Working for the Heiress (Hard Hat Hotties #12)

Conrad

I always arrived before dawn.

When I took this job in Forge Creek two years ago, I started keeping hours that don’t belong to anyone but me. The crew rolls in at six, the office staff at seven. I got to work every day at five to work on the birds in peace.

Lilianne Ashford was due to arrive at nine, which probably meant eleven if she was like all the other rich assholes who don’t value other people’s time. We’d been getting corporate emails for weeks.

Regional Operations Manager. Effective the eighteenth. I knew one thing for sure. The owner’s daughter was barely out of college and about to be in way over her pampered head. She must have been someone’s favor…someone’s headache at home sent out here to become someone else’s problem.

I had a few hours before that someone was me.

A helicopter was up on jacks in bay two, cowling off, and I was elbow-deep in the engine compartment with a flashlight in my mouth and a torque wrench on the bench at my hip.

Number three engine had been running rough on the last run — not bad, not a grounding issue, just a tick that nobody else had heard but that had sat in my ear for forty-eight hours like a splinter.

That morning, I was determined to find it.

The hangar smelled like cold concrete and old grease and the coffee I'd brought from home. Outside, the Colorado dark was squeezing the mountains the way it did in October, with the feel of snow coming a few days out. I could feel it the way I always felt a fight coming in a bar.

I worked on the engine, tamping down any thoughts of Ashford and his daughter. My hands knew what they were doing without me having to involve my head very much. It took those cracked, greasy paws about twenty minutes to find the problem.

A loose union on a fuel line, just a hairline suggestion of a split, the kind of thing that would have shaken itself worse before it broke and given somebody a chance to land.

I tightened it. I checked the torque twice.

I made a note in my own log — the personal one I kept in my back pocket, a duplicate from the company log, but one fully under my control — and I closed the cowling, then I stood there with my hand on the warm metal for a second longer than I needed to.

I didn't think about West Virginia.

I'd gotten good at not thinking about my old life.

Not about Wolf, who’d flown the bird I’d kept in the air. Not about Atlas, who’d operated on dying people by flashlight while the mountain came apart around us. The mudslide killed twenty-three people that night. The helicopter crash didn’t have to be part of the count.

The crew started rolling in earlier than usual, which meant they were eager to size up the big boss’s daughter. Diaz came in first, with two gas-station coffees and a face that suggested he hadn't slept. He set one of the coffees on the workbench beside me without asking.

"Holt." He nodded at the Bell. "She fly?"

"She'll fly."

"You find the thing?"

“Sure did.”

He grunted, satisfied, and moved off toward bay one. Diaz didn't talk more than he had to and never had. It was one of the things I liked about him. I knew he worked a second job to make ends meet, and I also knew we were lucky to have him and his instincts for these complex machines.

The rest of the crew came in over the next twenty minutes, in pairs and singles.

I kept my head down and let the small talk happen around me.

I'd already heard the thing they were speculating about.

I'd heard it in three separate emails and one phone call from Denver and a voice mail from the regional director that had used the phrase opportunity for the Colorado division twice in ninety seconds.

The Ashford heiress was coming.

I'd built a picture of her without meaning to.

Pampered. Polished. Bored. I'd seen it before, in different uniforms — the boss's son in WV, who'd lasted four months and crashed a company truck before they'd quietly moved him to a desk.

People like that didn't last in a hangar.

Three months. Maybe less if someone got hurt.

Then she'd be gone and I'd still be here, and the work would still be the work.

I told myself this while I cleaned my hands on a rag that had stopped being clean sometime in the spring.

A fancy car came in at twenty after eight. Earlier than I thought, I’d give her that.

Of course, the engine was wrong for Forge Creek. Nobody made their way up here without a V8, and she might as well have been puttering her way up here in a golf cart. She pulled up close to the hangar doors instead of parking out by the office, which was a choice.

I didn't look up. I had the cowling open on bay one's bird now, going through Diaz's pre-flight with him, and I was not going to perform a welcome for somebody who wasn’t going to stay.

The driver's door shut and I heard heels on concrete.

Not work boots. Not the steel-toes everybody on this site wore because they value their feet. Heels. The sound of them came through the open hangar door, and every head in the bay turned toward it before I did.

I looked up and time stopped.

She stood in the doorway with the sun behind her, and for a second — maybe two — she didn't see me. She was looking for the office, looking for somebody official. Her coat was too good for this town, but not right for the work.

Camel-colored, soft, looked like it cost more than my truck.

Her hair was dark blonde, pulled back into a low knot at the nape of her neck.

She had a leather bag over one shoulder and a phone in her hand and she was wearing thigh-high boots with a tiny skirt in October in Colorado.

The sight of her curves swelling round and ripe above those boots caused a violent, chest-shattering roar in my soul—a primal instinct I hadn’t felt for two years.

She didn’t know I was staring at her, hadn’t seen me yet.

But the moment my eyes locked onto her, looking away became physically impossible.

She owned me before she even knew my name.

She had no idea anyone was watching, and I saw her take in her surroundings.

She didn’t flinch, didn’t wrinkle her nose at the smell of engine grease.

Instead, she held herself like a queen stepping into my domain.

The sudden, bruising rush of blood to my jeans wasn't just lust—it was a definitive claim.

A lightning bolt striking a tree. I hadn't felt alive like this since the tragedy at Raptor Creek, but one look at this woman just resurrected me.

Then she found me.

