ANTONIO TOOK OFF his dress shirt and trousers and went back into the bathroom wearing only his boxers and carrying one of his favorite books. He’d seen it in the lobby gift store when he’d gone back for Izzy’s stuff. He poured two glasses of sparkling water—they were both in training and alcohol wasn’t something that either of them drank.
The conversation he’d overheard between Ace and Dennis should have made him leave her alone tonight. They’d been discussing the fact that couples shouldn’t be sent to space. They were worried that some of the candidates might hook up, and they felt couples who had just gotten together over the course of training should definitely not be chosen for a mission together.
Should he tell Izzy?
He stood in the doorway for a few moments unobserved and just watched her. She made his pulse race. Hell, just thinking about her unnerved him. But watching her.
Damn.
He’d just had her and he wanted her again. He knew that was the ticking clock in his head driving him to make the most of these quiet moments when they could almost forget about the future and the mission.
He knew astronauts who were married, who had normal lives and spouses who kept the home fires burning, but that had never been on his radar. He had been a loner for as long as he could remember...and now there was Izzy. His fellow traveler on a journey that would hopefully take them away from their home. Which was why he’d bought this book. His favorite book, and the gift shop had even had a Spanish copy, an advantage of being based in Texas.
He cleared his throat.
There was a melancholy air about her, and he hoped she wasn’t thinking too much about tomorrow and the roles they’d have to go back into.
“May I join you?” he asked.
She lifted her arm and a cascade of water droplets fell into the tub and onto the floor as she waved for him to enter. “I’ve never shared a tub with anyone.”
“That’s okay. I thought I’d just keep you company and maybe read to you,” he said.
“Of course,” she said. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears, and she tipped her head from where it was pillowed on a folded-up towel, and looked back at him. “What book?”
“Le Petit Prince,” he said, putting a towel on the tile next to the tub. “It’s in Spanish, I hope you don’t mind. This is my favorite book.”
She shook her head. “I love it, too. I am familiar enough with the story that my high school Spanish should be enough.”
He sat down on the towel and opened the book, remembering his mom reading it to him when he was a boy. This book had always soothed the darkness inside. The longings, resentment and other emotions that he didn’t like to deal with.
He started reading. The words fell easily from his mouth and he forgot about the future and the choices he was going to have to make. Izzy or Cronus, but not both. That was what Dennis and Ace had been hinting at. Hooking up with other candidates wasn’t a good idea.
Still, as he read, he remembered always thinking as a child that he was like the Little Prince. Funny, his career choice made it more likely that he was going to be the Prince.
He paused to look at Izzy, who had turned on her side to watch him. The water had to be cooling and he saw that her shoulder and left breast were visible and had gooseflesh.
“You’re cold. I’m sorry. I should have noticed earlier,” he said, putting the book aside and standing to get her a towel.
“I didn’t notice. You have a lovely voice, Antonio. I could have listened to you until the water turned to ice,” she said, rising and stepping delicately onto the bath mat. He handed her the towel.
“I’m happy to keep reading to you in bed,” he said.
“I’d like that. I wish I had a nightshirt,” she said.
“You can sleep in my T-shirt.”
“Your fantasy?”
“Part of it,” he said, not elaborating. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her with his dreams and desires—it was simply that the more he shared with her, the tighter the intimate bond between them grew. He was so afraid that there was going to come a time when he’d forget where he ended and she began.
He led the way back into the main living area of the suite and then through the door that led to the bedroom. He went to his clothing, which he’d draped over one of the chairs near the small table, and held his T-shirt out to her.
But his breath caught in his chest as he saw her leaning over the dresser and looking in the mirror. At first her curvy, naked body captured his gaze, and then as he skimmed up her frame, their eyes met in the mirror. She’d been watching him watch her.
They were both so afraid to risk anything with each other. Perhaps there was a reason they’d let their competitive streaks keep them apart all these years.
But as she turned and walked to him, taking the shirt from his hand and pulling it on, he couldn’t for the life of him believe that it mattered.
Instead, he followed her to the bed, and after a few minutes they were situated with pillows behind his back and her cuddled against his side. “What time do you have to be back at the facility?” he asked.
“I have the morning free,” she said. “So noon. You?”
