Storm Shades Read online

  “Sure thing, Braun. You’re the boss.”

  Finn delves deeper into the trunk, flicking switches on some of the gear, checking so that it’s all ready to go for the morning. They work in companionable silence until the job is done, and it’s only then that Finn lets her in on what conclusions he’s drawn in that gigantic brain of his. “Are you okay about Luke coming here?” He doesn’t look at Sofie as he asks the question. He can be sensitive sometimes—when he needs to be.

  “Yeah, of course.” Sofie pats him gently on the shoulder to reassure him. “I guess it was inevitable, he was never going to be happy just reading the reports.”

  “Right. He probably wants to make sure that the trust fund keeps on paying out.” Finn lays a gentle hand on her arm before they walk through the sliding motel doors. “You know that’s not the only reason he’s threatening to come.” Finn’s eyes behind the trendy glasses are soft; he’s worried about her.

  “Shale Corporation is his business, Finn. He can do whatever he wants.” Sofie shrugs and heads inside, not wanting to go any further down that road.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Finn says under his breath, as he follows his friend inside.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The town is dead silent. Why shouldn’t it be? After all, the sun’s barely even up. This was Sofie’s favorite time of day. She’d always been more of a lark than a night owl and, recently, it had been getting harder and harder to lie in bed alone. She plugs her earphones in and runs out onto the street, following the road that they’d driven in on the day before. There was a trail that she’d caught sight of through the bushes from the car, and she wanted to check it out.

  Although, for many people, running is a great way to meditate, to be one with your thoughts, Sofie ran for the opposite reason. She ran to try not to think about anything. Instead, she concentrates on the lyrics of whatever song is shuffling through her iPhone at the time, trying not to think about the bills that are piling up on her doormat at home. She tries not to think about the red color of her bank balance. She tries not to feel guilty for buying the shirt that she wore yesterday; the one that Finn had called out as expensive. He’d been right. What he didn’t know was how little she could afford it. It had been the first money she’d spent on herself in a long time and was a pick-me-up after Tyler. However, it had been frivolous, and she knew she’d be paying for it for months.

  She tries not to be angry with her dad for leaving her in this financial mess. It seems a little harsh to blame a dead man, but she can’t tell the repo men that. They couldn’t care less. The miles tick by and she starts to work up a sweat, but she shivers as she thinks about her father. They’d been a normal, middle-class family. Sofie was an only child. She was happy; she had a lot of friends; she was smart; and she knew exactly what she wanted to do with her life. That was before the accident, before everything changed.

  She pushes the thoughts away and concentrates on just putting one foot in front of the other. Every now and then there’s a blurring in the corner of her eye, but when she turns her head there’s nothing. She berates herself for getting so spooked. She grew up in Washington DC, so she’s pretty confident there’s nothing in this backwater town that could scare her.

  Eventually, she reaches a plateau on the trail and looks out onto the canyon below. It really is beautiful here, she thinks. The sky is so blue, and the earth is almost red. It looks like a painting. Her watch angrily beeps, reminding her that she’s not here to enjoy the view, and she has work to do. She turns to head back down the trail, retracing her steps.

  As she starts back, she makes an unattractive yelping sound when she realizes she’s not alone. “Jesus Christ!” she shouts. Her scream is louder than necessary because she still has her earphones in, and she yanks them out as quickly as possible.

  “Not quite, sweetheart. But it’s not the first time I’ve made a woman see the good Lord.” The hot guy from the day before smiles at her with a lopsided grin that does strange things to her insides. He’s staring down at her, perched on top of a rock, like he belongs there.

  He has the kind of gravelly voice that makes him sound like he’s smoked a pack a day since he was twelve, but his body tells a different story. No one ends up with a body like that as a chain smoker. The way his white shirt hugs his muscular chest and the bumps of abs...

