At the thought, her fingers twitched, then slowed their braiding. After Mari’s mom had remarried, she had always curled Mari’s hair on the weekends. Dolling her up in her best dresses like a good little girl who wouldn’t upset her stepdad. It never really worked. Her mom’s personality was soothing, as creamy as her unmarked skin. Whereas Mari always set him off, and by Mondays she was usually smudged with the angry red and bruised purple marks of her failure. Still, his backhands never hurt for as long as the tiny burns from when she squirmed in her seat and brushed her mom’s relentless curling iron.
She abandoned the half-done braid and stuffed it into a careless ponytail instead, irritated to catch herself guided by the echo of her mother’s desperate placating tactics from a lifetime ago.
“Ready for some good news?” At the sound of Marcus’s voice, she turned around, and he gave her a hopeful smile. “Payday.” He handed over her check, and her pulse jumped at the bold type across the top line.
Marianna Tucker
“Thanks.” She quickly folded it in half. Seeing her real name on anything always gave her a jolt. She used a fake name for hotels to make it harder to track her down, but she didn’t dare lie on legal documents that would be linked to her tax return. Still, she figured as long as the only address her real name led to was her truck and a PO Box, nothing could be traced back to her. He couldn’t find her.
She must not have hidden her disquiet very well, though, because Marcus looked worried enough to attempt an awkward shoulder pat. “You only have to stick it out with Wyatt for a week,” he said. “Just a week.”
* * *
—
Jack Wyatt roared off the dirt road and onto the construction site and jammed the work truck to a dust-billowing stop. He was already in a foul mood and twenty-two minutes late, because his Cheetos-for-brains crew couldn’t remember their tools from the construction yard. He needed to pack their trucks for them like a bunch of babies’ diaper bags if he wanted to get to work on time.
He grabbed a metal clipboard out of the back seat, scrawled his name on the top of it, and then chucked it onto his hood with a clatter as the other crew truck crept up to park next to his.
“Sign the damn safety form,” he growled. “If you’re too stupid to keep yourself alive, you don’t deserve to be.”
That was the only safety speech his men were going to get, and he was flat serious about it. He’d seen foremen talk about every little bitty thing that could go wrong, repeating it every morning, and he’d still seen linemen plunge to their deaths off the metal lattice towers they were erecting. There wasn’t anything that could keep a man from falling but his own hands and his own brains.
Talking wouldn’t do crap.
He spat in the dirt, a sourness clinging to his tongue that came from more than the rapidly cooling coffee in his travel mug. A guy like him was better off alone, so it was too bad he couldn’t just build towers by himself. It’d be safer, not to mention quieter. He’d never played well with other people. He’d only ever cared for two people in all his life, and one was an asshole, and the other got himself killed.
His thoughts were interrupted when he spotted something in the scene that didn’t match: a slender figure picking her way around the edges of the bulldozed dirt of the tower site. She walked lightly, as if there was hardly any weight to her steps, her wisp of a safety vest lifted by the curve of small breasts.
He blinked and looked away, not wanting to gawk at her like his shitbag brother always did to women. But once he did, he spotted a parked truck that he hadn’t noticed before. It was tiny compared to their work rigs, one of those foreign-made trucks with the bed of it closed in with a metal camper shell. He’d heard the desert biologists lived in them, eating and sleeping and everything in a little truck bed.
He didn’t really believe it.
In the Mojave Desert, 117 degrees in the shade, where metal got hot enough to burn straight through his thick leather gloves? Nobody was stupid enough or tough enough to live in a pickup truck.
Low murmurs caught his ears, and he squinted back to find his crew done signing the safety sheet and just standing around, smirking as their eyes bounced between him and the approaching woman. Women rarely showed up on construction sites, but on this job, they had a lot of female biological monitors, so it wasn’t that goddamn remarkable to see one. Even if there was something about the way this one moved that made him want to stare.
“Haven’t you ever seen a biologist before?” he said, furious that they were all gawking at her. “Why don’t you grab an impact wrench and act like you can do an honest day’s labor around here?”
“Just wanted to watch you meet the new bio, boss.” Kipp snickered from under his enormous waxed mustache.
Jack sent a furious look toward Kipp, who jumped into motion, yanking his tool belt on so fast he nearly buckled it to the belt on his pants.
Jack took off his hard hat and shoved his shaggy hair back, planting the helmet back on. “Infested with tree huggers,” he muttered. “In a land with no fucking trees.”
He strode forward, wanting to get this over with as soon as possible. Twenty-eight minutes late getting started now, and if they didn’t get this next section bolted into place by quitting time, no way was his boss approving overtime. Which would mean his men would have to work for free to get it finished. It wasn’t like they could just leave a giant tower half-screwed together like a forgotten Lego set on the living room floor.
“Um, hi,” the woman said. “I’m Mari.” Her quick, polite smile faded so fast he wasn’t totally sure it had ever been there. “I’ll be your biological monitor this week. I just need to check in with you about one or two things we have to do to keep our native endangered species safe while you work.”
Safe. Jack snorted. If only this company spent half as much on its own men as it spent protecting mythical animals nobody ever saw. His safety ropes were frayed, harnesses faded and brittle, the work trucks’ tires so bald and cracked they flew apart on the freeway a couple of times a year.
The corners of her mouth twitched down at his derisive sound, and he tensed, waiting for the holier-than-thou speech all these bios seemed to have at the ready.
“It’s just a power line,” she offered instead, her soft voice wavering a little. “Nothing should have to die for it.”
The sound of cracking bone rang through his memory. Vernon had died for it. Not this power line, but another. Jack ran a hand over his face to cover the twitch his shoulders gave in response. “I ain’t hurting any animals.”
It was plain old desert, all cactuses and squat, ugly bushes. Wasn’t like there were herds of white rhinos parading around. He’d been out here for months. You’d see a lizard, sometimes a bird, that was it. It wasn’t like he was holding them down and running screws through their feathery little wings.