On Thin Ice

On Thin Ice
Debra Lee Brown

The Alaskan tundra - a land whose pristine beauty was overshadowed by the darkness of winter, the danger of corruption.Her career hung in the balance, her life was on the line, and, after one reckless moment in a stranger's embrace, Lauren Fotheringay's heart was, too . He was a tribal cop working undercover as an oil rig roughneck to catch a corporate thief and win back his FBI job. But Seth Adams hadn't counted on murder. Hadn't been prepared to fall for his prime suspect.Instinct, however, told him the beautiful geologist was innocent, a mere pawn in a deadly plan. And as the danger around them escalated, the passion between them intensified as they raced against time to survive.

In the back of his mind, in a place he didn’t like to visit very often, he wondered if a woman like Lauren could love someone like him.

A regular guy. A cop.

All at once Seth felt guilty. Here she was spilling her guts to him with no idea who he really was, or why he was here with her now.

“What about you?” she said. “Altex. Your job. I can see you’re good at it. Do you like it?”

He felt uncomfortable lying to her—which was ridiculous. On an undercover job like this, it came with the territory. He had to lie.

On Thin Ice

Debra Lee Brown

DEBRA LEE BROWN

Award-winning author Debra Lee Brown’s ongoing romance with wild and remote locales sparks frequent adventures in the Alps, the Arctic—where she has worked as a geologist—and the Sierra Nevada range of her native California. An avid outdoorswoman, Debra loves nothing better than to strand her heroes and heroines in rugged, often dangerous settings, then let nature take its course. Debra invites readers to visit her Web site at www.debraleebrown.com or to write to her care of Harlequin Reader Service, P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269.

For Michelle

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 1

Thirty-six below. Forty-knot winds out of the east. It was gonna be a big one.

Lauren Parker Fotheringay zipped her down survival jacket to her chin, cinched the fur-trimmed hood tight and peered out the chopper’s frosted window across an endless expanse of ice. In the dim winter light she could barely make out where land ended and the Alaskan coastline met the frozen Beaufort Sea.

“Whiteout comin’,” the pilot shouted over the roar of the chopper’s engine. He squinted into the blowing snow threatening to reduce visibility to zero. “Three hours, four tops. You sure you want me to drop you?”

Lauren shot him a wry look. “No, I changed my mind. Let’s turn this thing around and head for Hawaii.”

The pilot laughed, though she couldn’t hear him over the engine noise. She settled back in her seat for the last few minutes of the trip out to Caribou Island, the site of Tiger Petroleum’s latest oil exploration well.

It was simple, or should have been. Drill a ten-thousand-foot hole in the ground, collect rock samples over the target depth, document traces of oil, clean up the mess and come home. Your basic exploration well. Oil companies drilled them all the time on land leased from the government.

Caribou Island was nothing special, really, though it did sit just outside the boundary of a wildlife refuge, an area currently off-limits to oil exploration.

Tiger had leased the island’s drilling rights on an exclusive basis. The rock samples and data collected would be proprietary, giving Tiger an edge in finishing its geologic maps of the area, and when bidding on future land leases. In the oil industry, figuring out where the oil was, was only half the battle. The other half was managing to lease the land overlying it before anyone else did. Land was everything. The only thing. And competition among oil companies was fierce.

As Tiger’s most senior geologist and project manager, Lauren hadn’t done any real fieldwork for years. Her early successes had catapulted her to the top of the technical ladder, and this next promotion would take her even further. She couldn’t let anything screw it up. Especially a last-minute, routine assignment she had no time for, and that should have gone to one of her subordinates.

Both of the geologists originally assigned to Caribou Island had caught a nasty winter flu. Just her luck. Regardless, she was determined to get in, get her rock samples, and get out as quickly as possible. The well was nearly at target depth. A week should do it. Two, at most. She had three other projects to manage besides this one.

And she wanted that promotion. Bad.

Everyone expected her to get it, and she was never one to disappoint.

Lauren gazed out the window just as the chopper’s high beams caught an arctic fox scampering across the tundra on the prowl for lunch. She caught herself smiling. The assignment wasn’t really such a hardship. She was glad to be out of her hose and heels and into some comfortable clothes for a change. And she could breathe again. She’d forgotten how much she loved the Arctic. Untamed, fresh, real. So different from the life she’d been living these past few years.

On the corporate jet from Anchorage to Deadhorse, she’d slipped out of the expensive business suit Crocker had bought her on his last trip to San Francisco. He was always buying her gifts like that. No man had ever treated her with kid gloves before, not like Crocker did.

On board the chopper she’d coiled her carefully styled hair into a knot and stuffed it under her beat-up old hard hat. She felt good. Relaxed, almost. A break from the rat race was exactly what she needed. She grinned, wondering what Crocker would think if he were here with her now.

He’d never seen her in her field clothes: holey jeans, a turtleneck and the moth-eaten cardigan that had been her father’s favorite when he was alive. She twisted her two-carat diamond engagement ring inside her glove, imagining Crocker’s shock and her mother’s disapproval.