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in the sun out on the deck in their black jeans, having taken their shoes, socks, and shirts off. Jack threw Jeremy a chilled Coors and popped another against the edge of the deck with a hiss, the cool froth running over his hand. The waves lapped around, reflecting a brilliant sun like multitudes of shimmering undulating silver cut glass.
    ‘Work at McAllen BlackGold was technically a superb challenge, but it was politically difficult from the start,’ Jack responded to an earlier question from his friend.
    Andrew Grant, the fifty-five-year-old engineer who had managed BlackGold’s engineering labs for twenty-two years before Douglas McAllen had bought the company, had expected to land the job and had been quite cross when McAllen had brought Jack in. At every opportunity Grant had tried to undermine him, tried to cause rifts between him and the McAllens, and challenged and bad-mouthed his plans in a knee-jerk fashion. Initially Jack had underestimated Grant and had treated his struggles as irrelevant irritations, ignoring Grant and enforcing his own way on the issues that he had cared about and letting Grant get away with it on the issues that hadn’t mattered.
    Eventually Jack had left BlackGold Engineering for Marine a little more than five years ago because persistent Grant had managed to antagonize Ronnie into a power struggle against him and had created a nasty sibling rivalry between Ronnie and Caitlin. The last straw had been when a fault had been created on the PCB layout of Jack’s latest design of the drill-head guidance unit when it was sent into production, an act of such subtle sabotage, Jack knew, that could have been executed only by Grant. However, when Douglas McAllen, not understanding the electro-mechanical details and spurred on by Ronnie and Grant had also reprimanded him, Jack had resigned on the spot. Friction with the powerful McAllen males had started putting his relationship with Caitlin under pressure. Maintaining good relationships with Douglas and Ronnie and the goodwill between the McAllen sister and brother had been more important to him than the job. He had decided he would hand the reins over to Caitlin and drive Grant through her.
    That plan had worked well. No longer underestimating Grant, Jack had maintained control over all new engineering designs as a consultant, driving down to the BlackGold offices a couple of evenings every week and some weekends, and working from his lab at home which he had gradually brought up to state-of-the art standards. Jack had made sure that all new electronics designs that had gone into production were his own, supervised against sabotage at every stage by the loyal QA engineer he had head-hunted and hired via Caitlin. Sales revenues from Jack’s newly designed devices had gone through the roof. As a result three and a half years ago, just before Caitlin’s and Jack’s wedding, Douglas McAllen had appointed Jack as the Director of Engineering of McAllen BlackGold. They had forced Grant into an early retirement with a golden handshake.
    Jack, however, had not cared much about political issues that were not technically important to him at the start. His attention had been straightaway distracted by Caitlin for whom, he later thought, he had fallen at first sight. Jack had simply thought of flirting with her as a nice secret perk, a bit of fun and banter to spice up the working day; and then it had been a challenge trying to seduce her when she had returned his attentions a little shyly, hesitantly, and subtly.
    After the first time he had got her into bed in the Rox Hotel suite in Aberdeen, however, he could not stop thinking about her. Caitlin had been quietly strong, pure, majestic, and mysterious and it had been an unforgettable experience seeing her breathless with passion at his touch. He had shattered her calm composure with a violent, passionate kiss, broken through the ice reserve, torn off the clothes that had come between them, and fitted