She also looked cute as hell in that damn hat.
“How bad?” she asked.
“Bad,” I said. “I’m not liking the results I’m getting on the pressure tests. Lizzie’s at risk.”
“Lizzie?”
“Well Three,” I immediately corrected myself.
“Please don’t tell me you name your wells.”
“Okay, I won’t. Now, are you going to come with me or not? I need another opinion before I’m willing to evacuate the offshore rig.”
“How many men are stationed there now?” she asked as she made her way around my truck to the passenger side.
“I’ve got a skeleton crew of five monitoring the activity while I came to get you. They have orders to self-evacuate if the pressure test results get any worse. I figure I can use this time to get you caught up on the numbers so far.”
I hopped behind the wheel and started the truck, pumping the heat up to high.
“You think you’re going to need to blow it?”
Blow Lizzie. It would break my heart. She was one of our best producers, but if the production couldn’t be controlled, then I would be left with no choice. However, if the pressure was going to continue to build like it was doing, I wasn’t exactly sure what blowing her might look like.
Before I made a call as serious as blowing a productive well, I wanted another set of eyes on it. Someone who knew that rig almost as well as I did. The only engineer who filled the bill was Olivia.
“That’s what you’re going to tell me,” I said grimly.
Before I started the truck, I pulled out my phone to send a text to Jenny. We’d had plans to meet up later today and I needed to cancel.
“I thought we were in a hurry,” Olivia muttered.
“I just want to let Jenny know I’m not going to make lunch,” I grumbled.
I put the phone on the console when I was done and pulled away from the runway to head to our shoreline camp. There, we would boat out to the rig, assuming we still had a path through water that was icing over.
I started spouting out numbers that she began writing in a notebook she carried. “I don’t want you leaping to conclusions,” I said. “Look at the data objectively. Then we’ll make the call once we’re onsite.”
She nodded and, after that, we didn’t talk for a while.
“So,” Olivia said eventually. “Jenny is still in Hope’s Point. It’s been what? Over a month?”
I shot a glance at her. “Yep. She’s still in town. She wants to stay permanently but we’ll see how she does through the winter. Zeke’s renting her an old cabin of his.”
“Oh. So you guys are…serious?”
I paused for a second thinking how to answer her.
“I wouldn’t say serious, no.”
There. That wasn’t a lie really. Jenny and I weren’t serious. Jenny and I weren’t anything but friends. She’d come to Hope’s Point to escape a family who wanted to control her. She’d used Angel’s Facebook contest for an all-expenses paid trip to Alaska to date an oil rigger strictly as a means to an end.
We never really talked about why she didn’t want any kind of intimate relationship. Jenny was…different. I knew she had very exact ways of thinking about things, and I never challenged her on any of them. She seemed happy to be on her own. But now and then when she wanted some company, we would have lunch.
“But it’s been over month,” Olivia pressed.
“What does time have to do with anything? Hell, Eli and Shelby were together for, like, three days before they realized they were gone over each other. Jackson and Kate, too, for that matter.”
“And they’re dating now, too. Jackson and Kate?”
