Dirty Secret: A Bad Boy Romance (Bluefield Bad Boys Book 3) Read Online Free

him, had everything he’d ever wanted. After Sasha had left the night of the fire, I’d realized that I wanted someone too. Hopping from woman to woman and never really making a connection was starting to make me feel like a lonely fucking loser, like one of those lifelong bachelors who spends his nights alone sucking down beer, playing video games and jacking off to porn flicks. Shit. I was already that guy.
    The supervisor and two engineers, who made rounds in their comfortable white trucks, were at the mouth of the section where Kellan and I would be bolting the roof.
    Kellan glanced over at me. “Wonder what that’s about?”
    “Who the fuck knows? Never saw all of them in one spot before, so it can’t be good.”
    We climbed out, and Jake Carson, our supervisor, headed toward us. “Braddock, Sullivan, we’ve got a kettle bottom. A big one.”
    “Fuck, this job just keeps getting better,” I muttered so that only Kellan could hear.
    Kettle bottoms were flat tree stump shaped bulges in the roof of the mine, loose sediment that had pooled around a petrified tree. And they were unstable and dangerous. Just like a massive dead branch, ready to fall on the lumberjack below, kettle bottoms were a miner’s widowmaker. It was going to be our job to push a bolt through it, to keep it from falling.
    Carson motioned for us to follow. The LED lights on our caps threw long white streams of glow over the otherwise black chamber. Columns of coal, or chain pillars, were left to hold up the entryway into the mined out section. The brow got lower, and we had to drop down to a crouch to make it to the place where the kettle bottom had reared its ugly face.
    “Jeezus,” Kellan mumbled next to me.
    The flat, cylinder shaped protrusion looked as if someone had carved it out of the rock ceiling. You could almost count the rings and root system of the prehistoric tree. A coal ring, a layer of smoothly striated bark turned to coal, showed where the kettle bottom could easily slide from its mold and crush all of us. It would have been an amazing site to see if it hadn’t been so damn dangerous.
    “Biggest damn one I’ve ever seen,” Carson said. “We’re going to need you to push up some bolts to get it stabilized.” He said it as if it was no big deal to drive a bolt through tons of unstable earth, earth that was above our heads.
    “How do you know the cast is shorter than the bolt?” Kellan asked. “How do we know we can even reach the end of this monster?”
    “We don’t,” the engineer, Spalding, said from behind. “This is more than three feet in diameter. Probably closer to five, in fact. We had to bring down a steel strap, a bacon skin. Have you men used one before?”
    “Never taken care of this big of one yet,” I said.
    Spalding crouched past Carson. He pointed up to the roof next to the coal ring. “You won’t be drilling into the kettle bottom. You’ll send two bolts through the shale. One on each side of it. Then the steel strap runs across the two bolts to secure the kettle bottom.”
    “Hopefully,” I grumbled, earning an angry scowl from my supervisor. It was easy for him to scowl. He’d be well out of the danger zone long before we started poking holes around the damn thing.
    Once the roof bolter equipment and steel strap were moved into place, the three big shots with sparkling clean gloves and a pretty truck to cruise around in, moved out of the way to let Kellan and me do the work.
    I watched as the three of them walk-crawled out of the room, eventually moving out of the scope of my light. I looked back at Kellan, who seemed just as excited about our task as me.
    “Don’t know about you, Kel, but I forgot to strap on my balls of steel this morning. I’m not looking forward to this.”
    “Yep, that about sums up my feelings too, Dawz. But the longer we wait, the harder it’s going to get.”
    We moved the roof bolter to a spot where we could drill a hole right next to the protrusion. That