Uncommon Pleasure Read online

  Uncommon

  Pleasure

  Uncommon

  Pleasure

  ANNE CALHOUN

  HEAT | NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com

  This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2013 by Anne Calhoun.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  HEAT and the HEAT design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Calhoun, Anne.

  Uncommon pleasure / Anne Calhoun.—Heat trade paperback ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-59550-3

  1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 2. Soldiers—Fiction. 3. Erotic fiction. 4. Love stories. I. Title.

  PS3603.A43867U53 2013

  813’.6—dc23

  2012031811

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Heat trade paperback edition / March 2013

  Cover photograph by Claudio Marinesco.

  Cover design by Jason Gill.

  Text design by Kristin del Rosario.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING PEARSON

  For HelenKay Dimon.

  As always, for Mark.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m forever indebted to HelenKay Dimon, whose kindness and friendship at a pivotal moment in my career resulted in the kind of good fortune I can only pay forward. Similarly, this book would not be in readers’ hands without the diligent efforts of Laura Bradford and Leis Pederson, and I thank you both. Robin Rotham, B, Jill Shalvis, and Alison Kent provided crucial support and encouragement. Going above and beyond, Alison helped me correctly plate a car in Galveston County, while Walt Stone provided insights into a petroleum geologist’s work; any errors are mine. Finally, thanks to Kristi, who said Sean would drink Shiner Bock, and has been along for the ride since the beginning.

  CONTENTS

  Over the Edge

  All on the Line

  Over the Edge

  Chapter One

  As the engine wound down the helicopter’s rotors lost speed, slowly thwapping at air saturated with late afternoon sunshine and humidity. Braced against the trunk of her car, Lauren Kincaid watched Ty Hendricks emerge from the helicopter. Acknowledging that he’d set off a purely physical response in her body wasn’t enough. She wanted to know why.

  It could have been his hair—blond, too long, finger combed back from his face—or perhaps his eyes—dark chocolate, with spiky blond lashes. It could have been his square jaw, or the broad shoulders straining at the seams of a plain gray T-shirt as he spoke a few words to the chopper pilot, then hoisted his duffel over his shoulder and crossed the helipad.

  But it wasn’t any of those things.

  It was the way he walked, utter confidence in his long-legged, loose stride as he cleared the helipad and set off down the aisle between two rows of cars and trucks left by Gulf Independent Petroleum employees working offshore. He inhabited his body as if it existed only to accomplish what he set his mind to, nothing more. He didn’t dress it or accessorize it or sculpt it. He used it—hands, arms, hips, legs—and based on the torque he applied to a wrench the length of her arm to work loose a recalcitrant bolt, she had no doubt he could be unspeakably brutal if he chose.

  His jeans were faded to pale sky blue and worn white at the seams from years of keeping him decent, nothing more. The T-shirt lacked ads for microbreweries or sports teams or Jesus, no funny slogans. He’d tucked it in, hooked his phone and Leatherman on a worn brown leather belt fastened with a dented silver buckle. She’d spent a lot of years in the company of men, from gruff, gravel-voiced career NCOs to PhDs who hadn’t seen daylight since Bush was president. She could tell a man’s man from a ladies’ man, knew within seconds when a guy puffed up like a rooster to hide insecurities and when an insecure front hid a sweetheart of a guy.

  Ty Hendricks was no sweetheart. He’d been offshore for thirty days, and pent-up need simmered in his industrial-strength body. Lauren hadn’t felt a man’s body, hard and demanding and maybe even brutal, against hers in a very long time. Illicit desire, long-suppressed and therefore all the more potent and volatile, zinged through all the right places.

  He crossed the lot, his worn brown laced-up engineer’s boots crunching gravel underfoot, and paused by the back of a crew-cab pickup to swing his duffel into the bed and head home. He had his key in the door lock before he paused, bent his head in something that looked suspiciously like resignation, then cut her a look with those melting eyes.

  She’d spent four days on an oil rig with Ty. A development geologist for Gulf Independent, her two-day trip to log the hole the drilling crew just finished drilling coincided with the end of Ty’s thirty-day shift. Two bridges to clear before she could log the hole turned forty-eight hours offshore into ninety-six and gave them plenty of time together. She’d caught him watching her with those shadowed eyes often enough.

  “Dead battery?” he said.

  Her Lexus IS 250 had four thousand miles on it, and if the battery had died, the dealership was going to get an earful. “Nothing’s wrong with my car. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

  The T-shirt strained over his shoulders as he braced his elbows on the side of the truck’s bed and let his hands dangle. There was no glint of gold on his ring finger, but that didn’t mean much. Wearing any jewelry was dangerous on a rig.

  His expression didn’t change. “Dinner.”

  “Yes. Dinner,” she said with a small smile. “After four days of gray mystery meat and iceberg lettuce I’d kill for a decent salad.”

