Beyond the Limits

“That’s a big ask, Thor,” Velocity said.

“I don’t agree,” Antonio added. “Some of the candidates are fresh recruits who have never been on a mission before. This test shook some of them and it’s better to find out on the ground if someone can’t cut it.”

Izzy gave Antonio a hard stare over her shoulder. He had forgotten how fierce she could be when she was challenged.

“That’s exactly why we are running these tests. You three are more experienced, but there are some candidates here who, frankly, are a gamble. We don’t know yet what they are made of. They all passed rigorous qualifying tests, but stuff happens. Things go wrong. We need to know how each person will react. You three showed your mettle today,” Thor said. “Now go and clean up and meet the team in the main area of Bunkhouse 1 at 1600 hours.”

Thor walked away from the group and they all turned to head to the bunkhouses together. Velosi was in Bunkhouse 3, a new addition to the facility now that there were more candidates coming in. Velosi and Izzy had been on the Bar T Ranch for over six months. He’d volunteered to switch to the new bunkhouse in order to mentor a few of the newer mechanical-engineering candidates.

Antonio wanted to touch her and make sure she was okay. Pull her away from the others and hold her for a few moments. The emergency hadn’t given them a chance to regroup after they’d made love.

“Izzy—”

“Don’t. I am not ready to talk about anything,” she said. “Except, why didn’t you have my back when we were talking to Thor?”

What had happened between them had been hotter and more rare than a comet snaking past Earth, and she wanted to discuss a difference of opinion? Fine. He could do that.

“One of the guys in my group freaked a bit as we were leaving. It made me realize how inexperienced some of these candidates are. We were lucky to have our training before coming to this program,” Antonio said. “Which is exactly what I said to Thor.”

“Sorry. Finding Molly like that put me on edge. She was slumped over on the floor. That was so scary,” Izzy said. She stopped walking and turned to face him, her gray eyes full of conflicting emotions. He reached for her, but she shook her head.

“No. We can’t do the personal thing. We had sex. That’s it,” she said. “We’ve seen how intense it is here, and I’m pretty sure they aren’t going to be too happy if we start something.”

“That’s it? Don’t I get a say in this?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “But I don’t think you want to risk your chances of going on this mission. You know there are no guarantees for who will be chosen. And no matter how incredible we are together, we’ve both worked our entire lives to be on a mission like this.”

She was stubborn, but he’d already known that. And she made a good point. The hot sex they’d shared had served to whet his appetite for her, but maybe it had cooled hers for him. Maybe that one time was all she needed.

It didn’t seem possible that she could feel nothing for him when he wanted her so much. “I think Ace was freaked, too,” Antonio said at last, following her change of subject. Retreat wasn’t really his style, but if she needed time to process things he’d give it to her. He put his doubts aside. One time wasn’t going to be enough...for either of them. And work was easier to discuss.

“He was,” Izzy admitted. “She’s not a candidate and doesn’t have the training we do. I’m glad we got to her when we did.”

“I agree,” Antonio said. “I think it proves Thor’s point that you can never be prepared for anything. They planned this drill but didn’t know she’d get caught in the middle of it.”

“Probably. It’s just that we follow so many procedures and regulations with the program,” she said. “We’re in the same bunkhouse, right?”

“Yes.”

She gave him a sideways look. “Why haven’t I seen you in the common room?”

“That answer is complicated,” Antonio said.

4

A SECRET.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know any more of Antonio’s secrets. She already knew the way his body felt pressed next to hers and the sound he made when he came inside her. The way the scent of his aftershave mingled with sweat on his body and how easily he rattled her self-control.

The smart thing to do would be to walk away. But she was still on edge. Finding Molly had rattled her. The risks associated with space missions had always been high, though sometimes Izzy felt that modern innovation had made spaceflight safer.

But the explosion of the test rocket a few months ago had reminded her that those risks hadn’t lessened. The stakes were high, so maybe, just for the moment, she could do something fun with Antonio.

