He rose to his feet, a cockroach in each hand, and tossed them through the open window out into the night. Then he lowered the screen and went to the sink to wash his hands.
He leaned back against the sink as he dried his hands. “See? They’re gone. Nothing to worry about.”
Airin was still frozen in the middle of the floor, her brown eyes huge as she stared at him.
“You didn’t kill them. You released them. Like . . . like they were birds or squirrels or something. How can you stand to touch those things?”
He grinned. “I don’t look at bugs the way I look at birds, but I try not to kill things when I don’t have to. And cockroaches actually play an important role in the ecosystem. They have a taste for decaying organic matter, which means they recycle fallen and dead vegetation. If you think about how prolific the plants are in Hawaii, we’d probably be up to our necks in vegetable debris if it weren’t for cockroaches and other insect scavengers.”
She stared at him for a moment. Then, slowly, some of the tension eased from her shoulders.
“They’re still disgusting.”
“No argument.”
He saw the muscles in her throat jump as she swallowed. “When I first saw them, do you know what I thought?”
He shook his head.
“I thought, That’s it. My mother wins. Experiment over. I’m going back home.”
She went over to the toilet and sat down on the lid, closing her eyes for a moment and then opening them again.
There was an empty feeling in his stomach.
Was this really it? Was she going to call it quits without even giving it a full day?
He ought to be rooting for that outcome. If she left Hawaii, that would satisfy his bargain with Dira. Airin would be safe at home with her mother, he wouldn’t be a spy anymore, and he’d find out if Dira intended to honor her side of the deal with a written contract.
He spoke abruptly. “Are you really going to let a cockroach stop you from doing what you want to do?”
She blinked. “Actually, no. But I thought about it.”
He was surprised at the strength of the relief that flooded through him.
“I’m sorry I screamed so loud,” she went on. “I heard you talking to Dean and Val. Are they mad at me for waking them up?”
He shook his head. “Nah. As far as they know, this is one of NASA’s psychological tests. Sometimes they’ll call us at three in the morning to see if we get annoyed—or if we show it, anyway. Can we control our emotions under stress? Not only when we’re expecting it, but when we’re not?”
Airin smiled a little. “One of my mother’s research partners ran an isolation experiment last year. It was a week long. On day three, the toilet in the pod broke. The five people in the experiment assumed it was a genuine mechanical failure and figured out ways to cope. They didn’t find out until the experiment ended that the designers did that to them on purpose.”
He nodded. “That sounds like something NASA would do. They want to find out how we’ll deal with frustration . . . and the unexpected.” He grinned. “After the way you reacted to the cockroaches, I’m guessing you wouldn’t pass the astronaut selection tests.”
He’d meant to make her smile again. But instead, a frown drew her brows together as she looked down at her bare feet.
Maybe her ribs were hurting.
“How’s your injury? Are you feeling it?”
She looked up again. “It’s fine. A little painful, but I’ll survive.”
“I’ll get you an ice pack.”
“You don’t have to—”
“And a cup of tea.”
That brought her smile back.
“Tea sounds wonderful. But you don’t have to wait on me, Hunter. I can get it myself.”
He brushed that off. “Go make yourself comfortable. I’ll be back in five minutes.”
He was wearing boxers and a T-shirt, so he stopped in his room to pull on a pair of jeans. Then he went down to the kitchen and nuked some water in the microwave.
Airin was sitting up in bed when he came in through her doorway, carrying a mug of lemon mint tea in one hand and an ice pack in the other. She was wearing white cotton pajamas, light enough for a tropical night . . . which meant they were light enough that he could see the contrast between the pale skin of her breasts and the darker skin of her aureoles.
Awesome. Just what he needed to calm his body down.
Still, it was better than that quick, searing glimpse of her naked body. Which reminded him: “Were you going to take a shower when you saw the cockroaches?”
She took the tea from him, setting it down on the nightstand beside her. Then she took the ice pack.
“A bath, actually. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought a bath would help.”
He should just go. Say good night and get back to his own room.
Instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Do you still want to take the bath? I could run one for you.”
She shook her head. “No way. I’d keep thinking about the cockroaches. I may never go into that bathroom again.”
“Yeah, you will,” he said as she positioned the ice pack against her ribs and held it in place. “You’re not a coward, Airin. You were just surprised.”
She frowned a little. “I thought you said I was a coward.”
When the hell had he said that?
“What are you talking about?”
“In the bathroom. You said I’d fail the astronaut selection tests.”
He remembered her reaction to that offhand joke.
“It’s quite a leap to think I was calling you a coward. Which I wasn’t, by the way. But why would the idea of failing some NASA thing bother you?”
Airin was quiet for a moment. Through her open windows, moist air flowed in as the wind picked up. It smelled like rain, and as though his thought made it happen, the patter of drops came moments later.
