Show Me

by Abigail Strom

  But the images that flooded his mind were of Mars.

  The Red Planet.

  He could be one of the first human beings to set foot on it.

  He forced himself back to the present. “You said you weren’t afraid to lay out the ‘stark reality’ of what you want. But now you’re trying to make it sound as innocent as possible.”

  “I want you to accept my offer. So yes, I want to make it palatable to you.”

  “How long would this arrangement last?”

  “Six weeks seems a reasonable amount of time. Airin will have made her decisions by then . . . and, hopefully, be ready to come home.” She looked at him keenly. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to accept. I can see the glow of Mars in your eyes.”

  No shit.

  “There’s something else, Mr. Bryce.”

  “Another condition?”

  “No. A compliment. You see, I don’t trust many people. Of that small number, there are perhaps three or four I would trust with my daughter’s safety. But you chose to stay with Airin at the cost of your own career advancement. I imagine you bring that same quality—a willingness to put another’s well-being above your self-interest—to all your endeavors. So even if you weren’t in a position to do me this service, I would consider you worthy of a place in my crew.”

  She was laying it on pretty thick.

  “But if I accept your offer, wouldn’t that be out of self-interest? What would you think of a man who would spy on your daughter for a chance to go to Mars?”

  She shrugged, her expression opaque. “I would hope he’d agree it was for Airin’s own good. And that he’d simply be doing what he already agreed to—keeping her safe during a difficult transition—while helping her mother with an equally difficult transition. I would also hope he might recognize that I’m motivated by love.”

  Maybe she thought she was. But whether she realized it or not, she was also motivated by a need for control.

  Up until this point, Dira had been able to manage her daughter’s safety to an extent few parents could . . . and that many might wish for. Now she was losing that control, and she was desperate to hang on a little longer.

  Well, that was probably natural, too. How would he know? The truth was, he was the last person who could speak to what a normal parent might wish for or struggle with. His own parents had been the opposite of normal. Compared with them, Dira Delaney was a fucking paragon.

  But that didn’t mean he should accept her proposal.

  He turned his back and walked over to the window. It overlooked a parking lot, and he watched people come and go without really seeing them.

  Dira was a determined woman. If he didn’t help her, she’d find some other way to get what she wanted. Wouldn’t it be better for Airin if he was the one talking to her mother? As opposed to someone else?

  Even as he voiced that thought in his head, he knew it was a rationalization. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

  He wanted to go to Mars. He also wanted to protect Airin. If he agreed to Dira’s proposal, he could do both those things.

  There was really only one thing he couldn’t do if he made this deal.

  He couldn’t act on his attraction to Airin.

  However he justified this arrangement, he’d still be betraying her trust. It might be better for her in the long run than whatever alternative her mom came up with, but she wouldn’t see it that way if she ever found out.

  There was no way they could be involved under those circumstances.

  But wouldn’t that be for the best, too? The one-night stand he and Airin had planned was one thing. The chemistry between them was off the charts, and it was something they’d both wanted. But if they were living under the same roof? It was easy to imagine things getting intense, emotionally as well as physically . . . and intense meant messy.

  There was a reason he’d decided a while back that pilots and astronauts were better off single. Those were jobs that took all of your focus, and being married or in a serious relationship could only get in the way.

  Not to mention how unfair the life was to your partner or spouse. Look at Sue Jackson, saying goodbye to Courtney for an eight-month mission. And if Courtney ever went to Mars? They’d be saying goodbye for two or three years.

  Airin was looking to spread her wings for the first time. He needed to get back on track with NASA. If he and Dira went through with this agreement, he’d be joining DelAres. The last thing he or Airin needed was some kind of emotional entanglement . . . especially when it would be Airin’s first.

  She needed to figure out her life before she started dealing with romance. And when she did, she deserved more than he’d ever be able to give her—even if he weren’t going behind her back to talk to Dira.

  So once again, he was rationalizing. He was telling himself that making this deal would be the best thing for everybody.

  Maybe it was even true.

  He turned around. “I accept.”

  He spoke abruptly, and Dira looked almost startled. Then she smiled—the first full-out, no-holds-barred smile he’d seen from her.

  “I’m glad,” was all she said, but he knew she meant it.

  She had what she wanted, and if things worked out as planned, he’d have what he wanted, too.

  The thing he wanted most in the world, as Dira had said.

  But for a man who’d driven his career off the rails a few hours ago and now had a realistic shot at being one of the first humans on Mars, he wasn’t feeling euphoric or ecstatic or any of the things he ought to feel.

  He was feeling like shit.

  Chapter Eleven

  Three days later, Airin stepped out of Hunter’s truck—the one he was renting while his convertible was in the shop—in front of a small white house nestled in a tropical garden. The backyard was a little forest of trees whose names she didn’t know, some of them bearing fruit.

  But the extraordinary thing about the backyard was where it ended up. Behind all the houses on this side of the road, the mountains of the Manoa Valley rose in lush green folds to a perfect blue sky.

