said anything?” Cade was still smiling, but his eyes had turned cold. “You’d already made up your mind that you knew everything there was to know about me, that I was a hatchet man, a human calculator—”
“Isn’t it bad enough you came down here to steal Gordon’s from me? You didn’t have to make a fool of me, too.”
“Are we back to that? If there’s a thief here, sugar, it’s you. This company is no more yours than it is the man in the moon’s.”
“And that’s another thing! I hate, abhor and despise being called sugar.”
“It’s a hell of an improvement over going through life being known as A.H.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being called by one’s initials!”
“No, not if you’re fat, fifty and you’ve got five o’clock shadow!”
“Go on, laugh all you like. But for your information, it was the men right here who dubbed me A.H.”
“Come on, lady! No self-respecting roughneck would ever want to address a woman as anything but miss! If they finally settled on calling you by a pair of initials, they must have been desperate!”
Angelica flushed. “It was a most satisfactory compromise,” she said stiffly, “one that overcame the formality so out of place in today’s workplace without putting the men in a position that made them feel uncomfortable.”
Cade shook his head in disbelief. “Is that a direct quote, or did you make it up for my benefit?”
“Don’t speak to me as if I were stupid!”
“Look, maybe what you learned in those books of yours might work in some uptight corporate world. But this business is different. Oil crews pride themselves on their masculinity—it’s why they’re called roughnecks.”
“And don’t patronize me, either!”
“I’m only trying to make you see reason. Dammit, Angelica, what if it turned out you were telling me the truth, that there was some kind of verbal agreement putting you in charge of Gordon’s—”
He stopped, but it was too late. Angelica was already smiling.
“What did you say?”
“Don’t take that as any kind of acknowledgment,” he growled. “It was just a supposition. It didn’t mean a thing.”
“Of course it meant something. You just admitted that-”
“Jesus.” Cade’s face went white. “Angelica,” he said, “shut up!”
“Shut up?” She laughed. “Listen, Cade, just because these men treated you like some little tin god doesn’t mean—”
“Dammit, I’m not joking! Stand absolutely still.”
Her laughter faded. There was something about the look on Cade’s face…
Something whispered across her fingers. Her heart leaped into her throat. “Cade?” she said, her eyes locked on his.
“Don’t move,” he said grimly. “Not an inch. I’m going to—”
A sharp pain stabbed into the tender flesh just below her thumb. Cade cursed, leaped forward and batted a dark, evil-looking creature to the ground.
“A scorpion,” Angelica whispered, shuddering as Cade ground the thing under his heel.
“Angelica,” Cade said, pulling her into his arms. “Did it sting you? Let me see your hand.”
She looked at the dead scorpion and then at Cade, her face as white as chalk.
“Remember when I said it would be better to trust a scorpion than to trust you?” sh
e whispered. “I was wrong. It turns out you can’t trust a scorpion, either.”
She tried to smile, but it didn’t work. Instead, her eyes rolled upward and she collapsed in Cade’s arms.
CHAPTER FIVE
LIGHT. Bright, white light, a blinding circle of it, beaming down from above, and beneath Angelica there stretched a hard, cold surface. There was an acrid, chemical tang in the air…and skittering toward her was something evil and ugly, something that carried its barbed tail upraised.
Angelica began to struggle. She had to get away before the creature reached her.
Hands clasped her shoulders, held her fast as she tried to run.
“Easy, sugar,” a voice whispered.
“No,” she said desperately, “no! The scorpion…”
“Open your eyes,” the voice demanded. “You can do it. Come on, sugar. Open your eyes and look at me.”
She didn’t want to; she wanted to fall back into the darkness. But denying the soft, firm voice was impossible.
Her lashes fluttered.