Still, she wasn’t sure if what he was offering was fun.

She had her guard up now. She had thought that it would be like blowing off steam, but it had been more—just like everything with Antonio was. Which was why she found herself back in front of the bunkhouse after showering and changing into jeans and a T-shirt.

“What’s this secret?” she asked as he walked over to join her.

He’d changed, too, and looked like the cowboy he was. He had on a pair of faded denim jeans that clung to his thighs and rode low on his hips. His boots were worn but good quality and he had on a button-down ranch shirt. He held a straw cowboy hat loosely in one hand and a bandanna was tied around his neck.

“Come with me and find out,” he invited. He held his hand out to her and led her not toward the bunkhouses but away from the Mick Tanner facility and onto the path that led to the Bar T.

“Why are we going toward the ranch?”

“So I can show you why I haven’t been hanging out in the common room,” he said.

“And it’s on the ranch?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She smiled to herself. He sounded like the ranch hands on the Bar T. They all had good Southern manners, and it was sort of amusing to hear Antonio talking like them in his Spanish accent.

“I think I’m seeing the vaquero side of you,” she said.

He gave her a half grin over his shoulder. “You might be. As much as I always wanted to be in the space program, there is also a part of me that loves the land and ranching. So when I have some downtime I’ve been working with the hands.”

She was a step behind him and couldn’t help noticing the way his jeans hugged his butt. She caught herself and blushed. “So what’s the secret?” she asked.

He led her to the barn and down the aisle that was bordered with stalls on each side. He stopped in front of a stall that was labeled Arabella.

“Is this your horse?”

“Yes. I had her brought up here from my family’s estancia,” he said. “My brothers like to tease me about her name, but I picked it for a very specific reason. Can you guess?”

She walked into the stall with Antonio as he started running a brush over the sides of his horse. She was beautiful—even Izzy could see that and she wasn’t really familiar with horses. Arabella. She ran the name through her mind, trying to come up with a connection that made sense. Then she remembered the two spiders that were part of early NASA experiments, spinning webs while weightless in space during the Skylab project in 1973. Anita...and Arabella.

“Skylab ’73,” she said.

“Very good,” he said with a wink.

“So this is your secret?” she asked. “I think some of the other candidates that have ranching backgrounds have brought their horses.”

“They have,” Antonio said, putting the brush down as he walked around behind the horse to a pile of blankets in the corner. “This is my secret.”

She came closer and noticed a small dog nestled in the blankets. The dog bounded to her feet as Antonio came closer, dancing around his legs as he bent to pet her.

“Who is this?”

“Carly. Near as I can tell she’s a mix of dachshund and corgi. She just showed up during one of my morning rides and followed me back here. I’m waiting to hear back from Jeb about her staying on the ranch—do you know the foreman?—so I’ve been letting her bunk in with Arabella. But I have the feeling she was a house dog and not a ranch dog. She pretty much stays in the stall.”

“So you are going for morning rides and you have a secret dog named Carly. Why did you pick that?” she asked. She wanted to keep Antonio at arm’s length and this certainly wasn’t helping. But realizing there was so much more to Playboy than she’d expected also helped distract her from her thoughts about the risks of spaceflight.

“It’s short for Carletta, which means manly. I figured with such a silly little dog I needed something strong,” Antonio said.

But the dog wasn’t silly, Izzy thought as she watched Antonio stroke her. She’d only ever seen him as the competition or as someone to be avoided. But now she had a glimpse into the man...the man she’d made love with, and she realized that this might be more dangerous than fighting a fire.

* * *

ANTONIO HAD PLACED a quick call to his boss at Space Now while he’d been getting cleaned up. Unlike Izzy, he’d never been up on a mission, despite the fact that he’d been assigned to two and had been training for the better part of ten years. In the US only forty-eight astronauts had gone on long-term missions, and working within NASA, Antonio had quickly realized his chances of making it to space were minimal.