  They weren’t in Kailua. Instead, they’d be staying in the four-bedroom house Hunter’s replacement had shared with two other members of the backup team. They’d been using the fourth bedroom as an office, but after Hunter had talked to them about Airin, they’d cleared it out for her.

  The house was only two miles from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where most of the team was involved in joint NASA-UH research projects. It was only four miles from Waikiki.

  When Airin remembered her luxurious hotel on the beach and the honky-tonk atmosphere a few streets away, it was hard to believe this was the same island.

  They were definitely mauka here. Inland. Nestled in the most beautiful valley she’d ever seen.

  A thrill of happiness went through her, in spite of the dampening her spirits had gotten that morning. When Hunter had picked her up at the hospital he’d been . . . something. Reserved, maybe? He’d been a little different with her ever since he’d spoken with her mother, but since Dira obviously hadn’t been able to talk Hunter out of helping her, Airin hadn’t worried about it too much.

  Her mother had flown back to Massachusetts last night. With Dira out of the picture and her hospital stay over, Airin had been hoping she and Hunter could get back to the dynamic that had seemed so natural when they first met . . . as though they’d known each other for years instead of days.

  But it was clear from the formal, almost distant way Hunter was speaking to her today that things between them weren’t going back to the way they’d been. Not right away, at least.

  Maybe he still felt guilty about the accident. Maybe Dira had said something awful to him. Maybe it was what she’d been afraid of all along, and he was beginning to resent her for derailing his career.

  Whatever the reason, Hunter was treating her as a housemate or a colleague, not as a friend—much less a friend he’d wanted to have sex with a few days ago.
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  She could table that problem for now, though. Because here she was, on her own in Hawaii, about to move into the first place she’d ever lived apart from her mother.

  And it was beautiful.

  Even the pain of her ribs and the stiffness in her torso couldn’t lessen the enjoyment of this moment. She looked at the shrubs and flowers in the front yard—there was even a plumeria tree at the far end—while Hunter grabbed her suitcases from the trunk.

  “This is a lot of stuff for a ten-day trip to a tropical climate,” he commented.

  “I didn’t pack it,” she said. “One of my mother’s assistants did, back in Massachusetts before we came here.”

  She turned away from the yard in time to see him swing her heavy case as though it weighed nothing at all.

  Whatever she’d been going to say next was forgotten.

  Hunter’s T-shirt and jeans were like the T-shirt and jeans of any other man in the world. The jeans were old and faded, and his navy-blue NASA T-shirt looked like it had been washed a thousand times.

  But it was the man inside the clothes who had her staring.

  Up until now, she’d only seen him at night or in the hospital. This was the first time she’d seen him in full sunlight, looking like some kind of pagan god in modern clothing.

  His shoulders were so powerful. Wide, with those thick bands of muscle that could lift heavy objects like they were nothing. And his arms . . . the flex and release of his biceps, his triceps . . .

  “Airin?”

  She swallowed. “Yes?”

  “Are you okay? You’re just kind of standing there. Do you feel all right? Is it your ribs?”

  She put a hand to her torso as though that were, indeed, the source of her hesitation. She’d dressed carefully that morning, thinking of her environment as well as her injury. She’d never seen Hunter in anything but jeans, and though she didn’t own any denim herself, she’d wanted to dress as casually as possible.

  She’d picked a pair of gray linen slacks and a blue silk shirt—loose so there would be no constriction of her rib cage, and thick enough that it would do something to hide the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra. She’d meant to wear one, but trying to put it on had been so painful that she’d given up.

  So there was nothing between her skin and the air but her silk shirt. She’d assumed that her ribs would be wrapped before they sent her home, but the nurse had told her that they didn’t wrap that type of injury anymore.

  “Compression increases the risk of lung infection and pneumonia,” she’d said. “We want you to be able to draw a deep breath even if it’s painful. You can use an ice pack for up to twenty minutes three times a day, just as we’ve done here in the hospital. Other than that and pain medication, there’s really nothing else we can do.”

  After a childhood spent in and out of hospitals and months of her life spent in recovery from surgical procedures, Airin had grown to hate the effect of pain medication on the clarity of her thought processes. With her body the province of doctors, it had felt like her mind was the only thing that truly belonged to her, and she was unwilling to do anything to dull its faculties.

  She’d taken what they’d given her during her three days in the hospital, but now she was relying on ibuprofen and acetaminophen to ease her discomfort. That meant she was in enough pain to have an authentic reaction to Hunter’s question.

  “It hurts a little, but I’m getting used to it,” she said.

  He nodded. “We’ll get you some ice as soon as we’re inside. Come on in and meet your other housemates.”

  She’d read their bios on NASA’s website while she was in the hospital, and she recalled the details as she followed Hunter along the path to the front door. Dean Bukowski was a mechanical engineer and roboticist. Valerie Ames was a triathlete as well as a scientist, and her fields were planetology, geology, and hydrology.

  Hunter held the screen door open for her.

  The house was designed very simply. She walked into an open kitchen with a big living room beyond it, the two areas separated by a granite-topped counter with bar stools on either side. Along the right side as she entered were two bedrooms behind closed doors.

