Anyone But You

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Synopsis

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Other Books by KG MacGregor

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  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

  Bella Books

  Synopsis

  An underground pipeline has ruptured, spilling oily sludge into Minnesota’s pristine Lake Bunyan. Taking the media’s heat for Nations Oil is Corporate Communications Director Cathryn Mack, an old pro when it comes to spinning the facts in her company’s favor.

  Stuck in Duluth to handle the press during eight weeks of cleanup, she finds a silver lining when Stacie Pilardi pops up on SappHere, a mobile app that seeks out nearby lesbians. Stacie is smart, funny, sexy as hell, and wants a longterm relationship as much as Cathryn—which is to say, not at all.

  A perfect arrangement, until they realize they’re rivals—Stacie is head of the Clean Energy Action Network, in town to protest the greed and recklessness of oil companies and the havoc they wreak on the environment.

  It’s best for everyone involved if they end this, and that’s exactly what they intend to do. Eventually…

  Copyright © 2014 by KG MacGregor

  Bella Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 10543

  Tallahassee, FL 32302

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  First Bella Books Edition 2014

  eBook released 2014

  Editor: Katherine V. Forrest

  Cover Designer: Linda Callaghan

  ISBN: 978-1-59493-407-0

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Other Books By KG MacGregor

  Etched in Shadows

  The House on Sandstone

  Just This Once

  Malicious Pursuit

  Mulligan

  Out of Love

  Photographs of Claudia

  Playing with Fuego

  Rhapsody

  Sea Legs

  Secrets So Deep

  Sumter Point

  Undercover Tales

  West of Nowhere

  Worth Every Step

  Shaken Series

  Without Warning

  Aftershock

  Small Packages

  Mother Load

  Dedicated to these wonderful people

  Cari and Kathy Robinson

  JJ Crabb

  Kim Holt

  Sylvie Saint-Laurent

  Ann de Mooij

  Lucy Piper

  Acknowledgments

  As you read this, be thankful I’m never left to my own devices. Without all the hands and eyes that go into producing a finished book, you’d get dropped words, extra words, dangling participles, plot holes, comical homonyms and characters whose names and features change from page to page.

  Thank you to my editor, Katherine V. Forrest, for her insight and expertise, and especially for the confidence she gives me to make each book my own. Thanks also to my two-woman cleanup team—my partner Jenny and longtime friend Karen Appleby. Special kudos to the team at Bella Books, who put on the polish.

  The characters in this book are a product of my imagination, as are some of the companies, organizations and venues. The story however was inspired by very real events and circumstances that threaten not only the health of this planet, but the future of our governance.

  Chapter One

  So far it was only a few dead fish.

  The Gulfstream 280, its tail emblazoned with a blue and green corporate logo intended to convey environmental consciousness, always stirred a sense of awe and self-importance in Cathryn Mack. Travel on the corporate jet was usually reserved for the company brass—vice presidents and chief officers for this and that—but this trip was different. Today she was perhaps the most important person on board.

  She’d packed enough business suits and dresses for two weeks in front of the cameras. Plus a few casual outfits for lounging around. Then some yoga wear and assorted lingerie. Cosmetics and vitamins. Four pairs of shoes. And one small, battery-operated tension reliever for the base of her skull. That sometimes doubled as a sex toy. All crammed into two rolling suitcases weighing every bit of forty pounds each.

  Juan Merced bounded down the miniature staircase to greet her. He was copilot, cabin steward and baggage handler rolled into one, and she was glad when he relieved her of her load.

  “Am I the last one?” she asked. She lived farthest from Houston’s executive airport.

  “No, we’re still waiting for Mr. Bower.”

  Of course they were. Harold “Hoss” Bower was the CEO of Nations Oil and the rest of the company moved on his schedule.

  Cathryn ducked through the doorway and acknowledged her colleagues as she made her way to the back of the ten-passenger executive cabin. All were men. White men. White men with big hats. The oil business in all its clichéd glory.

  These men were not really colleagues. As corporate officers, they were superiors in one way or another, including general counsel Gregg O’Connor, the only person on board whose presence rivaled the importance of hers. Over the next two weeks, their combined skills might be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  While the other executives scrolled through their company-issued smartphones and tablets, Cathryn fired up her laptop. As the company’s official spokesperson, she had to read and write press releases without error, and she couldn’t do that on a tiny screen, especially one that auto-corrected her thoughts. Her mailbox was brimming already with the pipeline specifications and site information she’d need for the late afternoon press conference already scheduled in Duluth, Minnesota. Her technical assistant, Woody McPherson, was forwarding the available data from George Bush Intercontinental Airport as he awaited a commercial flight. Until he caught up with her tonight, she was on her own.

  Hoss’s booming voice sounded from the tarmac outside. “Let’s get this show on the road!”

