Page 63 of Five Mountain Daddies

2

Samuel

No pressure, son, but we’re all counting onyou.”

Roy looks at me with that serious expression of his, and I smile back at him. “No pressure at all,” I say, grinning athim.

He laughs softly. “I know, it’s a bitch,right?”

“Right,” Isay.

Roy’s a small guy, well, I guess everyone’s small compared to me. He’s over six foot and a bear of a guy, but he’s in his fifties and getting soft with every passing year. I’m twenty-eight, and could possibly be his son, and yet for all intents and purposes, I’m hisboss.

Not exactly, of course. The coal mining company is his real boss, they’re all our fucking boss. The head of the company, this crazy guy named Tommy Evans, died in a freak skydiving accident. Apparently his chute didn’t deploy properly, and he hadn’t packed a backup. He smashed down into the Appalachian Mountains, and they scraped what was left of him off the side of aboulder.

He wasn’t such a bad guy, all things considered. He treated us fairly, more or less. We were paid on time, got decent benefits, though bonuses were cut years back, and there are more and more layoffs these days. I guess that can’t be helped, considering the state of this damn country these days. We all know we’re in a dying, backward industry, but we can’t do much about it. We’re a coal-mining town, and will be until it all fallsapart.

I take a breath and Roy smacks me on the back. “Come on, son,” he says. “Get it together. We’ll go make a good impression,yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say, steelingmyself.

We head into the offices of Evans Energy, the company that owns the Wheeler mine. A young, smiling girl with brown eyes leads the way through the offices, and I can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. I wish I could work in a damn office like this, but I know I stand out. I know I’d never fit inhere.

For starters, I’m a big man. I’m six-foot-five and more muscular than all the men here combined. I’ve been working with my hands all my life, and I’m more at home underground than I am above it. I know the mine better than anything else in the world, since my daddy brought me up to mine it. He’s gone now, died years ago in a collapse. My mom followed a couple years after, cancer from smoking all her life, leaving me the house and not muchelse.

I’m a miner through and through. Maybe there’s no dust to breathe up here in the offices, no worries about collapses or gas pockets, nobody dying just to make a dollar. But down there, I feel more alive, and I suspect I wouldn’t last long uphere.

We follow the girl back to a conference room. It’s empty and she gestures for us to sit. “They’ll be in shortly,” she says, and leaves a momentlater.

I look around the room without sitting. Roy glances at me and slowly sits with a grunt. “Come on, get comfortable,” he says. “You’re the union head now, you gotta act likeit.”

I glance at him. I never asked to be made head, but nobody else wanted the job. I’m the youngest union head in the miner’s union history, and I’m not sure how I feel about the distinction. We have contract negotiations coming up, and the old head conveniently retired, leaving that shit-show for his successor. Nobody else stepped up, so I fucking did, and here I am. Roy’s my second, mainly I think because he feels bad for me, since I have no clue what the fuck I’m getting myselfinto.

I haven’t negotiated anything in my life. Subtlety isn’t exactly my strength. I’d rather bash some skulls open or break a nice vein with an axe, but that’s not my role anymore. Well, I’ll still mine, but mostly I’m running the union, negotiating with the mine bosses, doing all that crap. Roy takes care of a lot of it, and it still all comes down on me if the shit getsblowing.

I sigh and finally sit. We’re here to meet the new head of Evans Energy, apparently crazy Tommy’s daughter. I don’t know anything about her. She hasn’t lived in Wheelville for years, and nobody I talked to knows a damn thing. As far as I can tell, she’s just some rich guy’s daughter, way too young to run a company, but that’s crazy Tommy for you. The guy made sure she’d take over if he everdied.

“Here they come,” Roy says, looking over my shoulder. “Smile and benice.”

“Always am,” I grumble, standing and turning and stopping in my fuckingtracks.

Three people walk into the room. I recognize the guy in the front. That’s Ingram Jones, crazy Tommy’s close friend and the second most powerful guy at Evans Energy. The next person is Laura Shane, an older brunette with too many wrinkles and too much eye makeup. She’s the head of PR, and I’ve never spoken to her in mylife.

And the third person is the girl I fucked a couple weeks back, the one that left in the middle of the night and I never heard fromagain.

I stare at her, shocked. I’m not the kind of guy to be rendered suddenly speechless, but here I am, wearing khaki fucking pants with my shirt tucked in, feeling like a fuckingfool.

Ingram steps up to me. “Mr. Carter?” he asks. “I’m Ingram Jones, Vice President of EvansEnergy.”

I can’t stop looking at her. Amelia, that girl I haven’t stopped fucking thinking about, not for a second. She’s staring right back at me, equally surprised. She looks gorgeous, her full figure tucked into a nice, slim-fitting business outfit, that tight skirt accentuating her gorgeous firm little ass so perfectly. I can still picture my big cock slamming into her pussy from behind, making her scream. For a second, I want to pull her thick, blonde hair, but I quickly get a hold ofmyself.

“Uh, yes, good to meet you, Mr. Jones,” I say to him, taking his hand andshaking.

“Please, call me Ingram. We’ll be working closely in the comingweeks.”

“Of course. And you can all call me Samuel.” I glance at Amelia, but she quickly looksaway.

“Samuel, this is Laura Shane, head of PublicRelations.”

---