  The living room was the heart of the house. It had a light and airy feel, with big open windows and fluttering gauzy curtains and casual, comfortable furniture. When she and Hunter came in, Dean was sitting at a computer desk and Valerie was curled up on the sky-blue sofa with a laptop. They both looked up from their work to say hello.

  Dean’s shaggy hair and wiry physique was a marked contrast to Hunter’s military bearing and athletic body. That, of course, was a contrast she’d expect to find in a Mars crew. The mission needed a mix of strengths and abilities and personality types, from geeks to jocks and everything in between.

  Valerie represented the in between. She was powerful physically—a product of her triathlon training—and an equally formidable scientist. She told Airin to call her Val.

  In addition to reading their bios, Airin had done some Googling. Now she was able to say to Dean, who was clearly itching to get back to his computer, “I’m impressed by what I’ve read about your helicopter drone project. Do you really think the counter-rotating propellers you’re working on will help you cope with Mars’s thin atmosphere?”

  Dean’s eyes lit up. “Yeah. I’ve been running lab tests at Mars air density, and we’re showing some real progress. Of course, staying aloft isn’t our only challenge. There’s also the problem of the rough terrain the drones have to land on.”

  “That’s my department,” Val put in. “I’ve been working to set up a lab environment that mimics the different surface elements on Mars. Once Dean solves the lift problem, we’ll be ready to tackle the terrain problem.”

  A moment ago, Dean and Val had seemed friendly enough, if distracted. But now the two of them wore an expression Airin recognized easily after growing up with her mother: the look of scientists who’ve just been given an excuse to talk about their work.

  I can do this. I can relate to people. I can be a person in the world outside my mother’s shadow.

  And then Dean said, “Are you interested in Mars stuff because of your mother?”

  So much for getting away from Dira Delaney.

  Yes, she started to say—because that was the expected answer.

  And yet, she realized suddenly, it wasn’t true.

  “No. I’ve been fascinated by Mars since I was a little girl.”

  Space had been her thing long before her mother had made it her life’s work. She remembered her dad’s stories about the little girl who’d stowed away to Mars and her own dreams about traveling to the Red Planet.

  Dira didn’t own the copyright to passion about interplanetary travel. Hadn’t Dira herself said something like that in one of her speeches to investors? Mars belongs to all of us. The push to establish a self-sustaining colony on another planet represents the hope and future of all humankind.

  Dean turned his computer monitor so she could see the screen. “Do you want to take a look at the drone blades I’m working on?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Dean grinned at her. He seemed so eager and likable, like a shaggy puppy of some superintelligent variety. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into? Offering to look at an engineer’s designs is like coming upstairs to look at a guy’s etchings. Only you’re thinking he’s got something else in mind, when he really does want to show you his etchings. For hours.”

  She laughed. “I’m the daughter of two engineers. I know exactly what I’m getting into.”

  “Okay then, gorgeous. Just remember that I warned you.”

  But before she could cross the room, Hunter spoke up. “How about you two geek out a little later? I’m going to get Airin settled in her room, and then she needs to rest. Val, would you grab us an ice pack from the freezer?”

  Val raised an eyebrow. “It’s like Jones never left. You sound exactly like him when you give orders, Bryce. Mission c
ommanders are all alike.”

  Hunter smiled. “It’s not an order, it’s a request. We’ll be in Airin’s room, okay?”

  “Aye-aye, Captain.”

  Airin followed Hunter up the stairs to the second floor, which consisted of a hallway, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.

  The whole house could have been tucked into a corner of her home in Massachusetts and no one would have noticed it.

  “This is you,” Hunter said, leading the way into the room on the right. She followed, and the first thing she noticed was the plumeria tree right outside her window. The scent wafted through the screen, and she closed her eyes as she took a deep breath.

  The room was small but lovely, with the polished wood floors of the rest of the house and walls painted a pale apricot. There was a ceiling fan, a double bed covered in a Hawaiian-print quilt in shades of cream and green, a big wicker chair with cushions of the same pattern, and a desk and bookcase along one wall.

  When she saw the books in the case—scientific tomes, a shelf full of Japanese manga, and another shelf full of horror novels—she remembered that they’d been using this room as an office. She was willing to bet that the manga belonged to Dean. Were the horror novels his, too? Or could they be Val’s?

  Val herself came in then, holding ice packs and a towel. She was tall, close to six feet, and Airin could easily imagine her running the Ironman triathlon here in Hawaii.

  “Here you go,” she said, laying down the towel before setting the ice packs on the desk.

  She was turning to leave when Airin asked, “Who reads all the Stephen King? Is that you, Val?”

  The other woman turned back and nodded. “Yep. I’ve been into horror since I stole my big brother’s books to read with a flashlight under the covers. Are you a fan?”

  “I’ve read him, but he’s a little intense for me. I prefer—” She started to say romance novels, but she wasn’t sure she was ready to admit that to a houseful of astronauts and scientists. “Mystery novels,” she finished instead, which was also true. Romance was her favorite, but she’d read anything. “Is the manga Dean’s?”