Noah’s Reckoning: Alaska Dating Games Book 3 Read online

  Noah’s Reckoning

  Alaska Dating Games Book 3

  S Doyle

  Copyright © 2019 by S Doyle

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Caleb’s Salvation

  Also by S Doyle

  Prologue

  Dyson Energy Corporate Headquarters

  Anchorage, Alaska

  Seven months ago

  Olivia

  I glanced at the clock on the wall of the conference room. It was ten minutes past noon.

  He was late.

  The other men in the room were talking quietly amongst themselves, but I was too nervous to make chit chat.

  Today I was going to meet the legendary Noah, aka Ark, Aikens. I had been studying his work for years. Had, in fact, taken this job just to have the chance to work with him, and now I was finally going to meet him. I lifted my hand to bite down on the pad of my thumb, a nervous habit I’d never been able to break, but stopped myself in time.

  Noah Aikens. My own version of a Hollywood crush.

  Except he was late. I knew he was flying in from Hope’s Point today so there could have been a delay, but the anticipation was making me crazy. My palms were sweaty and, as surreptitiously as I could, I rubbed them on my skirt.

  Then I heard a commotion from outside the conference room. It sounded like a storm was about to blow in, and when the door flew open and Noah Aikens barged in, I realized I wasn’t far off.

  He was wearing jeans, a flannel shirt and a Dyson Energy ball cap. He was also sporting some ridiculously heavy boots. I knew this when after he took his seat, he plopped one, then the other on the table.

  “Okay boys, you hauled my ass down for this, it had better be good.”

  I swallowed. And then coughed a little to make him aware of my presence across the table.

  “Sorry,” he said. “And lady.”

  I sat up in my chair, smiled and tried not to gawk too hard. I’d expected to be a little fan girl. I hadn’t expected my immediate reaction to him.

  Holy shit, he was hot. Tall, thick chested. He looked more like a lumberjack than an engineer.

  Hot, clearly cocky, he all but screamed MAN! I squirmed a bit in my chair. After working in the slick, sophisticated offices of the EPA in D.C.—with men who matched those offices—it felt like I was being introduced to a new species of man altogether.

  The corporate bigwigs at Dyson I understood.

  This creature…I didn’t know what to think of him. Other than I was looking at his bare forearms where he’d rolled up the sleeves, and I had this crazy urge to run my hands up and down them.

  Probably not a good idea at our first meeting.

  “Ark, good to see you.” Frank Sales, current CEO of Dyson Energy, leaned over to shake his hand.

  Noah had the graciousness to remove his boots from the conference table, before reaching over to take the man’s hand.

  “What am I doing here, Frank? You know I get claustrophobic when I’m in corporate headquarters.”

  Frank laughed like it was an old joke between them.

  “Ark, we called you down here to introduce you to Dyson’s newest engineer. Olivia,” Frank said turning to me, “why don’t you make the introductions yourself?”

  I stood then, a little too abruptly, but the man sitting across the table from me had done nothing to ease my nervousness. If anything, his appearance only made it worse.

  Still, I was a professional.

  “Hello, Mr. Aikens. I’m Olivia Sampson. I’m a graduate of the University of Washington with a double engineering degree in both petroleum and chemical—”

  He held his hand up with his palm out like he was a school crossing guard and I was a wayward student.

  The worse part was that I actually stopped talking.

  He looked at Frank. “What. Am. I. Doing. Here?”

  “Now, Ark, we’ve talked about this. We need someone to act as a liaison between what you’re doing in Hope’s Point and what we’re doing here. Also Olivia, coming from the EPA, is specially trained to make sure we’re minimizing any impact on the environment from our operations. Figured you two would be in agreement on that.”

  Noah, because referring to him as Ark felt a little silly, turned his gaze to me and looked me up and down. Not in a sexually assessing way, more like he was taking in my mettle.

  I straightened my shoulders and pushed my chin out telling myself he didn’t scare me.

  Only a little bit anyway.

  “Yes, well, I should state for the record that I’m quite a fan of your work. And in studying it closely, I have these ideas that I think might—”

  “Ideas?” he said. “You have ideas about my work?”

  “Yes.”

  He looked away from me to where Frank was sitting at the head of the table. “Frank,” he growled.

  “Now, Ark, hear her out.”

  “Yes, Mr. Aikens…” I said, attempting to gain his attention.

  “My dad goes by Mr. Aikens. People call me Ark.”

  I cleared my throat. “Very well, Noah—”

  “Ark,” he barked at me.

  “Ark is not a name, it’s a boat. If you don’t want me to call you by your last name, then I will use your first…Noah.”

  He snarled at me as he slowly stood, his palms flat on the table as he forward. I had another crazy urge to crawl on to the table, get up in his face just to see what he would do.

  He turned toward Frank. “Oh, now I get it. She’s sassy. And you think I’ll respect that. I don’t.”

  “Ark, be reasonable,” Frank said, trying to placate him.

  I stood my ground even as he inched farther across the table.

  “Listen, lady, maybe you don’t know who I am,” he growled. “But I’m the engineer who built Dyson’s North Shore operation, both land and sea. Up there I am king. What I don’t need is some suit wearing, corporate type, with her double engineering degree to start sticking her nose in my operation with her ideas.” He turned to Frank. “I don’t need a damn babysitter.”

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” I charged, pulling his attention to me again. I didn’t like the way he kept looking to Frank. I didn’t like it when he wasn’t focused on me, period. “I’m only going to make suggestions to improve efficiencies. Both from a cost perspective and an environmental one.”

