No Limits (2 page)

The too-brief kiss they'd shared in the kitchen had whetted her appetite, reawakened a desire that had never really gone away. He would leave again. To be fair, she'd probably want him to go. She knew she didn't share power easily and the thought of having to make decisions about the ranch with him chafed.

“Molly?”

She glanced up and saw him standing in front of his bedroom. No shirt to cover that muscled chest of his, only a pair of low-slung jeans that clung to his hip bones. His hair was rumpled as if he'd run his fingers through it a few times. Hers tingled as she thought of touching him.

“I am pissed at you,” she said at last.

He rubbed his chest, the thin layer of hair there and the scar he'd earned trying to climb out his window when he'd first come to live with them. The Bar T Ranch had left its mark on Jason as surely as it had on her.

“I left so I wouldn't hurt your relationship with your dad,” he said.

“That's BS and you know it. You left because you were afraid.”

“Afraid?”

“Yes.
Of me
. Of getting tied to this ranch and never seeing the world outside its borders.”

He shrugged and took a step forward. She shivered. He was all masculine grace. He moved as if he owned the world, and given that he'd seen it from orbit maybe he did.

She wanted to be in control. But she couldn't help wondering if giving in to lust would finally answer the question that had niggled at her for thirteen long years. Would he be the lover she'd always dreamed of? Sixteen-year-old Molly had been sure of it. Twenty-nine-year-old Molly had been disappointed by men before. But she wanted this, wanted him.

Always had.

“So...”

“You certainly aren't any more eloquent than you used to be,” she said, closing the gap between them. Acting without thinking.

That was the key.
Don't think
. She had been thinking way too much since her father died and she'd seen Jason's name on the will. She'd been questioning why her father, whom she'd thought she'd known so well, had named him in the will and not just her. Did he think she needed a man's help?

Stop.

Don't think.

Act.

She put her hands on Jason's shoulders. His skin was hot, hard under her touch, and damn he smelled good. She went up on her tiptoes, hung there balanced only by her hands on his body.

He arched one eyebrow at her but didn't make another move. She felt the unspoken dare between them. Was she going to do this or back away as she had in the kitchen?

“Ah, hell.”

Jason's words lingered in the air around them as his mouth came down on hers. For a mouth that had always looked so strong and tough, it was soft against hers. He took the kiss slowly as if he had all the time in the world.

They had this night.

Nothing was complicated in this empty house with the moon shining down on them. She held tightly on to his shoulders as he parted his lips and she felt the first thrust of his tongue in her mouth.

He tasted of whiskey and temptation. Two things she knew she should resist right now but was unable to.

She was tired of denying herself. Jason McCoy. She'd wanted him for longer than she could remember and at last it seemed he was hers for the taking.

No more regrets.

He settled his hands on her hips, drawing her closer, and the silk nightie she wore under the robe did nothing to protect her from the intense heat of his embrace. He thrust his tongue deeper into her mouth and she felt a fire start in her soul and fan outward.

She pulled back, looking up into his eyes. They were heavy-lidded, half-closed. Slowly he opened them.

2

M
OLLY
STARED
UP
into eyes the color of the morning sky, trying not to lose herself. She
knew why she was out here in the hallway after midnight. But it was too much to believe that he'd wandered into the hall at the same moment, also unable to sleep.

“Why are you actually here?” she asked. Her voice sounded husky, needy. Too feminine. She might want to pretend Jason didn't affect her, but that would be a lie. Her father hadn't held with lying so neither would she.

“To see the land, to figure things out with you,” he said, but he'd turned away. He put his hands on his hips and looked out the big window at the inky-black sky beyond. She wondered if, when he looked at the night sky, it made him long to be back among the stars.

She had questions about that part of his life, but mostly, right now, she needed to not turn something meaningless into a big deal. Her dad had died. She felt tears burning her eyes. She hoped one day she'd be able to think about him without this gut-wrenching pain, but she wasn't there yet. Would she ever be?

“Hey, you all right?”

She shook her head. “Just—”

Her voice, heavy with tears, sounded deep and almost unintelligible.

“It's okay. I miss Mick, too,” he said.

Miss him. She ached with his loss. She still wasn't ready to be on her own with the ranch or in life. She needed her father's advice. Now more than ever.

More tears fell and all of a sudden she was sobbing. She had heard it said that grief was the photo negative of love, but she wasn't ready to accept it. It was just a huge hole in her that could never be filled.