“Same. I’m doing the evening chores.” He reached for his phone and set the alarm.
“What shall we do now?” he asked.
“Would you mind reading to me some more?” she asked.
He tightened his arm around her and then reached for the book. He found the page and read until Izzy drifted to sleep. And he thought to himself that, like the Little Prince, if he was ever stranded on another world he would do anything in his power to get back to Izzy.
* * *
IZZY WOKE WITH a start. She had a moment’s disorientation as her heart raced and she wondered where the hell she was. Then she knew. Cole’s Hill. She was at the historic Grand Hotel.
In a suite.
With Antonio.
She looked over her shoulder and saw his broad back. They were pressed back-to-back with each other. She’d fallen asleep to the sound of his voice reading to her in Spanish. It was a memory that she was going to treasure for a long time.
Her mouth felt dry so she got out of bed, careful not to disturb him, and went into the other room. Finding a bottle of water in the minibar, she drank it in two long gulps. She walked to the window that overlooked the back parking lot and the sky.
One of the things she loved about Texas was how big the sky was here. Not Montana big, but still, when she looked up at it at night, she could get lost searching for constellations and planets. Tonight was no different.
She wanted to be like the prince in the story, be able to shed the shell that was her past and her fears of being like her mom. It didn’t matter that earlier she’d thought she’d put that ghost to rest. She hadn’t.
She doubted she ever would.
There was no way to outrun the past; she’d known that for a long time. There were times when her rebel streak got the best of her and she just had to give in to the things she craved.
Antonio.
There hadn’t been a lot of men in her life who had affected her the way he did. She wasn’t going to deny that he had a powerful pull on her, much like the moon did on the oceans. She just wasn’t sure if they were coming into a season where he was going to turn her into an out-of-control hurricane.
There was a chance... Hell, it was more than a chance—it was a definite possibility. But not tonight.
As she watched the moon, she realized that she wasn’t ready for the night to end. Tomorrow, when they showed up at the bunkhouse in yesterday’s clothes, how would they explain themselves? For that matter, how were they even going to get back?
It wasn’t like there was a huge cab service in Cole’s Hill, and calling Hemi or Ace and asking for a ride wasn’t high on her list of things she wanted to do. But she supposed she’d have to. Being a grown-ass woman meant owning up to her actions. She knew that. Always had.
But right now, she wanted to hide. To stay here in this room with Antonio and pretend nothing else existed.
She heard his footsteps a few moments before he put his arms around her and drew her back against his body.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Just staring up at the night sky and thinking.”
“Good thoughts?” His arms around her comforted her from the drama she was creating in her head. All her life she thought she’d been at war with herself. Proud of how hard her mom worked, yet at the same determined not to be swayed by men the way her mom had been.
“Yeah.”
He made a tsking sound and turned her in his arms to face him.
“Let’s don’t lie to each other,” he said. “I know that we have enough obstacles to this being a strong relationship already.”
“I wasn’t lying to you. They are good thoughts. I remembered the deep rumble of your voice as I went to sleep and now I’m searching the sky for the Little Prince’s home planet...good, happy thoughts,” she said. But even to her own ears she sounded a little defensive.
She couldn’t help it. She had worked herself into the kind of state she usually needed the gym for. Work out to get rid of the energy and force herself to stop thinking.
“Querida, I promise you that I will not judge,” he said.
She just arched one eyebrow at him. “Why would you be judging me?”
“I don’t know. What are you thinking about?” he asked her.
“That this is a mistake. That sleeping with you once was okay because I wrote it off as curiosity, but doing it again—this is becoming a habit.”
“Habit?”
“No judging, right?”
He put his hands up and stepped away from her. She knew she should have kept her mouth shut, but something about Antonio made her want to tell him everything.
Where Antonio was concerned, she wasn’t the ice queen she knew the men called her behind her back, and that should bother her more than it did.
But a part of her was relieved to be herself. Even if it was her not-perfect stuff. She was real with him and she liked it.
More than she wanted to.
The problem was that she didn’t know how to be herself and be successful. It scared her—it also excited her.
* * *
NOT JUDGING WASN’T really hard for him. For as long as he could remember he’d been the different one, the odd one. He was lucky to have grown up in a family that supported him and urged him to follow his dreams. That had made it easier for him to push aside the opinions of others.
