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  BLACK FLAME

  The Boomtown Boys

  Ruby Laska

  Also Available In the Boomtown Boys Series

  Black Gold

  Black Heat

  Black Flame Black Ember (Coming soon!)

  Copyright © 2013 by Ruby Laska.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Black Flame / Ruby Laska. -- 1st ed.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  “But—it’s Christmas,” Deneen Burgess sputtered, her face coming dangerously close to violating the Burgess family “No Tears Under Any Circumstances” rule, which was almost as sacred as the “Never Admit Defeat” rule that she had already violated earlier in the week.

  She’d come halfway across the country to escape her family’s scorn, and they didn’t even know about her latest mistake yet. She wasn’t about to compound the error by crying in public.

  “It’s not Christmas today,” the woman behind the rental car counter pointed out unhelpfully. “Only Christmas Eve. And barely noon, so I’m not sure you can even call it ‘eve’ yet.”

  “Thank you for your help,” Deneen said miserably, giving up all hope of leaving the Conway, North Dakota airport in a taxi or a rental car. It was probably just as well; she was down to her last eighty-seven dollars, so she would have had to put transportation on the just-in-case Visa her dad had given her when she graduated from college and started her first job.

  That had been five years ago, and she’d never managed to go more than a few months without having to put some unexpected expense on the Visa. Mother and Daddy never got angry with her, but they made it clear that it was time for her to find a nice husband to keep her in pocket money. Deneen had almost started to believe they might have a point, that she might as well give up all hope of making it on her own and find a man to take care of her, but she didn’t have any current prospects.

  Her sister Jayne had never needed to ask for money, but then again, Jayne was the perfect one. She’d managed to find not just a well-paying job but a fantastic boyfriend—none other than Matthew Jarrett, who had been famous in Red Fork, Arkansas for his looks and athletic ability and charm and, well, everything about him was just as perfect as Jayne.

  Last summer, Matthew and four of his high school friends had reconnected at their ten-year reunion, and decided to move to North Dakota together to pursue jobs in the booming oil town of Conway. Jayne had been working as an investment advisor at the time, and doing quite well at it, as their parents told anyone who would listen. But sensing an opportunity for adventure, Jayne quit her job and sweet-talked her way into the caravan headed north. Somewhere along the way she and Matthew fell in love, and when they arrived in Conway, Jayne immediately landed a job in short-haul trucking, earning even more than she had back home.

  Just once, Deneen would like to know what it felt like to be as successful as her sister. That’s why she was here. To prove she could be really, truly, good at something. After all, Jayne had found a job the minute she came up here last summer. Unemployment was down to three percent in this oil boomtown. With all the extra disposable income in the local economy, there would surely be a need for a skilled events planner. After all, newly wealthy oil workers would be getting married and having kids. There would be birthdays and engagements and retirements and christenings and all kinds of parties and celebrations.

  And while the unthinkable, horrible event of last week was still too painful to dwell on, the timing couldn’t have worked out better, because Matthew and Jayne had announced their engagement. Now Deneen had come to Carson, North Dakota to plan her sister’s wedding, and prove to her family that she had a talent all her own, while wowing all her potential customers, and giving her sister a gift to remember. Not to mention, avoiding the need to face her parents once they found out that she’d been fired yet again.

  That’s why she’d spent the last of her savings on a one-way plane ticket here on Christmas Eve. She’d planned to surprise Jayne and Matthew, and everything had gone without a hitch until now. It had been an uneventful flight through crisp, sunny skies; her luggage was stuffed with cute cold-weather outfits and gifts for the engaged pair; and she’d been having a pretty good hair day, too, at least until the heat blasting through the tiny building that served as an airport terminal made it stand on end.

  But apparently there were no rental cars left in town, and the only taxi service was already booked solid and not even answering their phone. Deneen briefly considered hitching a ride out to the ranch where her sister was living, but one look at the snow-covered streets outside changed her mind. She’d just have to give up some of the element of surprise, that was all. But that was all right: Jayne would still be thrilled that Deneen had come all this way.

  Except that Jayne wasn’t answering her phone. Deneen tried three times, and three times no one picked up.

  “Reception’s better outside,” the woman behind the car rental counter called.

  “Of course it is,” Deneen muttered to herself, attempting a pleasant smile and wave at the woman as she schlepped her two big suitcases toward the door.

  Outside, the wind hit her full blast in the face. It felt like ten below, not that it ever got that cold in Arkansas, and Deneen pulled up her hood and stamped her feet. Only then did she remember that her sister said there wasn’t always cell reception at the ranch, so she started paging through Jayne’s texts in search of the number to the ranch’s land line. When she finally found it, her lips were almost too frozen to speak. “Please, please be there,” she whispered through chattering teeth, and hit the call button.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Jimmy Mason was staring at a bowl of flour studded with broken eggshells, wondering how the heck one was supposed to “separate” the whites from the yolks since, as far as he could tell, they were all floating around inside the shell together, when the phone rang.