“It didn’t bother me, exactly,” she said after a long pause. “But I dreamed of being an astronaut once, when I was a little girl. What you said about selection tests reminded me that I’ll never be one. That’s all.” She shrugged. “I’m living with three astronauts now. Three people who know exactly what they’re doing with their lives, while I still don’t have a clue. I guess I’m jealous.”
The smell of rain in Hawaii was like nothing else. It was rich and soft and earthy and green, with the delicate scent of a hundred different flowers mixed in.
That must be why he felt so awake. Because of the rain-washed air blowing in through the windows.
He pulled up his legs and sat cross-legged on the end of Airin’s bed, facing her. He rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his hands in his lap as he leaned forward.
“Your dad told you stories about a little girl. She stowed away on a rocket ship and went to Mars.”
She smiled at him. “You remember that?”
“Yeah. Tell me more about what you and your dad talked about. Was he always interested in space travel?”
Her eyes went far away for a moment. Then she shifted against the pillows to get comfortable.
“My father was nine years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. From that moment on, he wanted to be an astronaut. He joined the navy because he thought that was his best chance. He applied for the Astronaut Candidate Program through the military, and he was chosen.”
His eyebrows went up. “He was? Wow. That’s a pretty big deal. There are more astronauts now, between NASA’s new programs and private companies like your mother’s, but back then your dad would have had something like a point five percent chance of being chosen.”
“Point six percent, actually.” Airin smiled a little. “And yes, it was a big deal.”
He frowned. “But he didn’t join the program?”
“No.”
“Why not? What happened?”
“I happened.”
“You mean . . . you were born?”
“Yes. And I know lots
of astronauts have wives and kids and all that. But my mother already hated that she’d fallen in love with a fighter pilot, because her father had been an aviator in Iran.”
“Your father and your grandfather were both pilots?”
She nodded. “And they were both killed in action—or at least, we assume my grandfather was. My grandmother was never given all the details, but he was lost during the sixties when the Iranian air force joined forces with the CIA to do reconnaissance over the Soviet Union. Several planes crashed or were shot down during that time, but not all of the losses could be reported because of the secrecy of the mission. We still don’t know—officially—what happened to my grandfather.”
One of his classmates at the Air Force Academy was the son of an airman who’d been declared MIA in Vietnam. Nothing was worse than the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to a family member.
“How old was your mother when she lost her dad?”
“Only eight. Things got worse after that. The Kurdish separatist movement was escalating, and there was violence. My mother and grandmother came to America as refugees in the seventies, when my mother was a teenager. They lived in Maryland when they first got here, and my mom met my dad when he was at the Naval Academy. Midshipman Frank Delaney.”
She set the ice pack on the nightstand and shifted her position so she was sitting cross-legged like him. Her shirt was wet where she’d been icing her ribs and her nipples were pebbled, but by God he was going to ignore that fact if it killed him.
She was smiling at a memory, her brown eyes far away again. “My grandmother liked to tell the story of how she warned my mother not to fall for a pilot. She gave her a big lecture one day, not long after my mom met my dad at a party. Gran said that even as the words came out of her mouth, she could see in my mother’s eyes that she was a goner. That was Gran’s favorite part of the story, because she loved the word goner. She prided herself on her knowledge of American slang.”
“Did she object when your mother wanted to marry your father?”
“Loudly. But she adored my dad from the moment she met him, and he loved her, too. I was glad she passed away before my father was killed. His death would have broken her heart.”
“You were telling me why your dad didn’t become an astronaut.”
“Right. Well, like I said, my mother and grandmother didn’t love that he was a fighter pilot. But they made their peace with it, and they were ready to make peace with the astronaut thing, too. Then my mother got pregnant with me, and he changed his mind. We moved to Florida, and he taught at the naval flight school in Pensacola. It was great for the whole family. My grandmother loved the climate. My mother got her third advanced degree at the University of Florida and began her nanowire technology work. A few years later, she started on rocket fuel. My father enjoyed teaching, and both my parents were able to spend a lot of time with me, all things considered. My memories of Pensacola are good ones.” She paused. “Really good.”
It sounded like a nice life. But in a way, what she was describing was his greatest fear realized. A fighter pilot, no doubt as cocky and in love with flying as they all were, grounded because of emotional attachments. Turned into a no-load because he had too much to lose . . . and people in his life who couldn’t bear to lose him.
This was why single men and women made the best astronauts—and fighter pilots. How could you give your focus to your job if you were worried about your spouse and kids at home?
Worrying about a teammate was different. They were like you; they’d signed up for this crazy shit and knew what they were getting into. But a husband or wife? Or kids? They hadn’t signed up for it. And having met the spouses and children of pilots over the years, he knew they worried every minute of every day that their loved one was in the air.
And every minute of every day that he wasn’t in the air, a pilot was wishing he was.
Or at least he’d always thought so. But maybe Airin’s father hadn’t felt that way.
Still, he’d died a fighter pilot’s death in the end—in the North Arabian Sea, Hunter had learned when he’d looked up the record. So Frank Delaney had found his way back to a mission.