But this wasn’t about him. It was about Izzy.
“Of course,” he said.
She nibbled on her lower lip and then turned away from the window wearing only his T-shirt. He was honest enough to admit he was distracted. She wasn’t tall, but her limbs seemed long, her legs endless and her arms so slim and graceful. Her waist was tiny, not that he could see it with his shirt draped over her.
She perched on the arm of the love seat and crossed one leg over the other, swinging her foot. He groaned as he thought about putting his hands on her thighs and parting her legs.
He wanted her.
Not really a big surprise.
But she needed to talk.
When his father gave him and his brothers the man-woman talk, part of his advice had been to listen to women. His papa had been adamant that there was more to sex than just the physical act. And Antonio knew he needed to be the man he’d always thought he was, and not a raging bundle of hormones. But it was damned hard.
“Izzy?”
“It’s just every time I think of how to say it, the words sound dumb in my head. I mean, I know what I want to say and it makes sense in my mind, but if I say it out loud...”
He knew exactly what she meant. “Try thinking in one language and having to speak in another, and then add in worrying about how you might sound.”
“I forgot about that. You speak English so well. It doesn’t seem to really affect you. Plus, you’re smart.”
“So are you,” he reminded her. “What is it that you want to say and are struggling with?”
She shrugged, and he closed the gap between them to sit on the coffee table near her.
“Whisper it. I’m close enough to hear it.”
She slid off the arm of the couch and onto the seat. Dropping her hands on her knees, she scooted closer.
“I feel like an idiot.”
“Everyone knows you aren’t one,” he said.
“With you... I don’t feel pressured to be what everyone else needs me to be. I can be myself and that’s very freeing. Does that make sense?”
He shook his head. Izzy was one of the strongest, most dominant people he knew, man or woman. “Are you sure you aren’t being something else with me? Not that we’ve even had a chance to explore who we are. It’s hard to be a couple when we are trying to avoid each other.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “I guess that with you I want to be my authentic self. Not the woman I always am at work. Even in personal relationships, I tend to keep it all about the physical, which kind of puts a stale date on the relationship. But with you, that doesn’t work,” she admitted.
He took her hands and turned them over in his, mainly to distract himself because even though her words thrilled him, he didn’t want to mean that much to her. It would be easier for him if this was purely physical for both of them. That way they could have fun but put their careers first.
He felt a lot of pressure. Everyone was watching him and the other candidates from Space Now to see how the private company performed, so they needed to be doing it better and cleaner than everyone else.
“It doesn’t work for me, either,” he said at last. “I sort of wished it would.”
She laughed. “Me, too. Would be easier to hook up and walk away, but I can’t. I think about you all the time and I wonder... I wonder if we do this dating thing, if that will be enough to bring us back to center. Maybe if we tried seeing each other in the off time we’d get bored with each other,” she said.
“Maybe.” He tried to sound noncommittal, then thought about how honest she’d been with him. He needed to be straight with her, as well. “Izzy. Before you joined us earlier, Dennis and Ace both were very frank in their discussions about the candidates and fraternizing.”
“So? Ace knows me and he knows you, too. We’re both very good at our jobs,” she said. “Do they think it will affect us?”
“It’s not us specifically. To be fair, they were talking in generalities. It’s just that you know I’m not from NASA, and I don’t want to risk it all—”
“For me.”
When she put it that way he felt like a douche bag. “No. Not that. What I mean is, I feel the scrutiny that the Space Now candidates are under, and I just don’t want to give Ace and Dennis an excuse to mark me down.”
She nodded. “So...?”
“We do need to sort this out. How would you feel about talking to Ace tomorrow, telling him we’d like to date and have no idea where it’s going to go. We can tell him we’ll see if it affects our training and our work.”
She sat back and watched him for a long time, and he wondered if he’d been too honest with her.
“I think it’s a good idea. Because avoiding each other has sucked. Plus, I’m not sure that I’ll be able to just shut you out of my life,” she admitted.
“Me, neither,” he agreed.
He scooped her up in his arms and carried her back to bed, where he made love to her and pretended that everything was resolved. But he knew that it hadn’t been.