  “This is most inconvenient,” he muttered, racing to wash his flour-dusted hands in the sink. The bad thing about being alone in the bunkhouse was that he had begun talking to himself, a habit which signaled a possible deterioration in his engagement with reality. He had concluded that his poor functioning could be blamed on the fact that he was spending too much time
alone; he hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on his roommates’ company until most of them had cleared out for the holidays.

  He, Zane, and Chase all worked for the oil companies drilling near Conway. An oilman worked “hitches” of twenty-one twelve hour days in a row, operating the rigs pumping the oil from deep in the earth, but had weeks off in between. Jimmy and Chase were currently between hitches, and Chase was spending the holiday with his girlfriend in Nashville. Matthew and Jayne were on a romantic getaway. That left Zane and Cal, but Zane had nearly an hour’s drive back and forth from the rig he was working on, and Cal, a police officer, was working a lot of overtime. So Jimmy was spending quite a lot of time in the bunkhouse by himself.

  The phone could be one of them now, letting him know they’d be late for dinner, which might not actually be the worst thing in the world, considering the state of the kitchen. But there was always the chance that it was something else—something worse, something that didn’t bear dwelling on. When your friends were cops and oil workers, the threat of injury was never far away. And because cell service on the ranch was unreliable, they usually used the house phone.

  Jimmy wiped his hands on a towel and grabbed the phone right before it went into voice mail.

  “Hello, Jarret-Burgess-Warner-Dixon-Olivo-Mason residence, Jimmy speaking,” he said, only a little out of breath.

  There was a little cough and then silence, other than the sound of breathing. Great—he’d interrupted his baking for a wrong number. “Hello?” he repeated, in a slightly stonier voice.

  “I—I’m sorry,” said a female on the other end. “May I please speak to Jayne Burgess?”

  “I’m sorry, but she isn’t available right now. May I take a message?”

  The silence seemed weighted with disappointment. Jayne had lots of female friends in town, despite her job in a mostly-male profession. By day, she hauled supplies to rigs all over western North Dakota. But her leisure time was divided between Matthew and her friends who liked yoga classes and chick flicks and whatever else it was they did. This was undoubtedly one of her friends, calling to wish her a Merry Christmas.

  Or…what if it was one of the ones they’d tried to set him up with? A feeling of dread overcame Jimmy. There had been a few of those, women who showed up unexpectedly at dinner and blushed and tried to make conversation with him. Often there were follow-up calls and texts and emails, which left Jimmy feeling as often as not like a real jerk. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in female companionship, but he’d been too busy for the sort of entanglement they all seemed to want. Well, that and the fact that none of them had seemed compatible with him in any of the ways that really mattered.

  “It’s just…” the female voice sounded even more forlorn, and Jimmy’s unease turned to panic. So it was someone he should know, then.

  “Dianne?” he guessed, remembering the petite physical trainer that Jayne had met at her gym and brought to dinner, the one who’d tried to talk to him about her obsession with avoiding carbohydrates.

  “No, this is Deneen.”

  Deneen? He didn’t remember a Deneen. Unless maybe this was the woman who just happened to stop by when they went out for sushi last week, Jayne’s friend from her book club. She had told him that his aura seemed playful—a ridiculous notion—and then suggested they go sledding. Jimmy had politely demurred, horrified by the notion of spending several hours with a woman who believed in auras. Had she been waiting for his call ever since?

  “Look, I’ve been really busy,” he stammered. “And I’m afraid I really ought to explain that I’m not, ah, currently looking for…”

  What was he supposed to say—a girlfriend? A date? A single night of mutual but entanglement-free pleasure? The truth was that the last option sounded pretty good to him. It had been awhile, and though Jimmy’s friends sometimes teased him about being more robot than human, he was as prone to normal urges as the next person.

  It was just that every relationship that Jimmy had ever started had ended when the women in question got tired of competing with his inventions for his time—or when they stopped finding his conversational limitations charming. And these holidays were going to be hard enough without another failed relationship to deal with.

  “Who is this?”

  Jimmy blinked. The woman didn’t sound particularly lovelorn, on second thought. “This is Jimmy Mason.”

  “Jimmy! This is Deneen! Jayne’s sister? I was two years behind you in school. Pompon squad? Class secretary?”

  Jimmy’s mind screeched to an abrupt halt and executed a U-turn. He could practically feel the synapses crackling as his assumptions evaporated and he tried to form a picture of Jayne’s younger sister. The problem was that he’d barely even been aware of Jayne, or almost any girls who hadn’t been in the math or robotics or physics clubs at school.