He’d used his family connections to the tech billionaire Malcolm Pennington to get himself a role as a senior astronaut with Space Now. He had the same training and skills as many of the NASA candidates; the field was simply smaller at Space Now.

Mal had been informed of the smoke test from Antonio and was en route to Texas to oversee this last phase of training and selection. He wanted to make sure as many of the Space Now candidates as possible were named to the Cronus missions.

Antonio was very aware of the fact that he and Izzy were going for the same role on the mission. And he thought that his employment with Space Now gave him an edge. After all, NASA had placed two of their candidates already on the team with Ace and Thor. The agencies outside of NASA who were equal partners in the financing and development of the mission wanted to have the same number of astronauts on the missions.

He glanced at his watch and realized they had twenty minutes before they were due back at the training facility for the debriefing.

“Want to help me groom Arabella?” he asked.

“I have been avoiding as much of the ranch chores as possible,” Izzy admitted, pushing a strand of her platinum-blond hair behind her ear. “But grooming the horses is one that I don’t mind.”

He handed her one of the grooming brushes and went to fetch a second one for himself. She worked on one side, he on the other.

“Why is that?” Antonio asked after a few minutes had passed. He loved the sounds of the barn. As a child he’d spent many hours grooming his horse, thinking of the future and dreaming of being in space.

“I could name the physical benefits of working out with one arm, but that’s not why I do it. There is something so soothing about standing here and looking after horses. I like the smell of the barn, all leather and hay—”

“And other scents,” Antonio reminded her. But he liked it, as well. As soon as he stepped into the barn, his other worries left. He was grounded here as much as he was when he got into the simulator at Space Now.

“Sometimes,” she admitted. “But most of the time it’s so solitary. Just me and the horse and the sound of the brush as I move it over her coat. And it gives me time to think and analyze whatever problems we’ve been dealing with at the facility. Working this way helps to soothe me.”

“Me, too,” he admitted. “Sometimes I think you and I have a lot in common.”

She looked over at him with those wide gray eyes of hers. “Some things. But when the trainees for the NASA program swelled in number, you were able to leave to go to a smaller private company...”

“Are you jealous?”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t be? I want to log as many hours in space as I can,” she said.

“You don’t think you’re a shoo-in?” he asked. Honestly, he did feel at a disadvantage that he was just joining the Cronus training program here in Texas. He was pretty sure that many of the other new candidates felt the same way.

“No one is. I think today just proved how high the bar is being set. What if that alarm had gone off ten minutes sooner?” she asked. “We both would have been...”

“In a very delicate position,” he said. He didn’t regret his intimate time with Izzy—how could he? He’d spent years dreaming of having her in his arms. And if today had proved anything, it was that the bond between them was a strong one. At least physically.

“Exactly. I don’t want to take a chance on screwing up. Even though I do feel like you took the easier path—” she held up her hand to stop him from responding “—we both have worked too hard to jeopardize our shot at getting on this mission.”

“I agree. We have worked hard. What are you trying to say?” he asked.

“That we keep our distance. Work together as we have to in the training sessions, but no more—” She gestured to the two of them, her hand going back and forth.

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, curious that a woman who was truly one of the boldest, bravest people he knew was trying to avoiding saying anything intimate.

“It means no more hooking up,” she said.

He bit the inside of his cheek to keep from smiling. “Fair enough. You know, you came on to me.”

She put her hands on her hips and gave him a hard glare, and then she threw back her head and laughed. “I did, didn’t I? I thought that if we cleared the air we’d be able to work better together. I never expected it to go so far.”

“I did,” he admitted. From the moment he’d seen her, she’d been a fire in his blood, and nothing had changed that. “But from now on, we can keep our distance.”

“Yes,” she said. “I think I’m done grooming this horse.”

“Vaquero, you in here?”

“Sí, I’m back here,” Antonio answered.

