Her Perfect Stranger Page 6

  Sleek, wet and muscular, that had been Mike, standing there on deck.

  She’d taken one look at him and had lost every thought in her head. He’d known it, too, damn him; she could still see the slow, baby-here-I-am smile he’d sent her.

  This had to stop. She’d had him once and that should be enough. It should be over.

  But it wasn’t.

  She couldn’t even look at him without having that stupid, adolescent, weak-kneed reaction, and it was really making her furious.

  She’d read his personnel files, shamelessly soaking up his private information. He had four brothers, all in the military. His father, too, was a military man. His mother, a Russian, had died when Mike had been only four, so it was no wonder he was so incredibly masculine. He’d grown up in a house full of Y chromosomes, and then had gone into an industry overloaded with testosterone.

  That was a problem, she decided, rolling over to punch her pillow. Because while Mike definitely knew how to treat a woman—he had, after all, made her purr more than once—he had no idea how to do anything other than pamper a female, much less work for one. To work beneath her command was going to be utterly foreign to him, and with both of them needing their control…well, it wasn’t going to go smoothly, this mission, she could see that.

  What she couldn’t see, exactly, was what to do about it.

  She wasn’t herself around him. She had a hard time sticking to that cool, icy facade she favored, mostly because he saw right through her.

  She hated that.

  With a sigh, she heaved herself out of bed for her usual middle of the night run to the bathroom. It was annoying, but then again, if she’d just sleep the night through like normal people, instead of obsessing, she wouldn’t have to go at all, would she?

  The hall was silent, both when she crept into the bathroom and when she came out two minutes later. Which was why she nearly screamed when she ran into a solid rock wall of a chest.

  Even as those big, warm hands came up to steady her, she knew. “Mike,” she said in a breathless whisper, blinking through the dark.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “You have a weak bladder, too?”

  “I don’t have a weak anything.”

  “Everyone has a weak something.”

  “What I have,” he said softly, reaching up to tug on her ponytail, “is a weakness for long dark hair flowing wild and free, and dark-blue eyes melting with desire when they look at me, instead of two icicles.”

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Not until we talk.”

  “It’s late.”

  He flicked the light on his watch. “Actually, it’s early. I’ve been listening for you, Corrine. We need to get this over with.”

  “Maybe you’d rather try to beat me at my morning run again.”

  He scowled. “So I underestimated you.”

  “You thought me nothing more than a fragile doll.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

  “I bet. Look, Mike, this is never going to work. Surely you can see that. You have a problem with me being the commander of this mission.”

  “What I have a problem with is you pretending you don’t know me. You pretending we didn’t sleep together, that we didn’t make love—”

  She slapped his hand over his mouth and whipped her head to the right, then to the left, making sure no one could hear them. “Damn it,” she breathed. “Could you stop talking about it? Why do we have to keep talking about it?”

  Grabbing her hands away from his mouth, he held them at her sides, slowly backing her up against the wall until she had the cool plaster at her back and his hot, hot body at her front.

  She hadn’t given much thought to her pajamas—men’s flannel shorts and a loose tank top. As they were her favorites, they’d been washed to a thin softness. Thin enough to feel every inch of him, and her body seemed to recognize how much she’d enjoyed those inches, because she closed her eyes in order to better concentrate on the sensations.

  “Corrine,” he whispered, his voice low and rough now, as if he, too, couldn’t help himself. “I don’t understand you. Help me understand. Why can’t we just…be? Why do we have to ignore this?”

  Why? He had to ask why? There were a million reasons, starting with the fact that they had to work together professionally, with no personal hangups between them. The mission depended on it. NASA counted on it. Billions of tax dollars were at stake. There could be nothing dragging them down emotionally. “There is no ‘this,”’ she said with a finality she didn’t feel.

  He ran a finger over her jaw, down her throat to the base of her neck, where her pulse had taken off. “Liar,” he chided softly as her nipples beaded and thrust against the material of her shirt.

  “Mike.”

  “Yeah.”

  She let out a disparaging sound. Oh, Mike. Why couldn’t she forget? What was it about what they’d shared in the dark, dark of the night with no music and no candles, no romantic devices, nothing but the two of them turning to each other? They’d needed nothing but each other, and that scared her.

  Hell, it terrified her. “There can’t be a this,” she whispered.

  “Oh, there’s a this.” His finger continued its path over her collarbone to her shoulder, nudging the edge of the tank off it. Stepping even closer, he dipped his head and nipped at the skin he’d exposed, while his fingers continued their seductive assault on her senses.

  Thunk. The back of her head hit the wall as she lost the ability to hold it up. “Mike—”

  “How can you ignore me?” He dipped his head so that she could feel his breath on her skin. “After what we shared?”

  “It was…just…sex,” she panted as he dragged that clever mouth back up her throat now, feasting as he went, his fingers toying with the edging of her top, and the curve of her breast.

  “Yeah. Sex. Great sex.” He waited until she cleared her glassy gaze and looked at him. “I made you come, remember?” His hips slid to hers. “Over and over, until you were screaming.”