Her eyes landed and her face assumed the right expression for a woman pretending to be in charge of the workplace.

She smiled. It was warm and professional and did not reach her eyes.

And then she started toward me, those hips swaying as I stared, long past appropriate.

The boots clacking sounds on the concrete.

Diaz, beside me, made a noise under his breath that could have been a laugh or a prayer.

"Excuse me," she said. "I'm looking for someone who could point me to the office. I think I parked in the wrong place".

Up close, the smile was even better. Up close, I saw her eyes were brown, and there was a freckle on her cheekbone.

I could smell whatever she was wearing — not perfume exactly, something cleaner than that, maybe cinnamon or vanilla, like cookies.

I knew I looked like a filthy beggar compared to her polished decorum.

“Office is the building on the left," I said. "You want to come in through the side door. The front one sticks".

"Thank you".

She didn't move. She was looking past me at the bird, the one I'd just buttoned up, and there was a small change in her face — quick, gone before I could name it — that was curiosity, maybe. The kind a person has when they're looking at a thing they recognize.

"Is that the Three-Fifty?" she said.

I blinked.

"The B-three," she added, like she was correcting herself. "Sorry. I don't know if you call them by the model or by the tail number around here. I'm — I'm trying to learn".

I looked at her. The curiosity was real. The smile had dimmed a notch into something more honest, almost embarrassed, and that surprised me. I was rarely caught off guard.

"B-three," I said. "Yeah. That's the one we use for the lift contracts".

"Okay." She nodded, and tucked a piece of hair that wasn't loose behind her ear, and looked at me, and said, "I'm Lilianne Ashford".

As if I hadn’t known. But hearing her say it, in her own voice, in my hangar, did nothing to ease the pressure behind my zipper.

“Holt,” I spit out as I wiped my right hand and held it out — and even as I did it I was already preparing for the moment she'd look at it and decline.

Women always looked. The hand never came clean.

I'd learned to offer it anyway, because not offering it was its own kind of statement, and then to retract it gracefully when the woman in question gave the small apologetic smile that meant I don't touch that.

And then the heiress took my damn hand. She held it with a full grip, a firm shake that had nothing delicate about it as my blood surged and my nerve endings fired heat up my entire arm.

Her palm wasn’t the delicate, useless hand of a spoiled heiress.

Amid the scorching firestorm in my veins, I realized the truth.

She had tiny friction calluses on the inside of her fingers—the distinct markings of a pilot who knew how to grip a cyclic stick.

I felt the electric current of her strength mapping itself through the grease on my skin.

I let go three seconds too late, completely unapologetic about the footprint my grease left on her spotless skin. She was marked now. By me.

"Holt."

She said it back to me the way a person says a word they're tasting. She didn't ask for a first name.

"Welcome to Forge Creek, Ms. Ashford."

"Lili, please."

"Ms. Ashford," I said again, because my mouth had decided some things my brain was going to have to catch up to.

A small smile. "All right," she said. "Holt."

Diaz, behind me, dropped a wrench. It was deliberate. He picked it up too slow and too loud, and I could feel him grinning without having to look.

"Thigh-highs in the hangar," he said, to the air, to nobody, to me. "Boss is gonna love that."

It was the kind of thing Diaz said, and ordinarily I'd have ignored it, but Lili — Ms. Ashford — turned and looked at him with that same even smile and said, "Hi. Are you the boss?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then I'll wait to be loved."

She said it lightly and Diaz laughed and the temperature of the hangar shifted by some fraction of a degree, and I understood that this woman was different from what I had decided she was.

"Office is over there," I said again, because it was the only thing I could figure out to do.

"Thank you, Holt."

She walked past me, heels clacking. I listened as the sound was muted as she reached the linoleum where the hangar gave way to the office hall. Then I heard a door, and then her voice—muffled by distance—saying something that made the admin laugh.

I stood there with the rag in my hand.

Diaz, who was a smarter man than he let on, said nothing as he moved off toward bay three.

After a minute I went back to the engine cover I'd already closed and opened it again, because I needed to be doing something, and I could not have told you in that moment whether I was checking the joint I'd already torqued or just looking for somewhere to put my hands.

Ms. Ashford came back through the hangar twenty minutes later with the office manager, getting the tour. I heard her again before I saw her — the sound of those damn boots, plus the office manager's voice doing the cadence she did when she was being deferential to corporate.

I was wiping down the engine and did not stop. Didn’t look up into those eyes for fear I might explode, and lord knows I had no idea what was going on inside me. Something primal and inappropriate, for sure.

A monster awakened inside me and decided to lust after a woman far above my station. No. Not lust. I felt drawn to this woman, who came from the man I hated with every drop of my marrow.

"And this one?" Lili said. "Whose is this?"

She was asking the office manager about her own assets, as if every bolt and washer in this building didn’t belong to her family.

But Ms. Ashford meant something else, too.

She was asking about responsibility. About chain of command.

About accountability. The office manager looked at me, because she was not the person who answered that question about the machines in this room.

I straightened up and met Lili’s eyes across the engine covering. The hangar was loud around us — two compressors, somebody's radio, Diaz arguing with a hose down at the other end — and none of it touched the small distance of air between her face and my own.

"Mine," I snarled.

It came out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying. The word for the bird. The word for the labor, the parts. The word for the work I had built around myself for two years like a wall I could live behind.

And, somewhere I wasn't ready to look at: the word for her.

Mine.