  Focus, Sofie, she thinks, pulling her eyes away from his body and back to his smiling eyes. It’s as if the guy knows exactly what she’s thinking, but it’s not an altogether uncomfortable feeling. “I bet,” Sofie replies under her breath, trying to gather herself together. That’s twice he’s gotten the best of her, not a great batting average on her part. “What’re you doing up here?” She plants her hands on her hips, wishing that she wasn’t quite so sweaty.

  “Rock climbing,” he responds after a beat, his piercing blue eyes never leaving hers. “You’re a pretty strong runner.” It’s not a compliment, he says the words as if they’re a fact.

  She shrugs. “I’ve been doing it a long time.” There’s a challenge in her voice, and she wonders why she’s being so combative with him.

  “I can tell.” He hops down from the rock he’d been lounging on like an eagle and takes a few steps towards her. “So are you running from something or towards it?”

  He keeps his eyes on hers, and the intensity of his gaze makes her want to take a step back; but, she pushes her heels into the ground, refusing to be intimidated. This conversation is getting weirder by the minute, she thinks. She opens her mouth, but isn’t quite sure what to say. She gets the feeling that this guy knows her, like he knows more about her than he has any right to. But that’s impossible, we’ve only just met, and I’m too old to believe in fairy tales. Life just isn’t like that.

  “That’s not really any of your business,” she says in a low and cold voice, hating how his throwaway comment has dredged up her defensiveness and all the thoughts she’d been avoiding on the run. It was one of the things that Tyler had hated, the way her mood could change in an instant. She couldn’t really blame him for that.

  The mystery man doesn’t reply, just looks her up and down from the feet of her dirt-stained trainers, up her toned runner’s legs, past her flat stomach that’s visible under her tight technical t-shirt, and back to her face, which now holds a thoroughly pissed expression. The way he looks at her brings Luke to mind—the man who thinks he owns her. However, there’s something so different about this guy’s gaze. There’s a hunger to it that warms her between her thighs.

  “You should be careful out on these trails,” he points out, taking a few steps back, breaking the tension between them. “Hardly anyone comes out here. If you’d fallen or gotten hurt, it would be days before anyone ever found you.”

  There’s no threat in his words, but it still makes Sofie uneasy. Please don’t let him be a serial killer, please don’t let him be a serial killer, she silently repeats.

  “Thanks for the tip. But I can look after myself,” she says, as she crosses her arms and catches sight of the time. Dammit, I’m going to be late if I don’t sprint all the way back to the motel.

  “I bet,” he says under his breath, mimicking Sofie’s words from earlier. “Just figured, as you’re not from around here, you could use some friendly advice.” He’s breezy as he says the words, but it’s clear that he’s analyzing her reactions.

  Sofie feels herself stiffen. The first rule of Shale Corporation is that you work under the radar and keep yourself to yourself. The last thing the company wants is angry townsfolk protesting over a big corporation drilling for oil in their back yard. She knew the rules, and she’d learned how to play by them. It didn’t mean that she had to like it though. As far as she was concerned, people had a right to know what was going on in their town and how it was going to affect their lives. When she’d taken her opinions up with Luke, he had called her an idealist and dismissed her; but, that had been the start of his interest in her. Sometimes she wishes that she’d just kept
her mouth shut and towed the line, maybe then she wouldn’t have to deal with a stalker for a boss.

  “Thanks, but I’m just passing through. I won’t be here for long. Anyway, I better get back. The guys will be wondering where I am.” She throws the last phrase out there, just so that he’s sure someone is waiting for her—in case he does have any serial killer tendencies. Mr. Ten-Out-Of-Ten laughs, and the reverberations come from deep inside his broad chest. What a great sound, she thinks.

  “This isn’t the big city, little lady. You’re safe here.” As he says the words, it’s as if he’s making a promise that he’ll keep her free from harm. Even though Sofie had never been the kind of girl that wanted to be looked after, there’s something so comforting in what he’s saying. In fact, her desire to take care of herself was probably why she and Tyler had been together for so long. He had made it clear from the beginning that her problems were hers, and he didn’t want anything to do with them.