Jason cursed and then pulled her into his arms. He didn't do anything else. Just held her as sobs racked her body and her emotions fell in a gush of tears. She had no idea how much time had passed until she was hiccupping softly and the tears had almost dried up.

“Sorry for that,” she said, taking a step backward.

“I'm not,” he admitted. He wiped the trail of moisture off her face and then sighed. “I'm also here because...I have a few health concerns after spending a year on the International Space Station and my commander wants me to take a break.”

“Oh. I appreciate your honesty. So what's 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.

* * *

T
HE
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 Cronus mission, and Dr. Lorelei Tomlin, the team medic, had designed a fitness routine to get him ready for the long-term mission program and to see if they could counteract the expected impact of spending a year outside the Earth's gravitational field.

He'd had very little spinal-fluid loss, which was the result they had been hoping for, and he'd recovered relatively quickly from the standard loss in muscle mass, but the bone-density loss he'd suffered—and the raised calcium levels in his blood that came with it—continued to be a concern. At his medical exam Doc Tomlin had been as upset as Ace was by the unusually slow rate of improvement. He'd taken a leave to see if being away from Johnson Space Center and a different, off-site exercise regimen would help.

Osteopenia had the power to end the part of his career he loved most—actually being up in space. Something he wasn't ready for. He was determined to beat this any way he could.

He mounted Carl, and Molly touched her heels to her horse's sides and made a clicking sound, leading the way out of the barn.

The night was cool, not cold, and the sky was clear. Early May in south Texas wasn't really hot yet, at least at night. For a minute he forgot about riding and just stared at the sky. His heart took a punch and he felt a sense of fear and loss. He had to be cleared for more missions.

“You okay?” she asked.

He thought seeing the stars would remind him of who he was, but it just emphasized what was at stake.

“Yeah,” he lied.

She loped along the fields past the grazing land where the cattle were kept, and he stopped thinking and just followed her.

Her ponytail flew out behind her head as she rode and it took all of his skill to keep up with her. Eventually he realized that Molly wasn't riding with him. She was racing away from something.

Her dad
.

He stopped trying to keep up and let her ride as hard and fast as she could. Even though he knew there was no running away from the ghosts that were carried in one's soul.

Molly pulled up a few hundred feet in front of him and tipped her head back to the sky. He couldn't help noticing again how long and slender her neck was. Everything about her body was sleek and elegant.

When he pulled up next to her, he noticed that her eyes were wide and wet.

“I forgot how much I love to ride at night,” she said.

“Me, too. It's exhilarating.”

“It is. Thank you for this. I know you came here to figure out what to do with the ranch, not to deal with Mick's hot mess of a daughter.”

“You're not a hot mess,” he said. “I came back for you, too. We both have to decide what to do about this complicated legacy Mick left us.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “But not tonight.”

“Definitely not,” he agreed. “Where to now?”

She tipped her head back toward the stars again and he did the same. His breath caught as his eyes skimmed the sky finding what he was looking for. The International Space Station. Knowing where to look made it easy for him to spot it. He watched it moving slowly in orbit and thought of all the time he'd spent up there. He'd clocked more time than most of the other guys on his team.

“What are you looking at?”

“The space station,” he said.

“Where is it?”

He lifted his arm and pointed. “It's in a slow moving orbit.”

“What's it like up there?”

He shrugged. “Better men than me could probably put it into words. I just know up there...I'm free.”

“Like me when I'm riding,” she said, quietly.

He didn't respond, just looked up at the sky, realizing he was going to do whatever he had to in order to get mission-ready again. He wasn't done with that life. Not yet.

* * *

T
HEY
GOT
OFF
their horses and left them to graze as they continued, walking. This was a side to Jason she didn't know. In fact, there was a lot to the man she had no idea about. He'd been a boy when he left to go into the military and started on his path to becoming an astronaut. And though they'd lived in the same house for a few years, they'd never had deep conversations.

Tonight she thought she finally had a glimpse of the real man.

“What's going on with you and your career?” she asked. “You said there was a medical issue.”

“It's complicated.”

“Which means you don't think I will understand it or you don't want to talk about it.”

“You're one of the smartest women I've ever known,” he said.

She smiled. “That's because I whipped your butt at AP calculus back in the day.”

“I'm a little better at it now,” he admitted.