His mom finally gave it up. “All right, if you don’t want to invite her, if your relationship hasn’t gotten to that point yet, well, all right.” She sighed. And then she brightened and teased, “At least Cybil and LouJo and Ashley will be happy to know they still have a chance.”
Trapped. His gut churned and his pulse pounded. And then he heard himself say, “As a matter of fact, Sam and I are engaged.”
It just kind of popped out. He blinked at the wall. Had he really said that?
His mother cried out in joy. “Travis, how wonderful! I can’t believe you didn’t tell me until now.”
Had Sam heard him say that? He sent the tall, broad-shouldered woman in the grease-streaked coveralls another furtive glance. Uh-uh. She’d turned back to the sink to wash her hands. As he faced the wall once more, he heard her rip a paper towel off the roll.
He looked again. Clomp, clomp, clomp. Coffee mug in hand, she sauntered over to the nearer TV and grabbed the remote. The screen came alive and she started channel surfing.
Meanwhile, on the other end of the line, his mother was on the case. “And that settles it. You must bring her with you. I won’t take no for an answer, not now.”
He stared at Sam’s I Ain’t Yo’ Mama backside, at her short brown hair, creased tight to her skull from the hard hat’s inner band, at her big steel-toed boots. Had he lost his mind? There was no win in lying to his mom—especially not about being engaged. “Uh, well…”
“Please, Travis, invite her. I’m so happy for you. And you know we’re all going to want to meet her.”
“Mom, I—”
“Please.” Her voice was so gentle. And hopeful. And maybe even somewhat sad—as though she knew that in the end, he was going to disappoint her, that Sam would not be coming with him, no matter what his mother said to encourage him to bring her.
Now he felt like a complete jerk. For lying about Sam. For disappointing his mom. For everything. “Look, Mom. I’ll…check with Sam, okay?”
Dear God in heaven. Where had that come from? Bad, bad idea.
“Oh, Travis.” His mom was suddenly sounding happy again. “That’s wonderful. We’ll be expecting both of you, then.”
What the hell? “Uh, no. Wait, really. You can’t start expecting anything. I said I would ask her.”
“And I just know she’ll say yes. Two weeks from today, as planned. Love you. Bye now.”
“Mom. I mean it. Don’t… Wait! I…” But it was no good. She’d already hung up.
He took the phone away from his ear and gave it a dirty look. Then he started to call her back—but stopped in mid-dial.
Why ask for more trouble? Hadn’t he gotten himself plenty already?
Grumbling under his breath, he snagged the phone back onto the wall mount, yanked out a chair at the table a few feet away and dropped into it.
Sam had been waiting for Travis to finish on the phone. She watched as the two roughnecks wrapped up their bowling game and went back up the stairs.
Good. She didn’t need anyone listening in.
She heard Travis hang up, and then the sound of a chair scraping the floor as he pulled it out from the table. She switched off the TV and turned to him. “That roustabout Jimmy Betts? Born without a brain. A walking safety hazard. Give that boy a length of pipe and someone is bound to get whacked in the frickin’ head.”
He seemed distracted, slumped in the chair, a frown on his handsome face. But after a second or two, he said, “He’ll learn. They all do—or they don’t last.”
Sam let a snort do for a reply to that. And then she tossed down the remote and went to join him. She plunked her coffee on the table, swung a chair around and straddled it backward. Stacking her arms on the chair back, she leaned her chin on them. She studied him. He stared back at her, but his brown eyes still had a faraway look in them.
“Your mama, huh?” she finally asked. “Driving you crazy again?”
He grunted. “That’s right.”
“She still trying to find you the new love of your life?”
He grunted a second time and looked at her kind of strangely. She got the message. He wasn’t in the mood to talk about his mother and her plans to get him hogtied and branded.
Sam could read Travis pretty well. After all, they’d been friends since way back when he was nineteen and she was eighteen. Back then, Travis had worked on the oil well at her dad’s South Dakota ranch.
So, all right. Not talking about his mother was fine with her. She had something else on her mind anyway.
Sam indulged in a glum look around the lounge. It was a large room. But the low ceiling, the absence of windows and the fluorescent lighting gave the space a sort of subterranean glow. It made Travis look tired, turned his tanned skin kind of pasty. She didn’t even want to think about how it made her look.
Travis’s dark brows drew together. “Got something on your mind, Sam?”
Oh, yes, she did. “You have no idea how frickin’ tired I am of being on this rig. And I could seriously use a tall cold one about now, you know?”
They grunted in unison then. There was no liquor allowed on the rig.
Most rig workers had the usual two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off rotation. Not the pusher. Sam had been on the rig for over a month now, working twelve-hour shifts seven days a week. A week more and she would be back on land at last. She could not wait. And the rock docs—the engineers—were saying that the four-month drilling process was within days of completion. Her job on the Deepwater Venture was ending anyway. She wouldn’t be signing on to another rig to start all over again.
“Travis, I’ve been thinking…”
He waited, watching her.
She sat straighter and swept both arms wide, a gesture meant to include not only the lounge, but every inch of the semi-submersible rig, from the operating deck and the cranes and derrick soaring above it, to the ballasted, watertight pontoons below the ocean’s surface that held the giant platform afloat. “I used to love the challenge, you know? Doing a man’s job and doing it right. Earning and keeping the men’s respect—in spite of being female, even though I was younger than half of them. But lately, well, I’m thinking it’s time to change it up a little. I’m thirty years old. It’s a time when a person can start to wonder about things.”
He tipped his head to the side, frowning. “What things?”
“Things like getting back to the real world, like living on solid ground full-time, like…I don’t know, letting my hair grow, for cryin’ out loud, getting a job where I don’t end up covered in drilling mud and grease at least once a shift. Sitting in an employee lounge that has actual windows—windows that look out on something other than water and more water.”
He made