Jeb, the ranch foreman, poked his head around the stall and leaned in. “Ma’am. Antonio, I could use a hand with some fence repair if you have the time. And I talked to Ace—you can keep Carly in your room at the bunkhouse for now. We are looking around in town to find her owners.”

“I have a meeting at 1900, but I think I could help out for a little while,” Antonio said.

He glanced over at Izzy, who was simply watching him and Jeb. “Wanna help?”

* * *

“NO” WOULD HAVE been a perfectly acceptable answer, Izzy reminded herself as she held a length of fencing in place as Antonio hammered a nail to fix it. The setting sun shone brightly and it felt good doing something instead of being back in her room remembering that scary moment when she’d found Molly.

She kept getting flashes in her mind of finding her friend’s slumped body in the corner of the room. And the acrid smoke that she’d breathed in seemed to burn the inside of her nostrils every once in a while.

“Izzy?”

“Yes?” she asked, glancing toward Antonio. His hands were on his hips and he was watching her. He looked good dressed as a cowboy. Some of the other candidates looked like they were playing dress-up, but he wore the clothes with a natural air that made him seem a part of this landscape.

“I said that’s it. Are you ready to head back?” he asked.

She nodded and turned toward her horse but stopped. “I keep thinking about Molly. What if something like that had happened in space?”

She didn’t hear Antonio move and jumped when he put his hand on her shoulder. “We’d cope with it, same as we did today. But it is scary. We have to be able to rely on the team completely.”

“Exactly. I mean I know Velocity really well, so I’m happy to have him at my back, but some of these people...how are they going to make us into a team?”

“With a lot of hard work,” Antonio said.

“Do you know the people from Space Now well?” she asked. She’d worked with everyone who had come through NASA, or else she knew them by their reputations. She’d read the dossiers on all of the new candidates, as she assumed they’d done with her, but she’d worked with very few of them and hadn’t even heard of some of them.

Antonio echoed her thoughts. “Some of the Space Now candidates are new, people I haven’t worked with, but most of them I know. They were rigorously vetted before being sent here.”

She put her hand up. “I wasn’t judging them. I was thinking more from my own perspective. It’s hard to build trust. I imagine that’s what Thor and Ace are going to be trying to get us to do while we learn how to use the equipment that we will need to build the way station.”

“It will work out,” he said.

She turned to face him, caught between him and her horse. She looked up at his tanned face, hidden from the sun under the brim of his straw cowboy hat. He had deep laugh lines around his eyes, and his eyelashes were thick. His eyes as he watched her seemed cautious. But then, maybe she was projecting that onto him since she wanted to be watchful around him. Careful not to let him slip past her guard again.

What if it doesn’t work? But she didn’t ask him. Instead, she just closed her eyes, which was a mistake. The sun disappeared and she flashed to the hallway filling with smoke, hearing echoes of the alarm. Her eyes popped open and she saw that Antonio was studying her.

He put his hand under her chin and looked down at her with an expression she’d never seen on his face before. It was tender and almost sweet, and it made her realize that she’d made more than a basic mistake in letting him in. She’d made a critical error. The kind that could cost lives in space and, if she wasn’t very careful, possibly her place on the Cronus mission.

She pulled back, turning away from him and trying to mount up. She got her foot in the stirrup, and the ranch-trained horse stood still as she tried to use her arms and a hop to get up in the saddle.

He cursed under his breath in Spanish, which somehow sounded more elegant than it did in English. He put his hand on her butt and gave her a boost up into the saddle. She swung her leg over and seated herself before turning to thank him. He’d already sauntered over to his horse.

Arabella.

The horse named after one of the spiders NASA had sent into space. She realized the stakes were high for Antonio, as well. She had to remember that. Sleeping with him hadn’t just affected her. Antonio was going to have to deal with the fallout, too, and if the way he clicked his heels and started galloping across the open field was any indication, he was as frustrated as she was with the attraction that was still there between them.