  A breeze off the Gulf tossed his hair in his eyes, but he didn’t move. “You don’t want to have dinner with me.”

  She lifted both hands to tuck a fluttering strand into the heavy knot at her nape, watched his gaze flick to her breasts, sparking a hot, tight clench low in her belly. “Actually, I do.”

  He straightened, put on a pair of wraparound shades that hid his eyes. “No, you don’t.”

  That wasn’t I’m in a relationship, or I’m seeing someone, or I have plans already, and his blunt statement raised her hackles. She’d grown up having the circumstances of her life—frequent moves in the middle of the school year, making friends only to leave them months later, the only place that felt like home her grandparents’ farms in Kansas—dictated by her father’s meteoric rise to general in the United States Army. Once she was in charge of her life, it was a point of pride to know what she wanted, why she wanted it, and then go after it.

  “Fall’s coming,” she said, glancing up at the faded blue sky. “This is one of the last warm nights we’ll have for a while. I’m going to go home, shave my legs, and put on a dress, then I’m going to McGuigan
s. They have a bar on the patio and a Thai chicken salad I like. That’s where I’ll be around seven if you feel like eating something at the same time I’m going to eat something.” She was interested, not desperate, so she clicked open the locks on her Lexus and pushed away from the trunk. “Trust me, Ty. I know exactly what I want.”

  Dark blond eyebrows rose ever so slightly above his Oakleys, but he said nothing. She slid into her car. A push of the button started the engine, and within moments cold air blasted from the vents, chilling the sweat at her hairline, hardening her nipples. She backed out, and in the rearview mirror she saw the door close and brake lights flash on Ty’s truck before she headed across the causeway connecting Pelican Island to the mainland.

  Maybe she’d misunderstood the looks that lingered a little too long, attributed sexual interest when he saw only an oddity, a five-foot-ten female geologist working in the male-dominated oil industry. Whether he showed or not, she’d still be going to McGuigans, but she hoped he showed. She wasn’t just curious about Ty Hendricks. She wanted to know what it was about him that sped up her heart, made her aware of her body, and his, brought to the surface a very primitive female yearning. She knew exactly what she wanted.

  She wanted Ty.

  * * *

  The unexpected conversation with Lauren Kincaid in the parking lot sent a fairly predictable sensation coursing down Ty’s spine. After four tours and months of working two- to four-week jobs on isolated, confined oil rigs, he recognized the purely physical need for a woman that he suppressed when there was no chance in hell of having one.

  She’d stood out from the moment she got out of the helicopter with the rest of the crew assigned to log the well and not just because all loggers wore the same color jumpsuits. Ty noted endless legs and a full, wide mouth, then tried to dismiss her from his mind. Work relationships were too complex to make the payoff worthwhile, and a woman like that would want more than he would give.

  Until he’d seen her standing by her car, realized she was waiting for him, and thirty days of repressed need became a physical ache, sitting low and tight in his spine, hardening his cock. But physical need wasn’t enough; he had numbers to text if he wanted to get laid. No, what got him under the tepid trickle of water that passed for a shower in his hotel room then digging through his duffel for clothes both clean and suitable for McGuigans was simple curiosity.

  How would that mesmerizingly calm woman look in a dress?

  The setting sun bled orange and red into the Gulf, the tips of the waves gilded silver as he drove to McGuigans, parked the truck in one of the lots near the beach, and walked the rest of the way to the bar. His phone buzzed with a text message. As he walked he flipped it open to see New op 8 am my office from John Langley. Good. Work, lots of it, helped mute the memories.

  So did alcohol and sex.

  The two-sided bar separated the restaurant from the back patio. Lauren was sitting on the patio side at the end of the bar, and when he saw her something very primitive flickered to life under the curiosity. Each of the four days she’d been on the T-22 she’d restrained her hair in braided twists just under the back strap of her hardhat, but now her hair streamed over bare shoulders and down her back.

  He wanted to see that silver-brown silk caught on her wet lips, sliding against his thighs to pool in his lap.

  A bottle of beer sat in front of her, and her long fingers trailed in the moisture sliding down the green glass as she watched the flat-screen TV over the bar. The Thursday-night college football game was on, the commentary competing with the music barely audible over conversations. He’d been out of the Corps over a year. Civilian life should have felt normal, but crowds, noise, and no personal space still set his nerves jangling. Ignoring the internal clamor, he turned and worked his way down the bar to her. Something tipped her off to his presence, because she looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide with something he could only identify as not flirtation.

  For a long moment silence stretched between them, tinged with the same heat currently climbing her throat to her cheeks. “I didn’t think you’d come.”

  He signaled the bartender for a beer, then said, “I eat.”