  She was going to scream now. “Stop.” Since she wanted to mean it, she put a hand to his chest. “I want you to forget all that. If we’re going to make this work, you have to forget.”

  “Corrine—”

  “Forget, Mike.” And while she still had the strength, she wrenched away. But instead of going back to bed, she went into the bathroom and cranked on the shower.

  Cold.

  As she stripped and stepped beneath the icy spray, she could swear she heard Mike’s soft, mocking laughter.

  6

  THE MEETING WAS NOT going well. Corrine knew this, and she tried to get a handle on things—things being mostly her own emotions. But with Mike sitting there so calm and put together at the conference table, it was all but impossible.

  She could feel his eyes on her, searching and intense. And though it had to be only an illusion, she thought she could smell him, all clean, sexy male. She certainly could feel him, and he wasn’t even touching her.

  She’d dreamed about that, his touching her. He did it far too often. Always in such a way as to seem innocent, of course. A brush of an arm here. A thigh there. Here a touch, there a touch, everywhere a touch.

  She was losing it.

  “Facts are facts,” she said into the tense silence. “We’ve been asked to conduct these experiments, and we will.”

  “But we can complain about it, at least. They’re not NASA based, or even university experiments,” Frank said. They’d been having this bickering session for an hour. “It’s a bunch of elementary students from Missouri, and they want to test seeds. I think we can all agree that, with the unknown time factor involved in repairing the already installed solar panels, combined with constructing the new ones, we have better things to be worrying about than kids with seeds.”

  Both Jimmy and Stephen nodded. Corrine looked at Mike.

  He returned the look, his expression closed, and said nothing.
>
  “I hear what you’re saying,” she said, a bit unsettled by how that simple exchange could rattle her wits. “But these kids—middle school, not elementary—won a national contest in D.C. It was a publicity stunt, designed to bring the public’s attention back to the space shuttle and the International Space Station in a positive way.” That she personally agreed with her team—that they had far better uses for their very limited time in space—didn’t matter. Her hands were tied. She had no choice. “We have to do this. The president promised we would.”

  “Commander, surely he could—”

  She shook her head at Jimmy, hating that she couldn’t find her cool, purposeful calm with Mike sitting there watching her. This should be easy, persuading her team to do whatever she wanted them to do. She shouldn’t feel their bitter disappointment in her inability to change the unchangeable. “The president personally asked NASA for this favor, and we agreed.”

  “Yes, but when we agreed,” Stephen pointed out, clearly annoyed, “it was before we knew about the additional time problems we were going to face, both in transport and on the station.”

  As the payload specialist, he had viable concerns regarding the time constraints. Corrine knew this, which didn’t make her tough stance any easier. The International Space Station, or ISS, had had its share of problems, the current and biggest being the defective solar panels already in place. Since astronauts were housed on the ISS on a permanent basis, repairing the problem was crucial.

  No one wanted to spend critical hours every day of their ten-day flight baby-sitting the students’ projects, which included exposing seeds, hair, bread, hamburger and even bubble gum to the weightless environment of space to see if they were affected by the change in pressure, altitude or anything else.

  “We still hadn’t figured out how to add the required replacement parts to our payload without crushing the original load,” Jimmy said. “Much less allow time for the repairs Stephen has to perform.” He lifted a troubled gaze to both Corrine and Mike, who as commander and pilot, together would run the ship. “We’re running out of time.”

  “Not to mention, maneuvering into the tight area of the ISS is going to take a miracle,” Frank added. “Are you prepared for that? Prepared to tell the other countries in this mess with us that we couldn’t figure it all out because we were too busy handling amateur science experiments?”

  “You don’t understand the pressure NASA is under to have the public on side in this huge tax expense,” Corrine said evenly. “The microgravity of space has become an important tool for developing new and sophisticated materials.” She purposely didn’t look at Mike, so she could let her famed iciness fill her voice. She was in charge here and had the final say, whether they liked it or not. “And the public is losing interest.”

  “Good,” Stephen said, and both Jimmy and Frank laughed.

  “Not good,” Corrine corrected. “We need a total of forty-three flights to build the ISS. That’s quite a bit of taxpayer money.”

  “We’re already committed as a nation,” Stephen said. “It’s too late for them to decide they don’t want in. I’m with Frank and Jimmy. Dump the experiments.”

  “Stephen,” Mike said softly. “This isn’t a democracy.”

  Corrine took a deep breath but didn’t look at Mike. He was siding with her, apparently. Because he agreed, or because she’d slept with him? She hated that she questioned it. “We’re not ditching the experiments.”

  Stephen’s jaw tightened.

  Jimmy looked irritated, too, but asked calmly, “Can we agree to shelve them if we have a problem up there?”

  “We’ll make that decision when and if the time comes,” Corrine said.

  “Well, let’s work on the timetable then,” Stephen said, still grumbling. In a low mutter he added, “And make sure nothing conflicts, especially a PMS schedule. Geez.”