  “How are you?” he said stiffly. “Jayne and Matthew have gone to Minneapolis for several days. They, er, asked not to be disturbed, but I’ll be glad to let her know—”

  “Oh, no!” Deneen Burgess burst in, her voice quavering.

  “Is there something I can help you with?” Jimmy said, even more uncomfortably, since the only thing more confusing than a besotted female was a distressed one.

  “Yes,” she snuffled. “If you don’t mind too much, can you come pick me up? I’m fifteen hundred miles from home and I’m losing feeling in my fingers.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  By the time the shiny white truck pulled up, Deneen had practically disappeared inside her coat, cinching the hood so only her nose was exposed and pulling the cuffs as far as possible over her hands. The coat wasn’t holding up well to the cold, which wasn’t surprising since she had bought it in a vintage shop and it was thirty years old, but she hadn’t been able to resist the hot pink puffy quilting or the faux-fur trim. Also, it had been cheap, and Deneen had never imagined that any place on earth could be so cold that the coat wouldn’t be adequate.

  She definitely should have bought better mittens; the pink ones with the appliques in the shape of kitten faces did almost nothing to guard against the incredible cold.

  She watched people coming and going from the terminal, marveling that her sister had willingly come to such a barren and unwelcoming place. The locals clearly knew a thing or two about surviving in arctic conditions: they wore heavy boots, down-filled pants that didn’t look like they would do much for one’s figure, voluminous parkas, and wooly hats and scarves. They got into enormous trucks and SUVs with massive tires, vehicles that looked like they could flatten the bumps out of a road, and took off in clouds of exhaust.

  The white truck looked just like all the others, but it slowed in front of her and the window rolled down a couple of inches.

  “Deneen?”

  “Yes!” She smiled brightly and started tugging her suitcases toward the passenger side.

  The door opened and a man jumped out. He was wearing a fleece hat that covered everything but his eyes. He jogged over in his snow boots and grabbed the suitcases as though they weighed as much as boxes of tissues, and whisked them into the back of the truck.

  Then he loped to her door and held it open.

  Deneen cautiously clambered into the passenger seat, impressed by Jimmy Mason’s manners. It was hard to tell, in the winter gear, if he still had the legendary physique that had got him recruited for the Fighting Bulldogs football team his sophomore year. The rumor had been that he didn’t even know how to hold the ball, but that Coach Emerson had gotten the physics teacher, Mr. Blount, to explain the dynamics of the passing game. Whether it was true or not, by the time Jimmy was a senior he was on the varsity starting line, and girls lined up outside the gym to watch him come out after practice, freshly showered and often shirtless.

  She’d never been one of them. Jimmy was too weird, awesome torso or not. He talked like a Wikipedia entry and he barely seemed aware of his fellow students unless they were talking about quantum physics or space travel or somethin
g equally uninteresting.

  But he had just driven through the snow to rescue her, so Deneen supposed she should make an effort.

  “So, you work on an oil rig,” she said, holding her frozen hands over the heating vents to warm them. “That must be, um, interesting.”

  “Oh, yes,” he agreed. “The new technology is fascinating. Multilateral drilling in particular lets us branch out from the main well and—”

  “That’s…wow,” Deneen said. She tried to think of an intelligent question to ask and came up short.

  “And you came up here to spend Christmas with Jayne,” Jimmy said. He sat very straight, his hands exactly on the ten and two, like they taught in driver’s ed. A real rule follower, Deneen thought disapprovingly, and then mentally chastised herself. No more judgment, that was one of the many resolutions she’d made for this latest fresh start.

  So she resisted saying, “That’s right, Captain Obvious,” and decided she might as well be charming.

  “That’s right! And also, to plan their wedding. I’m going into business as a wedding planner, and this will be my first job.” Once the words were out, she realized that it was the first time she had voiced her plans aloud. Which was scary, because now she was committed. Quickly, she changed the subject. “Plus, holidays with family! The way it should be, right?”

  Too late she saw his expression harden, and put two and two together. Matthew and Jayne were gone, but he was still here. Wasn’t there something in high school…she had a vague memory of Jimmy’s mother being sick. And it had just been the two of them. Her own mother used to cluck over “those poor unfortunate Masons.” Once, Marjorie Burgess had driven over to their run-down little house with a box of clothes she thought Mrs. Mason might be able to use; Jayne and Deneen, in the back seat, stopped fighting when they saw the thin figure come to the door and speak for a few moments with their mother. She was pale as paper, her thin hair twisted into a bun, but she’d had a dignity about her, even from afar. It was hard to believe she was related to Jimmy, who, despite his weirdness, was the picture of health and vitality.