  “Good to know.” She defaults to flippant mode and walks towards the entrance to the trail quickly, head down. She doesn’t want him to see what his words have stirred up inside of her. “But I really should get going now.”

  “How long you here for, running girl?” He stands in the way between her and the trail. There’s no way around him unless she squeezes past him, and she doesn’t want to get that close to him—not when he makes her feel like this from ten feet away.

  “Not sure. A week or so, I guess.” She attempts to be vague, but it’s not in her nature. As a scientist, she’s a person of facts and figures. She’s never been a fan of wishy-washy people, either a thing was something or it wasn’t. For Sofie, there was no in-between.

  “Be seeing you then, I guess.” He keeps his eyes trained on hers, and there’s a softness in his tone that makes her stomach do a back-flip.

  This guy really knows how to work his magic, she thinks. He’s probably well-versed in how women react to him. I won’t be just another girl that falls at his feet. I’ve got to retain at least a little dignity. “Maybe.” She shrugs, like she really couldn’t care less and takes a deep breath before she brushes past him.

  She can feel the heat coming off of his body in waves, and she wonders if she imagines it, or if he really does dip his head down and smell the back of her neck as she passes by him. The feeling sends a little thrill of excitement down her spine, but she doesn’t turn around. She knows that a man like that is dangerous. He’s not the kind of guy that I’d bring home to introduce to my parents. That’s if they were still around.

  As Sofie pounds the trail, attacking the downhill, putting all her energy into getting back to the motel as fast as she can, she can’t keep her mind off of the mystery man. As she moved past him, she had noticed his smell. It was a delicious manliness mixed with something else, something fresh like grass. The heady mixture had invaded her senses and made her want to jump him right there and then. Finn must have been right, she thinks, shaking her head. I really am desperate to get some.

  She gets back to the motel in record time, spurred on by her own frustration. She takes in deep breaths, trying to recover from her workout as she turns the shower on to full blast. She stands underneath it, letting the cool water pound against her head and shoulders. She can’t help but think about the man that made her feel more alive than she had in a long time.

  Her body is still buzzing from their closeness. She reaches her hand down over her slick stomach, down over the thin line of hair between her legs, and she touches herself. She’s already wet from their encounter, and she only has to dip her finger between her folds to feel her excitement building. She thinks about the way his blue eyes stared down at her, and she taps her clit, shivering deliciously at the feeling. She begins to rub more insistently, feeling the hard nub, tracing tight circles around her clit. It doesn’t take long before she gasps, as her orgasm soaks her fingers with her own wetness.

  When she realizes what she’s just done and who she’d been thinking about, she wonders how this guy has managed to get under her skin so easily. She wasn’t someone that was prudish about touching herself; she’d choose a home-grown orgasm over meaningless sex any day of the week. However, it had been a long time since she’d masturbated to the thought of someone real, someone who had been standing opposite her less than a half hour before.

  It’s only when she’s brushing out her wet hair that she remembers the beautiful man had said he was rock climbing. If that was true, then where the hell was all his equipment?

  CHAPTER THREE

  After a day of collecting samples the three experts were exhausted, which meant there was only one thing to do. It was time to head to the bar.

  “Hey, Sofe, you coming?” Finn asks, as his friend continues pouring over her microscope.

  “Hmmm? Yeah, I’ll catch up with you. I just want to take another look at some of these,” she says, without even looking up.

  “Suit yourself, but you know the rules…last one to the bar picks up the tab.” Finn throws a look over his shoulder before he leaves the room, but she doesn’t react. She’s too busy staring down her scope.

  She doesn’t even hear the door close behind him. There are too many thoughts spinning around her head. She picks up another rock sample from the site they’d been investigating all day and prepares it for viewing. There is something that isn’t quite right about what she is seeing. On the surface it looks like your standard source rock, but that’s just the exterior. Underneath it, there is something much more interesting and, if she’s not mistaken, unique.