  As he took his seat in the center of the small cabin, the others swiveled in their leather executive chairs to face him, knowing full well they were in for a wrenching, three-hour business meeting. Cathryn was glad for her position in the last row since she was facing forward. Her stomach had never mastered the art of flying sideways.

  Six-foot-five and barrel-shaped, Hoss intimidated most people, even some of the men on the plane, but Cathryn had always found him strangely charming. He’d been up front about why she was promoted from public relations staff to Corporate Communications Director. He liked her long blond hair and youthful looks, and said the press vultures would be more polite to a pretty lady.

  Of course, that was eleven years ago when she was thirty-three, and though she still
wore her hair long—and kept it blond with a little help—Hoss’s prediction that the press would be polite had proven way off the mark. Sure, the financial reporters were fine when she announced robust quarterly earnings, acquisitions and new drilling permits, but crisis communications like today’s were different, especially since “the press” no longer meant only newspaper, magazine and TV reporters. Now it included a growing horde of adversarial activists who wrote blogs and newsletters for people who cared a great deal about a few dead fish.

  “What’s our situation?” he demanded.

  Predictably, the executives deferred to Bryce Tucker, Chief Operations Officer and therefore the boss of everyone who should know the answer to Hoss’s question. “All we’ve got so far is a marsh slick covering a little more than an acre. Best guess is that puts us at about ninety thousand gallons.”

  Nations Oil piped its crude down from Alberta to Hartford, Illinois, where it was loaded onto a barge for transport down the Mississippi River to their refineries in Houston. Today’s emergency was a pipeline rupture outside Duluth that had spilled into a lake. Though ninety thousand gallons was a relatively minor event, environmental activist groups would make it out to be a disaster on the scale of Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf or Talmadge Creek in Michigan. Cathryn’s job was to mute their efforts with the facts, which weren’t nearly so alarming.

  “Ninety thousand gallons!” Hoss chortled and slapped the arms of his chair. “Hell, we can mop that up with a few paper towels and be home in time for the ten o’clock news.”

  “I’m afraid this spill might be bigger than ninety thousand,” Cathryn said hesitantly, looking up from her screen to see all eyes turned in her direction. Her mantra for getting ahead in the company was Don’t Make Waves, but it was clear Bryce Tucker was relying on a rosy report from their local contractor, whose ass was on the line because he was supposed to maintain the pipeline. If these figures from Woody were correct, they could be dealing with a major spill, bordering on catastrophic. “Based on the differential between the two pumping stations, it could be as much as four hundred thousand.”

  “That’s crazy as hell!” Bryce yelled, his face reddening with anger. “Dilbit’s so thick it hardly moves when we want it to. It sure as hell ain’t going anywhere with the pump shut off.”

  “Heavy crude,” Hoss corrected firmly, scanning the cabin to make certain everyone heard. “Heavy crude, not dilbit.”

  Dilbit was short for diluted bitumen. Bitumen was tar sands, a thick mixture of sand, clay and water that held dense petroleum deposits, whereas heavy crude had a lower viscosity and flowed more easily. Nations Oil had suffered a rupture two years ago in northern Wyoming, and paid a major fine for transporting dilbit in a pipeline approved only for heavy crude. This pipeline in Minnesota was in the same class, twenty-four inches in diameter and a quarter-inch thick. The company was petitioning the US government for a permit to build the Caliber Pipeline, a stronger conduit for dilbit from Alberta all the way to Houston, but environmental zealots had so far blocked their efforts.

  “I certainly hope I’m wrong, Bryce,” she said. Crossing Bryce Tucker was never pleasant, but her job was dealing with facts, not temper tantrums. The unfortunate truth was over four hundred thousand gallons of oil were unaccounted for.

  Some of that, perhaps even half, could still be sitting safely in the broken pipeline. The sad fact, however, was that the controllers who monitored their pipeline network assumed the alarm had sounded because of a gas bubble. Instead of shutting down the flow, they increased the pressure to push the bubble through, inadvertently spilling even more. There was no telling how much had gone missing, but Woody’s latest estimate probably was much closer than Bryce’s.

  “At least it’s a lake and not a river,” one of the vice presidents said.

  Heads bobbed in agreement. No one wanted to chase crude down a river. By the time the EPA finished with Enbridge, that company’s cleanup cost for the dilbit spill in Michigan’s Talmadge Creek and Kalamazoo River would top a billion dollars.

  Cathryn sent around an information sheet. “Here’s what we know about Lake Bunyan. Three hundred twelve acres, stocked with bluegill, trout and largemouth bass. Several dozen species of native birds. Property tax records show ninety-three residential structures fronting the lake—most are probably weekend cabins—one public park with a boat launch and one bait shop. The bait shop owner is the one who reported the spill.”

  As the jet roared down the runway, Hoss swiveled forward to address Gregg. “I want you to start buying up all that property. Every last one. The sooner we get the locals off our back, the better off we’ll be.”