  The rest of the men appeared to fight for control of their facial expressions, and lost. Jimmy and Frank grinned.

  Mike wisely looked down at his clamped hands.

  But Corrine was infuriated, anyway. Why was it if a woman had a strong opinion, or needed to get her group under control, she came off as a moody bitch? But when a man did so, he was merely acting within his rights as a male in charge?

  The unfairness wasn’t new to Corrine, but for some reason, today it hit hard. She chalked it up to a lack of sleep, not the unquenched heat Mike had kindled within her body last night, and used her don’t-mess-with-me expression to stare down the men.

  Jimmy and Frank were unhappy, to say the least. Stephen looked equally so. “I think this stinks,” he said. “For the record.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you think,” Mike said evenly.

  Fair or not, at his defense of her, Corrine felt smoke come out of her ears. She didn’t want any heroics here, she wanted…she wanted—Oh hell. She wanted him, damn it! “Obviously we need a break,” she said, standing. “Now’s a good a time as any.”

  Mike was the last to the door, and she stopped him. “I want to talk to you.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t need defending.” She knew she sounded stiff and ungrateful, but as she was both at the moment, she couldn’t help it. “Especially in front of my team. Not now, not ever.”

  “It’s my team, too,” he said softly. Too softly. “And I won’t let anyone talk to you like that. Not now, not ever,” he said, mocking her words, while somehow utterly meaning what he’d said.

  If she’d had more sleep, she would have seen it coming and deflected it. But as it was, she’d been sidetracked by all that heat in his gaze, so that when he cupped her cheek and stroked her jaw with his big, warm and oddly tender hand, all she could do was stand there and tremble like a damn virgin.

  “Corrine.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “You don’t even know what I was going to say.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “I’m going to tell you anyway.”

  “Please, don’t.”

  “Please.” His lips curved. “The only time I’ve ever heard you say that word was when I was buried inside you and—”

  “Mike!”

  His eyes darkened. “And that, too. The way you say my name. Makes me hard, Corrine.”

  “I’ll be sure never to say it again,” she said through her teeth.

  “I want you.” He shook his head, clearly baffled. “God, I still want you.”

  She crossed her arms, desperately striving for normalcy, which was impossible with this man. He set her body humming without even trying. “We were talking about what happened in this room a few minutes ago. About the fact that you came to my defense when I didn’t need it.”

  “No, you were talking about that. I wanted to talk about something entirely different. Or not talk.” His eyes flared with an unmistakable desire. “Not talk is okay, too.”

  This was far worse than she could have believed, because how could all this…this heat still be between them? They’d had each other, more than once! It should be over.

  Done.

  And where had her anger gone? How was it that whenever she so much as looked at him, she lost every thought in her head? And how in the hell was she going to keep it to herself?

  “So many worries,” he said quietly, holding her face while he forced her to look into his eyes. “Share them with me.”

  “Yeah, right,” she managed to answer weakly, pushing away his hands. “I can’t.”

  “Won’t you mean.” He watched her pace the room. “Why are you doing this? Why are you this warm, soft, passionate woman with me, and yet with your team you’re so…”

  She whirled on him. “So what?”

  “Hard,” he said bluntly. “You’re hard, Corrine.”

  That hurt, and she had to swallow before she could talk. “If I have to explain it to you, you’ll never understand.”

  “Try.”

  She looked into his earnest face and for some odd reason f
elt her throat tighten. “Mike. Not here.”

  By some mercy, footsteps came down the hall.

  “Later then,” he agreed. “But, Corrine? There will be a later.”

  AT LEAST THE AFTERNOON session went more smoothly, though the damage had been done. Corrine was as uptight as she could possibly be.

  Everyone else seemed willing to move on from the morning’s scene, however, so she put all her remaining tension behind a cool smile and a hard determination.

  After all, she had work to do and a mission to whip into shape. The solar array wings they’d be carting into space had to be treated with kid gloves, both while packing and transporting, and then while constructing and assembling on the space station.

  Each of the mission members, Corrine, Mike, Stephen, Frank and Jimmy, had a specific job, and each job was critical, requiring months and months of planning, and then months and months more of actual, hands-on practice. For instance, while attaching the very large solar array wings, each of which, when fully deployed, would stretch two hundred forty feet from wingtip to wingtip, Corrine first had to maneuver the shuttle into position so that they could open the payload bay and work in there. That alone—shifting a space shuttle in the available window at the ISS—would be an amazing feat.

  Stephen and Mike would operate the robotic arm. Frank and Jimmy, both of whom had extensive technical training, would do the actual repair. Three space walks were required, and each time, the robotic arm would be used as a movable platform for an astronaut to lie on. That astronaut, Jimmy in this case, would be strapped in, with Corrine directing Mike and Stephen into maneuvering Jimmy where he needed to go. The integrated equipment assembly measured sixteen by sixteen by sixteen feet, and weighed twelve thousand pounds. It required very precise teamwork, all done in a weightless atmosphere, hovering between the tight corridor of the space shuttle and the ISS, while wearing a bulky, hundred-pound spacesuit.