  While she was at the canyon, she saw that it was beautiful; anyone could see that. However, there was something more to the place than just beauty. The feeling that she had while she was there, she couldn’t quite explain. It was something that crept up on her, and she hadn’t expected it at all. There was a peace in that place that she hadn’t ever experienced, like nothing bad could ever happen there.

  The idea of the trees being bulldozed and the earth being dug up by those grotesque drillers isn’t something that she treasures but, looking at these samples, it seems impossible that the canyon would be left untouched. If what I’m looking at is correct, then all the signs point towards the potential for huge deposits of oil in the ground, maybe even the biggest ever found in the state.

  She looks over the samples again and again, and she wonders why she feels like she’s hoping to come to a different conclusion. This is great news for her and for the rest of the team. It was well-known among the employees of Shale Corporation that a big oil and gas discovery meant a big bonus. Lord knows that I could do with that extra cash now. But there is something that just doesn’t feel right about Shale invading this sleepy town. Sofie had seen it happen before.

  Luke bought off the local senators, so they would hand over their land. He wrapped up the oil discovery as the best news for employment rates in the area for years, getting the residents on his side. Shale sucked the sites dry and then moved on to the next. All the jobs that were created disappeared as quickly as they had appeared, the natural beauty of the place was destroyed, and Shale Corp’s profits just kept on going up. If Luke had any idea of the potential deposits in Beaumont, he’d be on his private jet quicker than you can say ‘entitled asshole’, and Sofie wasn’t quite ready for that.

  “I need to be sure,” she says out loud to no one in particular, as she decides what to do. She has a few friends in the lab at Shale HQ, and she’s covered enough shifts for other people to be owed a few favors. She packages up a couple of the samples and addresses them to Jennie Gray.

  Sofie pulls out her phone and hopes that the reception booster that Finn has fitted into each of their rooms is enough to get her a signal. “Jackpot.” She smiles as the coverage bars on her cell light up. She punches in the message and rushes to send it out before she has time to change her mind.

  Sending some rocks over but need you to keep them off the inventory. I’ll owe you one! S

  The response comes before Sofie ev
en have has time to set the cell down. Jennie was one of the smartest women she knew, but she was always attached to her phone—like it were a fifth limb.

  No worries, S. I know field micros suck! :-) Give me a few days. But why the secrecy? x

  Sofie has to think before she types a response, not because she doesn’t want to tell Jennie, but more because she herself doesn’t really know what the reason is.

  Not sure yet, just a hunch. Keep me posted. S

  Sofie signs off, knowing that her reply will only give Jennie more questions. However, she also knows that Jennie will keep her secret.

  She grabs the package she’s put together and walks purposefully out to the motel reception. The guy on the desk, who looks like he should still be in high school, stands up hurriedly as soon as she comes into view.

  “It’s urgent that this goes as soon as possible. Can you overnight it?” Sofie asks, handing over the package to him.

  “Umm, sure. Overnight. I can do that.” The high school student’s words come out in a rush, and he hops from one foot to the other like he really needs to use the rest room.

  “You alright?” Sofie gives him a concerned look, wondering what his deal is.

  “Umm, sure. Fine. I’m fine. You’re really pretty.” It’s like the guy has verbal diarrhea, and he looks mortified when he realizes what it is that he’s just said.

  “Okay.” Sofie is as embarrassed as he is by his outburst. She looks down at her shapeless dungarees and white t-shirt underneath, knowing that she doesn’t look anywhere near her best. “Thanks...” She wishes that she’d paid more attention when he’d introduced himself the night before—since he seems like a sweet kid.

  “Brett, it’s Brett.” He sticks his hand out towards her, over the reception table.

  “Right. Well, thanks Brett.” Sofie shakes his proffered hand and wonders when it would be considered polite to release herself from his grip.