  Larry Kratke, Bryce’s assistant vice president, was already monitoring cleanup operations on his tablet. “We’ve put three booms in place—two on the lake and one on Van Winkle Creek, which runs out of the southeast corner toward Lake Superior. Two suction dredgers are en route from Grand Forks, ETA about four o’clock this afternoon.”

  The simplest method for cleaning oil out of standing water was to suction it into a centrifuge and separate it. Once it was spun, the oil was pure, and they could then siphon it into a waiting tanker and return the clean water to the lake. Time was of the essence in cleaning up heavy oil because the diluents would evaporate in a matter of days and the oil would sink to the bottom and mix with the sediment on the lakebed.

  “Get two more suction crews and tell them to send in a grab dredger too,” Bryce said gruffly. “No, make that two. How many on the repair crew?”

  “About twenty.”

  “Double it. I want them stringing lights and working three shifts. Whatever it takes to get that oil running again.”

  From Bryce’s tone, which was even surlier than usual, he was worried about this spill. So was Hoss, who was staring grimly out the window. If Woody’s assessment was correct, they were all in for a long ordeal, much longer than the two weeks she’d planned.

  And yet it was hard to complain about anything that took her out of Houston in July.

  * * *

  “Make a legal U-turn…Make a legal U-turn.”

  “Knock it off, Marlene. Didn’t you see that Detour sign?”

  Stacie drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as her smartphone recalculated the route. She’d named the device for her father’s second wife, a know-it-all who, unlike her phone, lacked a silent mode.

  “In a quarter of a mile, turn right.”

  “See, I told you.”

  Only eight miles to Duluth, then another ten to Lake Bunyan, where Israel Kaufmann was already holed up in a vacation cabin waiting for her. It was too early to know what they were sitting on but two things were certain—whichever oil company was responsible for this spill would downplay the damage and then do as little as possible to fix it. That’s what BP had done in the Gulf, what Enbridge had done at Talmadge Creek, what Exxon had done in Arkansas and what Nations Oil had done in Wyoming. Why on earth anyone would trust them to build more pipelines was beyond her.

  It was a stroke of luck she’d been in Chicago at a green builders conference, since the drive from her home in Pittsburgh would have taken twice as long. Not that she minded her time with Marlene, her only traveling companion ever since an oil company thug snapped the radio antenna off her first-generation Prius. The solitude gave her time to brainstorm strategies for the Clean Energy Action Network, a nationwide organization of activists whose primary mission was to agitate against fossil fuels. They were dedicated and energetic, and she needed to find ways to tap that energy year-round, not just when there was an incident like this one.

  To do that, she’d have to take CLEAN to the next level, but something short of corporate. It wouldn’t do to have their precious funds eaten up with administrative costs. They’d garnered several friends in high places—congressional representatives and state-level legislators, a few Hollywood types and several technology billionaires, all of whom liked their grassroots approach. What they needed now were more grants, a full
-time executive director and professional support staff, and a team of lobbyists to get their message through. She wanted CLEAN to be efficient and effective but without losing its hands-on appeal.

  Marlene got her as far as Hermantown before declaring, “Unknown route,” and Stacie was forced to scroll through Izzy’s directions, which she’d tapped into her notes app. Though she detested Marlene at times, it was undeniable the electronic wench had saved a tree or two.

  As she drove closer to the lake, the unmistakable smell of petroleum permeated the air. That was typical in the aftermath of a significant spill, but the worst of it usually dissipated within twenty-four hours once the hydrocarbons began to evaporate. This was fresh, as though the oil was still flowing, and that struck her as odd.

  When she reached the perimeter road, a Bunyan County Sheriff’s patrol car with flashing blue lights was parked in front of a barricade, and a deputy directed all traffic to the left. That told her which part of the lake had been compromised, but it was unthinkable the authorities wouldn’t evacuate the entire area soon.

  “Second driveway on the right after the One Lane Bridge sign,” she mumbled to herself from the directions. Shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun, she crept along until she reached the turnoff. At the end of a dirt drive sat a small rustic cabin, its clapboard siding painted burnt orange and its tin roof dark green. Izzy’s car, a white SUV with rusted fenders, was parked next to a small sedan sporting an array of liberal-leaning bumper stickers, and an emblem from the University of Minnesota at Duluth.

  No sooner had she climbed out of her car than she was lifted off her feet and twirled around.

  “Stacie! I thought you’d never get here.”

  Izzy was both gentle and burly, like a human teddy bear. For the last eight years they’d been a thorn in the side of energy companies, rallying local communities to demand thorough cleanup and fair compensation in the wake of spills and other disasters. Even more important were their protests against new corporate land leases of public property, drilling or fracking permits, and pipelines. When he wasn’t responding to disasters or participating in protests, he loaded produce trucks at his uncle’s distribution center north of Minneapolis. This spill was practically in his backyard.