wrong with your health?”
“Nothing that some time in Earth’s gravity shouldn’t fix. Everyone is betting on that. But I’m mainly at the ranch for the reasons I gave you before—because we need to talk, to figure out what we are going to do with this place,” he said.
“And kissing me was...what was that?” she asked. Oh, God, had she once again thrown herself at Jason? What was it about him that made her abandon common sense?
Aside from his rock-hard body, chiseled jaw and brilliant blue eyes. Those were things any woman would find appealing. But she didn’t normally throw herself at men just because they were attractive.
“That was us. I guess it’s always been there between us, but we never really took the time to pursue it,” he said.
She arched one eyebrow at him. She felt energy and anger coursing through her, but she knew focusing on these feelings was just an easy way to pretend she wasn’t still missing her dad. “Pursue it?”
He shrugged. One of those gestures men make when they know better than to answer a woman.
“You just admitted you are leaving as soon as you get the all clear from NASA,” she said. “We aren’t pursuing anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” he said, moving closer to her. She felt the heat of his body and found it very hard to look away from his naked chest. Besides the scar on his left side, he had a tattoo that read To boldly go.
He took another step closer and she put her hand up. Kissing him had been foolish. She was a practical woman. She always had been. And now, with Dad gone, she really needed to think rationally. The ranch was in financial trouble, as it had been for years, and she needed to focus on that.
Not wonder what it would feel like to run her finger over Jason’s tattoo.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. His voice was low and it brushed over her senses like a warm breeze. She wanted to close her eyes and tip her face up, but she didn’t. She’d had her kiss. And it was hotter than she had ever expected. But now she had to go back to being Molly.
“Nothing.”
Nothing. Really? She was intelligent and her remarks had been known to leave men speechless, but with Jason she felt like she was sixteen-year-old Molly in the throes of her crush.
“Well, nothing I want to talk about with you,” she admitted. “I’m not myself tonight. And I want to be like Scarlett and put my troubles off for another day.”
“I’m not myself, either,” he admitted. “Who is Scarlett?”
“Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind. She’s famous for saying ‘Tomorrow is another day.’”
“Well, she’s right,” he said. “But for tonight we have two choices.”
“Only two?”
“Well, two that won’t get us into trouble,” he said.
There was a touch of mischief in his expression and she realized it had been too long since anyone had teased her. Everyone had been treating her as if she was fragile since her dad had died.
“I’m listening.”
“We can get that bottle of Maker’s Mark out of the cabinet and drink until it’s empty,” he said.
“Or?”
“Or we can saddle up the horses and chase the moon as it moves across the sky,” he said. “I recall that used to be one of your favorite things to do.”
She swallowed hard. It still was.
How could a man she hadn’t seen in thirteen years be the one person who knew her that well?
“Ride,” she said.
“Good choice. Meet you at the stables in ten?”
She nodded and walked away from him. She didn’t think as she changed into her favorite pair of jeans and her cowboy boots. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and walked out into the night.
* * *
THE STABLES HADN’T changed since he’d first visited them as a teenager. The barn was big and cavernous, the scent of hay and sweet corn welcoming him as he stepped inside. There was a narrow aisle between the horses’ stalls. Mick’s horse, Rowdy—named after a TV character from a Western Mick had watched in his youth—had always had the first stall.
As a teen, Ace hadn’t really appreciated being sent from Houston to some ranch out in the middle of nowhere. It had felt like the punishment it was meant to be. And he’d been just bratty and angsty enough to act like an ass for the first three months he’d been at the Bar T Ranch. But Mick kept giving him chores and allowed him the distance he needed to wake up and figure out that he’d made a mess of his life and that he was the only one who could fix it.
He walked past all of the hands’ horses before he came to the few horses Mitch kept for visitors. He saddled one with the name Carl on its stall door. Then he found Molly’s horse in the second stall. Molly had always used the stall next to her father’s. And while it housed a different horse than he remembered, the wood-burned sign she’d made when she was fifteen still hung outside the door.
He heard Molly’s footsteps behind him and turned to face her. He regretted leaving his bedroom when he’d heard her in the hall. She was a complication. Someone he’d never figured out how to deal with. Even from his moody, teenaged perspective there had been something about Molly Tanner that had made him want her.
“I saddled your horse,” he said.
“Thanks.” She took Thunder’s reins and led him to the mounting block.
Ace watched the way she moved. The long easy strides that made her hips sway with each step. The denim fabric of her jeans as it pulled tight around her thighs when she mounted the horse. She settled into the saddle and then glanced over her shoulder at him. Her chestnut hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and he couldn’t take his eyes off the long sweep of her neck.
“You coming, Jason?”
He nodded. NASA trusted him with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and paid him for his opinion and his thoughts, but at this moment he knew he wasn’t worth a dime. He was speechless watching this cowgirl in her element. She was at home here. Even if something happened and God forbid she lost the ranch, Molly would know who she was.
He’d never felt fully himself until he’d been above the Earth, the blue planet so beautiful at a distance and the rest of the universe spread out before him. If he was permanently grounded because of his health...who would he be? It was his goal to be part of the Cronus test missions, but that might be out of reach now.
Cronus wasn’t an acronym for anything. All of the NASA missions were named for Greek gods and Cronus had been chosen for this program because he’d fallen from the sky and started a civilization on Earth, according to mythology. Many were hoping the Cronus missions and the Mars manned missions would do the same for that planet.
Before Ace had gone up to the ISS for a year, Dennis Lock, Deputy Program Manager for the