  She turned on the bar stool to face him, and all mental activity halted as her outfit registered in his brain. Lauren Kincaid’s idea of a dress was what his mother would have called poor judgment and his grandmother would have called a disgrace, but some years all a cotton farmer’s wife had was her respectability. He was the only member of his extended family to leave Camden County, Georgia. The Corps, travel, and life experience shone a different light on their attitudes. That perspective transformed him from local boy to outsider, and made it hard to go home even before his last tour. Now it was worse. He knew he was different, and they knew he was different. No one knew how to bridge the gap.

  The disgrace was the color of the sweet, milky chai tea he drank with the Afghan villagers, and thin straps exposed virtually all of her shoulders, neck, collarbone. The fine silk lay against the gentle slope of her breasts and her flat belly without the ridge that normally accompanied a bra or panties. He’d bet the next round that under her expensive-looking dress she was bare all the way down. With her legs crossed the skirt rode up to midthigh, revealing a good three-quarters-of-mile-long, smooth, tanned legs.

  Breathe, Hendricks.

  Under his gaze the pink staining her collarbone and cheeks darkened, and she bit her lip, looked away, then her eyes met his again. Her position on the bar stool left her head below his as he leaned against the bar and began sharing body heat, the first step in the dance. Despite the air-conditioning blasting away inside the bar, heat radiated from her, and a clean, simple scent rose into the air between them. A hint of lip gloss, and dark shadow on her blue eyes that turned them storm gray. The pink on her cheekbones was all him, though, and by the time he was through with her mouth, that color would be all him, too.

  Blood surged south, but there were manners and rules to this game. To cover his response, he looked out at the patio area, saw a table for two being cleared. “Let’s eat,” he said.

  She picked up her bottle of beer and uncrossed her legs, all it took to get her feet flat on the floor. He led the way, spending the time it took them to snag the table trying to think of something else to talk about besides food and sex.

  “How did the well look? Worth casing off?”

  The corners of her mouth lifted, but whether she was laughing at his conversational gambit or enjoying the diversion, he couldn’t tell. “Preliminary logs look good,” she said. “There’s a solid pay zone around fourteen thousand feet. Everyone’s waiting on orders, and I need to finish my analysis on reserves, but it was worth the trip out.”

  “Even if you were out there twice as long as you should have been,” he said.

  The waitress arrived with menus. “Anything else to drink?”

  “We’re ready to order,” Ty said, then glanced at Lauren. “Unless you’ve changed your mind.”

  “No,” she said.

  “A Thai chicken salad for the lady and a french dip and fries.”

  The waitress tucked the menus under her arm, scribbled on her order pad, and disappeared.

  Lauren picked up her bottle of beer and took a long swallow. “Rigging down to clear the same bridge twice doesn’t make for the smoothest logging run,” she said. The driller all but yanked the drill string up through the sensitive sand section, a move that would at best partially collapse that part of the hole and at worst cause an underground blowout. “I thought for sure the driller would swab the hole, but he didn’t.”

  “You got lucky,” Ty said. “Last run he did swab it. The geologist had to fly back twice to get four thousand feet logged. He was pissed. He send you instead?”

  She smiled again. “He’s got a wife and two kids, hates to be away from them. I’m happy to go in his place.”

  “Nobody waiting at home for you?”

  “Just my dog,” she said lightly, her fingers trai
ling through the condensation again. “You?”

  Where was home anymore? His sisters, brothers-in-law, and father waited for him to come home to Georgia, but that wasn’t going to happen. There was no one here. “No,” he said shortly.

  “Dave said he’d fire the driller and give you his job,” she said, continuing with the work-themed conversation.

  Ty shifted in his seat. The temperature hovered near eighty-five, and the indoor air swirled around his booted feet, doing nothing to cool his upper body. She’d know the job as driller paid more, had better hours, and he could pick his crew, but he didn’t want to go there. “He tried. I turned him down,” he said shortly.

  She said nothing, just tilted her head and studied him. “You’re not from around here,” she said.

  “Neither are you.” He was out of practice with dating and casual conversation, but remembered it wasn’t supposed to sound like a verbal fistfight.

  “My parents are from Kansas, but my dad is career Army and we lived all over the world,” she said easily. “After two years in England we had to break my sister of her English accent, but the rest of us just sound like Midwesterners. You’re from…?”

  “Georgia,” he said.

  “You do pronounce all the vowels in a word,” she said.

  “Just talking,” he said, lifting one shoulder. As the silence stretched between them she idly rubbed her instep against her calf. The thin silk of her dress slipped down to pool at the tops of her thighs, but she made no move to push it down.

  The sexy dress, the hair, the makeup all made her look a little younger, a little less professionally polished, but none of it changed the fundamental confidence and competence she radiated. She was studying him the same way she’d pored over the logging reports and the mud samples when she arrived, and the scent of her skin or maybe whatever she’d washed her hair with drifted into his nostrils, mixing with his blood like oxygen.

 
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