He thought he could guess why.
“When did your dad start flying combat missions again? Was it after 9/11?”
Airin nodded. “I was twelve years old when he was killed.” She paused. “I didn’t mean to talk about that, though.”
Shit. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you of—”
“No, it’s not that. I don’t mind talking about any part of my dad’s life . . . or death. But it must be after midnight and—”
“You’re tired. And your ribs hurt.”
She shrugged. “I’m a little tired, but I’m okay. And the ice helped my ribs. But you have an early-morning meeting tomorrow, don’t you? And a PT test before that? At, like, five in the morning or something?”
Yeah, he did. But like a college kid willing to sacrifice sleep to spend time with his crush, he’d pretty much forgotten all about his morning commitments.
There was something about talking to Airin that made him want to keep going. And it wasn’t just because talking to her meant he could look at her, too.
Although keeping his eyes on her face when he was so conscious of her body had resulted in a special kind of wide-awakeness. That top she wore was no barrier at all. All he’d have to do was lower his gaze a few inches and he’d see her nipples and the soft curve of her breasts with only a whisper of material covering them . . . and the memory of seeing her naked in the bathroom to sharpen the experience.
It was no hardship to look into the rich brown of her eyes, and it felt like he could do that one thing forever. But his awareness of her body—and the need to keep that awareness from Airin—created an electric tension that made him anything but tired.
“Yeah,” he said, wondering how long it would take him to fall asleep tonight. “I should probably get to bed. And you need rest, too. We can pick up this conversation tomorrow.”
Another gust of rain-damp wind blew through the window, and both he and Airin turned like animals scenting something on the air.
“What is that smell?” Airin asked him. “It’s so . . . I don’t know. Delicious. Perfect. It makes me want to walk in it.”
“I know what you mean.” He thought about walking in the gentle Hawaiian rain with Airin, and it was such an appealing idea that it took his breath away.
“You’re right,” he said abruptly. “It’s getting late. I should go.” He surged to his feet. “You didn’t drink your tea. Do you want a fresh cup? Or anything else? Is there something you need before you go to bed? Anything that’s hard for you to do because of your ribs?”
Airin shook her head. “Only my princess routine. And I can do without that until my ribs heal.”
He blinked. “Princess routine?”
She smiled. “That’s what my dad used to call it. Every night before bed, my grandmother and I would brush our hair together. One hundred strokes. We started when I was a toddler, and I’ve done it ever since. But with my ribs, all I can manage now is one or two strokes. It’s fine, though. I’m thinking about cutting my hair, to be honest. It would be so much easier to take care of.”
Cut her hair? He was surprised at how much he hated that idea, even though he knew Airin’s hair was none of his goddamn business.
“Let me do it,” he heard himself say.
Her eyebrows rose. “You want to brush my hair?”
His fingers curled into his palms at the thought of touching that incredible softness again.
Man, this was a colossal mistake.
“Sure. Why not? It’s part of your routine, and routines are important. Pilots are all about routine. Space psychologists talk about the importance of routine on long missions.”
“I’m not on a long mission,” she pointed out.
“Sure you are. It’s called life on Earth.” He looked around the room. “Where’s your brush?”
She opened the drawer of her nightstand and pulled it out. It was a beautiful thing, the handle made of smooth dark wood and the bristles as black as her hair. It felt good in his hand, solid and functional and satisfying to hold.
Airin didn’t say anything else. She moved to make room for him and then turned her back, sitting cross-legged again, her hands clasped in her lap and her spine very straight.
He sat down on the bed behind her.
The waves of her black hair fell to the middle of her back, between her shoulder blades. He reached up, placed the brush against the top of her head, and then moved it down, slowly, to the tips of her hair.
God, that felt good.
There was just enough resistance against the bristles of the brush to give a satisfying feeling of substance and heft to what he was doing, like moving a paddle through water. He did it again, moving the brush to the right, and again to the left.
Then again. And again.
There was something hypnotic about the repetition of this simple action. The scent of her hair was just as he remembered—faintly spicy with an undertone of amber. He remembered her mother’s assistant bringing her toiletries from the hotel and the nurse offering to help her shower.
He wished he could thank that nurse. Because of her, Airin smelled the way she had that first night: like everything mysterious and delicious that had ever been.
The scent pulled him in. He was holding himself very still as he brushed, because every cell in his body was tugging him forward, telling him to mold his body to Airin’s, to comb his fingers through her hair, to kiss the side of her neck.
But somehow he stayed on task. This should be one of NASA’s psych tests—a way to prove you could stay rational and focused in the most extreme circumstances.
“Hunter?”
He froze. Neither of them had said a word since the brush had first touched her hair.
“Yeah?”
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Chapter Thirteen
Airin held herself absolutely still. The two times she’d kissed Hunter had been about unleashing desire, swimming in it, while this was about restraining it. Hiding it. Hanging on by a thread to a kind of self-discipline she’d never needed before.
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