“You’ve obviously had your coffee.”
“In the next life,
“You’ll still be stuck with me,” he said wryly, and swung an arm around her shoulder as they headed for the car.
It was an hour’s drive to the construction site. Anticipation increased in Sonia as they neared the project. She hadn’t been there in months, not only because Craig had been involved in meetings in Washington, but because a site where shale oil was being extracted was hardly the most natural place for a woman to be, unless she wore a hard hat and geologist’s boots.
Craig parked the car, viewing his wife’s antsy movements with a chuckle. “I have this terrible feeling you have a secret wish to run a bulldozer. Are you going to be able to contain yourself while I work through a few things in the office?”
“What do you pay a bulldozer operator?” she demanded.
“I refuse to answer that.”
“You haven’t really told me in a long time how the project’s been going.” She understood the basics. Craig’s
“How long are you going to be?” she asked him as they walked toward the two-story office building.
“No more than an hour or two.”
“I’ll just wander around, then.”
“No,” Craig said swiftly.
Sonia’s eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Craig, I don’t want to get in your way. You know I’m perfectly happy just poking around. Everyone knows me…”
He obviously wanted her in sight, she thought with amusement. Mrs. Heath met him at the door of his office, her crinkly gray hair standing on end as it always did. Piles of crises had accumulated in his absence, all of which Mrs. Heath politely indicated he should immediately resolve.
She served Craig a cup of coffee, then he went about the business of resolving. John was one of his geologists; his crisis had something to do with the marketing of nahcolite, a by-product of the extraction process. After that, Senator Brown wanted to discuss a section of the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act that worried him. After
Somewhere in midstream her husband seemed to realize he was holding her hand. He didn’t
Outside was a barren wasteland of sagebrush with the sun beating relentlessly down on it. It always amazed her that such a short distance from home, green rolling landscape turned into gutted gullies and arid rolls of parched land. The aboveground shale-oil workers always argued that messing up the landscape here was hardly an ecological crime. At first glance, of course, one saw no beauty. At second glance, however, one might see a herd of mule deer grazing on one of the hills, an eagle swooping down, a plant bursting into flower. Even the pitted gullies had their own kind of lonely beauty.
Two tall, gray, windowless structures gleamed silver in the morning sun, and a fleet of large trucks, bulldozers and cranes was parked by the office. That was all, though. No one could ever guess that three hundred people were probably working underground at this moment, or what was happening there.
Her feet were itching to take the huge elevators down to see what was going on at the heart of the project. She knew the mechanics…more or less. Oil was down there; that was a given. In conventional mining, the shale was brought to the surface, and the oil separated from it by a heating process called retorting. That method, unfortunately, left a legacy of slag, polluted water and air no one would want to breathe.
When the mining was done underground, very little water was required, no air pollution resulted and the slag presented only minor disposal problems.
It was so simple; Craig had explained it to her a dozen times. Underground, the men dynamited, leaving masses of broken oil shale. The rubble was later exposed to tremendous heat, which caused the oil to separate from the rock. Then the oil was pumped up and sent to the refineries. So simple, to produce a few hundred thousand barrels of oil a day that the country desperately needed…
And not simple at all, Sonia thought absently. Meeting energy needs was never simple. Any sudden increase in fuel supplies was enough to send prices plummeting, enough to destroy national economies as well as oil companies. Craig’s project received funds from the federal government and from private investors, all of whom had the same goals: to produce fuel in a way that would not upset economic systems, didn’t harm the environment and earned profits. Craig’s process was designed to achieve that goal.
Sonia stirred restlessly at the window. She was shamelessly proud of him. When push came to shove, though, she couldn’t care less about the project when her husband’s health was at stake. She turned and watched him for a moment with ruthlessly critical eyes.
Craig was on the phone; Mrs. Heath was in the doorway; John, in a short-sleeved shirt with his hard hat cockeyed, was leaning over Craig’s desk. Her man had loosened his tie twenty minutes ago, rolled up his shirt cuffs even before that. One arm was lazily folded over his ribs, but there were no pain lines around his eyes, no drawn look between his brows that signaled a headache.
And he was busier than a one-armed juggler. Smiling, Sonia slipped toward the door with a wink for Mrs. Heath. She was perfectly content wandering around on her own and hardly wanted to be in Craig’s way.
She’d made it to the end of the corridor before she felt a warm hand slip into hers again. She glanced up to find a very handsome man with a shock of brown hair over his forehead and a very clear pair of blue eyes focused on hers.
“That stuff will wait,” Craig told her. “I’ve got things to show you.”
He did, she admitted. Her husband had a great many things to show her, in spite of being constantly interrupted by people who needed-and claimed-his attention. His hand still remained irretrievably locked with hers.
The dusty workers from underground, talking about tolerances and heat and percussion problems, must have thought it strange.
So did Sonia. Craig had never before exactly tied her to his wrist while he went through the mundane details of his work. She didn’t mind. She’d always liked the simple intimacy of holding hands.
She said nothing aloud. He loved her, and sooner or later he’d notice what he was doing. She hoped sooner. She wanted to make a trip to the ladies’ room.
Chapter 6
“Come on, Charlie. You know you’ll have a good time if you come with us,” Sonia coaxed. As additional bribery, she handed him a lemon meringue pie to hold, then turned to wrap the bowl of potato salad with plastic wrap. Neither the huge bowl nor the single pie would even dent the hunger of the billions of people she knew her mother had invited for the barbecue-but then, everyone would bring similar offerings. June Rawlings believed in annually celebrating the first of July, for no good reason that anyone worried about.
“I’ll just take this out to the car for you,” Charlie said gruffly. “But I got too much to do to go anywhere.”
She trailed him out to the back of the SUV, which was already loaded with swimming suits, two root-wrapped rosebushes as presents for her mother, a long skirt to wear later, and some tools Craig was lending her father. She stood back up from the truck and blew a wisp of curl from her cheeks. “You’re going,” she told Charlie with an affectionate and most determined gleam in her eyes. “No more nonsense about being too busy. It’s too hot to work, you know my mother will kill you if you don’t show up, and you’re too darned old to be shy. Furthermore, you’re
