The Reckless Engineer (The Reckless Engineer #1)

Chapter 2: The Summer of The Year Before

The Monday that Michelle Williams started work at Marine Electronics was a scorching hot midsummer day. From the fourth floor wall of glass on the west wing of the seven-storey building owned by Marine, Jeremy and his fellow engineers were treated to a panoramic view of the landscape stretching all the way to Portsmouth Bay where the waters lay out in the sun and made light ripples, too lazy and too content to get up and make even the occasional wave. The bay was thus greeting the day cheerfully shimmering in the mid-morning sun when Steve, the QA team leader, brought Michelle over for a quick introduction to Jeremy’s team. Quality Assurance essentially meant “testing”; a QA team sat next to each engineering team and ran many series of rigorous tests after Engineering was done with the research, design, and development of various stages of a product. 

Engineering was a male dominated field. There was only one female, Sally Trotter, in Jeremy’s team of one physicist, one mechanical engineer, and ten electronic engineers. He could see that Michelle’s long bleached hair, sleeveless low-cut blouse, endless legs tanned from a bottle, three inch stilettos, and hot-pink claws—so long they were surely retracted in for typing—did not go unnoticed by the boys.

She wasn’t Jeremy’s type. He preferred a more elegant, darker, and a more understated beauty—a little curvier, less ‘processed’, and much more intelligent—by which he meant his then-estranged partner, Maggie, with whom, though they had been separated for nine dark months and four long days, he was still deeply emotionally involved.

Jeremy didn’t think Jack took any interest in Michelle either. Jack was his best mate at the time, the darling of the team. Everybody loved his humour, charisma, and extrovert, sunny nature. Jack lived in Guildford with his second wife, Caitlin, and her pre-teen daughter, Gillian, from a previous relationship. He had two sons from his first marriage, thirteen and seventeen years old respectively, and spent many of his evenings helping the elder of the two, Peter, with his A-levels trying to get him into university to read engineering. 

Jeremy had been close friends with Jack and Sally for over two years from the time both Sally and Jeremy had started work for Marine Electronics, on the same day, as senior electronics engineers. Sally was a permanent member of staff and he was on a semi-annually renewed contract. He was aware that there was a romance that had sparked and was burning between Jack and Sally. Hence, he did not think that Jack was interested in their new addition to the QA team either; at least, not at the time.

At the time Jeremy was living in a three-bedroom waterfront end-of-terrace in Port Solent a mere ten-minute drive from Portsmouth. Maggie was an Attending Registrar at Southampton University Hospital to which she had a fairly convenient half-an-hour’s drive from their house. Out of the properties they had viewed when Jeremy first took on the Marine contract, the French patio doors of the first-floor rear room of the house that opened out onto a wooden balcony over the waters of the port, and a view of the marina and the bay beyond it bathed in a sunset red on heat, had seduced them at first sight. They had decorated this room as their study cum main living room with a sofa and a TV, demoting the actual living room directly underneath to secondary status. To the right of the French patio doors they had placed the dark mahogany pedestal desk and leather chair they liked to sink into for work, looking out the patio doors at the breathtaking view. Though the old-fashioned desk and chair were slightly out of place among the otherwise modern décor they would not—well, he would not—sacrifice substance for superficial style. The house was a mere four-minute walk from the bars, pubs, restaurants, and shops of the Marina, and from the beach they liked to run on. Life had been perfect back then.

After Maggie moved out, Jeremy had started working very late and taking Sally and Jack out to his favourite pub on the Marina, The Mermaid, to numb himself enough to face the restless dark hours after work. For many months, the grieving ghosts of his empty house had driven him to catch a ride with Jack to dinner with Caitlin, Peter, and Gillian. Jack had a good hour’s drive home and, since Caitlin liked having Jeremy over as a third wheel, he had spent many nights and weekends in one of Jack’s guest rooms.