  “Insinuating that I don’t have the most efficient process already?” he shouted. “No, Frank.”

  “Sorry, Ark. You’re a stubborn sonofabitch. But so am I. We need Olivia to do what you won’t do, which is to play nice with management, and she does have some creative ideas we think you should take a look at.”

  He snorted at the word management.

  “Fine. You wanted us to meet. We’ve met.” He pointed at me then. “You have ideas. Put them in a report. Send them to me. I’ll mak
e sure I give them the consideration they deserve. Now are we done here? Some of us have oil to pull out of the earth.”

  “We’re done,” Frank said.

  Then, just like he’d blown in, he blew out. Frank and two of his senior managers in the room looked at each other then at me.

  “Well,” Frank said, nodding, “that went better than expected.”

  “Better? How can you say that?” I asked. “You know he’s not going to read my report. He’s already dismissed me and my ideas without an ounce of consideration or respect.”

  The other men in the room said nothing but their mannerisms suggested they agreed with my assessment.

  Frank sighed. “We knew it was going to tricky bringing you on to work with Ark. He’s a cocky sonofabitch in addition to being stubborn. But he’s like that because he’s—”

  “The best,” I finished for him.

  “Right.”

  “Then there is only one thing for me to do,” I said, taking my seat. “You hired me as a liaison between corporate and operations. To oversee his operation and offer improvements. If he’s not going to read my reports, then we’ll have to do this another way.”

  “What are you thinking?” Frank asked. And I could hear the skepticism in his question.

  “If the mountain won’t come to me, looks like I’m going to the mountain,” I said paraphrasing an age-old adage.

  “You? In Hope’s Point? With Ark? Now that’s something I might want to see.”

  “I’m not someone to be easily intimidated,” I assured them. I had been working in a predominantly male world my entire career.

  If Noah was something more than man, well then, I was going to have to learn to deal with him, too.

  “Good luck,” Frank offered. “But be fair warned, in the case of Ark…his bite is just as bad as his bark.”

  “I’m not worried,” I told them even as I imagined Noah biting down on my neck. Hard.

  That shouldn’t have turned me on as much as it did.

  1

  Hope’s Point Airport—aka the runway

  Today

  Ark

  I looked up when I heard the sound of the plane’s engine. I could see it swaying in the wind and, for a second, I wondered if bring her out here was safe.

  Who the hell was I kidding? Of course it wasn’t safe. But I needed her. Her of all people. What fucking choice did I have? Men’s lives were at stake, not to mention a shit ton of money.

  Pacing in front of my truck, I felt like it took ten years before Doogie finally landed the plane and was opening the door. I saw him drop the step ladder, and when Olivia popped out, I had this crazy sense of relief.

  Which was ridiculous because the woman mostly drove me insane, but there was no point in denying it.

  She hitched a backpack over her shoulder and headed straight for me, the harsh winds whipping the ends of her hair around her face. By the time I could see her expression, I knew she’d gotten my message and understood how serious this was.

  It was officially Alaska cold as we moved through November. And dark skies overhead threatened the Arctic snowstorm we knew was scheduled to hit in the next few hours. Temperatures had already plummeted, and the water around the offshore rig was starting to freeze over, making it difficult to get to by boat.

  Which meant time was limited.

  I gave Olivia an up and down glance. I usually did this to find something wrong with her attire. She had this thing where she wanted to be seen as both an engineer and a woman so every once and while when she came out to the camp she wore pencil skirts, silk blouses and four-inch, fuck-me pumps.

  I liked to give her shit about it because riling up Olivia was something I considered to be entertainment. Well, at least until I pushed one button too many and she hauled off and hit me.

  We weren’t the best at abiding by the Dyson Company Handbook when it came to how co-workers should treat one another. However, neither one of us had filed any official complaints so far.

  This time she understood the drill. She wasn’t here for an inspection. Or to push her ideas so hard that I would be forced to look at them. This wasn’t normal business. And she didn’t need to make any damn point about her femininity. With her long, dark hair, killer, deep blue eyes and legs that went on forever, she never needed to make a point in my opinion.

  Wrapped up in jeans, heavy boots and a decent winter coat, a wool cap secure over her ears and heavy gloves, she looked ready to face the serious cold.

  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 toget
her 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?”

  “Yep. If he’s not flying down to Nome, she’s flying up to Hope’s Point. Doogie is making a fortune on those two. Eventually they’re going to have to settle on a place, but Kate wants to take things a slowly. Daniels wants her locked down sooner rather than later, but he’s willing to give her the time she needs.”

  Olivia snorted. “Locked down. You make it sound like he’s buying a car instead of dating a woman.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Oh, here we go. Did I offend your feminine sensibilities? I just meant he would marry her tomorrow if he could.”

  “That seems…fast.”

  “Yeah, but I guess when you’re in love and shit, time is relative.”

  “And are you?”

  I looked at her again. Her head was turned away even though she’d asked the question.

  “Am I in love?” That was a hell of a question.

  “With Jenny.”

  I should tell her the truth. That we were friends and nothing more. But I felt like it was information she didn’t need to have. What did it matter to her if I was or was not in love with Jenny? When I had told Olivia about Jenny the first time, Olivia had wished me luck. Completely unfazed by the idea of me going out with anyone else.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  She shifted in her seat. “I was just curious.”

  “If I remember correctly you said you hoped she was everything I wanted her to be.”

  “And is she?” she pressed.

  “Jenny’s special. I’ll leave it at that.”

  We drove for another mile before Olivia opened her mouth again.