5

“THANK YOU ALL for meeting back here. Ace is with Molly, who will be fine, but he didn’t want to leave her alone. She suffered some low-level smoke inhalation,” Thor said as he addressed all of the candidates.

Izzy stood in the back next to Velosi and some of the others who’d been here since the beginning. She and Velosi had been at the Mick Tanner Training Facility since day one and they were familiar with the program. But today the stakes had been raised. Sundays were downtime. Everyone knew that.

Not anymore.

The smoke hadn’t been an accident. It had been a test. And while Izzy had no problem participating in tests and honing skills, she did think it was a little sneaky of Thor, Ace and program director Dennis Locke to have implemented this one the way they had.

Dennis stepped up next to Thor. Dennis was in his fifties but was fit and looked younger. His hair was graying at the temples but his gaze was still as sharp as his early mission photos when he’d been in his twenties. Izzy respected him and felt fortunate to be included in a program that he was heading up.

“I know that some of you have raised concerns about the test happening on your day off, and I’ve addressed most of you privately. But I do want to say publicly that from this point forward every day—even your down ones—will be some sort of training,” Dennis said.

“They could have mentioned that earlier,” Velosi said under his breath. “But let’s face it, we know you don’t get a day off in space.”

“So true,” Izzy said.

“Many of you have met the candidates who have joined us from the international and privately funded space programs like Space Now, but until today you didn’t have the chance to see each other in action. While the emergency situations occurred at the three locations where we had staff—the training facility, bunkhouses and the ranch pasture—you all were challenged in different ways.”

Thor stepped forward. “We felt it was necessary to see if you all could function as a team without us making you into a team first. These exercises were very successful and we have identified the candidates who have already made a strong impression.”

Dennis spoke again. “As you know, you are all qualified and have unique skills, but the first mission will be the one where we anticipate the most unforeseen problems, and that is why we have been training, testing and slowly building that first crew. The subsequent missions will be built on new knowledge.”

“We are going to divide you into two teams of twelve and each of you will be challenging yourselves within the group and against the other team,” Thor continued. “You will select a leader for yourselves and you will start to work completely with that team. You will eat together, do the ranch chores together, train together... In effect, you will be a unit.”

“Dr. Tomlin has a bowl with twelve red and twelve blue markers. Please come forward and select one to determine your team,” Dennis said. “Blue team, you will be rotating to the ranch for two weeks for intense team building, muscle building and general skills. Red team, you will be in the facility for two weeks in the new rocket simulator that has just been installed.”

Izzy felt a tingling in her stomach. The mission was becoming more real. From the moment she’d arrived in Cole’s Hill, she knew that the end goal was the way station in orbit halfway between Earth and Mars, but it had seemed so far away. Now that they had the rocket simulator that would mirror the actual vessel that would take them to the location where they would assemble the way station...she was getting excited.

She looked around for Antonio and noticed he stood with a group of astronauts from the EU. He caught her gaze and winked at her. She just shook her head. She was glad that she’d had her little lapse in control where he was concerned before this announcement. She hadn’t had time to change when they’d come back from their ride, but she was determined to keep her distance from him.

She was happily going to tuck Antonio back into the box marked off-limits and focus on the Cronus missions. Not that she hadn’t been before, but now that the missions were getting closer, she knew there was no room for error. And sleeping with Playboy had definitely been an error.

But it was in the past. Maybe they’d be on different teams and they’d hardly see each other.

Please let us be on different teams, Izzy thought as she walked up to the bowl behind Velosi and drew out her marker. It was blue. Velocity’s was red. He shrugged and walked over to the red group. Izzy did the same, joining the other blues.

She chatted with the candidates on her team, trying to appear as if she wasn’t paying attention as Antonio moved closer and closer to the bowl to make his selection. She looked deliberately away from the selection line and yet couldn’t help glancing back as his big hand reached into the bowl and pulled out the blue marker.

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