Space in His Heart (30 page)

She cried
out and he pulled back, muttering an apology. She shook her head
and grabbed his backside,
pulling
him into her again and again and again until he
felt her flesh quiver and heard her whine and gasp in
response.

He braced
himself over her, his hands flat on the cool tile floor. With each
arch of her body, the pleasure shot through him as she clutched him
with her arms, her teeth, her feminine flesh. She vibrated with an
orgasm, calling his name, biting his neck, and he lifted her to his
chest, blinded by the need and desire and, finally, a dizzying,
satisfying burst of pleasure as he exploded over and over inside of
her.

He
couldn’t speak, couldn’t move. Aftershocks shook her, squeezing his
flesh and leaving them both gasping for air. She’d taken over his
soul. This woman who touched him so completely. This woman who had
changed everything that ever mattered to him. This brilliant,
beautiful, relentless woman
whom
he loved.

“
Deke.”
Her breath warmed his cheek and he lifted his head to look into her
eyes.
Don’t
say it, Jessie. Please, don’t say it before I get on that
shuttle.

But he knew he
couldn’t stop her. He could read her certainty in her eyes. Nothing
could stop Jessica once she made up her mind. “Deke, I love
you.”

He dropped his
head into her hair and choked back the lump in his throat. How had
he gotten to this place he swore he would never, ever be?

Chapter
Twenty-three

Deke scraped
the concrete of the launch pad with the steel tip of his work boot,
studying Scott Hayes’s expression as the engineer glided back to
the ground in the bucket of a cherry picker. Of the men who’d
ventured into the main engines of the orbiter that morning, this
one’s opinion mattered the most.

“What do you
think?” Deke asked the engineer.

Scott didn’t
answer as he climbed out of the harness that held him.

“It was the
plug,” he finally said when he reached the ground.

“How’d we miss
that?” another engineer asked.

Deke
walked over to the blueprints and computer readouts they’d spread
at a work area. Not everyone missed it.
Someone
saw it. Someone who was willing to lose his
reputation as a space legend for revenge against an ancient enemy.
He erased the image of Skip Bowker from his brain. He had more
important problems to solve.

“It released
during launch and ruptured the coolant tube,” Deke said to the
group. “There’s got to be a simple solution.”

Only
six
engineers
, including
Deke, had taken the lift into the mains. But more than a
dozen
people
had an
opinion on what could be done. The more conservative voted for no
launch. Deke remained firmly on the other side.

“
That pin
has no critical function,” he argued as they pored over the
computer readout. “It doesn’t even exist
o
n
Atlantis
or
Discovery
. It’s
a holdout from an old design and it makes no sense that it’s part
of
Endeavour
.”

The debate
continued, but he could feel most of them starting to agree with
him.

“We could widen
the combustion chamber,” someone suggested. “That would reduce the
pressure and the temperature.”

“It would also
require taking the orbiter off the pad,” Scott commented. “A long,
long delay.”

“What about a
shield?” Deke asked as he tapped the blueprint in front of him.
“Can’t we protect the nozzle from a flying pin or even secure the
plug into place so it can’t come loose?”

Scott leaned
forward and peered at the readout. “A couple of months ago I
suggested that we fashion a safety wire around the plugs for a
completely different reason. But it would keep the same thing from
happening again.”

One of the
engineers holding a PLIC logbook looked up. “I never heard about
that.”

Scott shook his
head with a rueful smile. “You know what they say about NASA. Great
engineers…”

“Lousy
communicators.” One of them finished for him.

Deke knew what
was lousy. And it wasn’t communications. But Skip was dead and they
had to fix this problem.

“
Do you
think it could be done with the shuttle still on the pad?”
Deke
asked Scott.

“Oh, yeah.”
Scott nodded and peered at the blueprint. “We can do it.”

“
Come
on.” Deke didn’t want to debate another minute. “Let’s brief Rourke
and Price. We need their blessing. Then we can get the right people
out here to fix it.”

They met John
Rourke, the mission director, in the waiting room of Colonel
Price’s office, and the three of them went in together. Deke
immediately saw the sorrow that darkened the Colonel’s eyes,
noticing the man looked all of his fifty-five years that day. Skip
Bowker had been a lifelong friend of the Colonel’s and the previous
evening’s events couldn’t have been easy on him.

With Skip’s
death, Scott Hayes had become the de facto head of Safety and
Logistics. Deke let him take the lead in explaining their findings
to the Colonel and Rourke.

Scott sketched
his solution on a yellow pad, making it look remarkably simple.
Maybe too simple. Deke studied the Colonel’s expression for a
clue.

“
This is
not the way NASA likes to work,” Rourke said before the Colonel
spoke. “It smells of Apollo
-13
and jury-rigged fixes. We’ve come a long way since
then.”

“We don’t have
a choice,” Colonel Price announced, silencing the debate. “I just
received word that Micah had a cerebral embolism and has symptoms
of a TIA. That’s a transient ischemic attack, also known as a
mini-stroke.”

He stood and
turned toward his window. No one spoke.

“
The
Russian government is clamoring for us to get up there to get him.
They’re in bad shape, having only the
Soyuz
for an escape and knowing that would certainly
kill him. His uncle is in Washington meeting with the
p
resident.”

Deke stared at
the yellow diagram that Scott had just completed. They could be
ninety-nine percent sure. But never one hundred. Not in this
business.

The Colonel
turned from his window view and looked at Deke. “Be ready to launch
at 5:47 a.m. on Sunday. You’ll take a skeleton crew that can get us
up and back. A pilot, the surgeon, and two mission-critical
specialists. Just enough to get that man home alive. Safety-wire
the plug and start the countdown.”

“Yes, sir,”
Deke agreed.

He closed his
eyes for a moment as they left Colonel Price’s office, realizing
that somehow he’d become an ambulance driver and it could damn well
cost him his life. When he opened his eyes, he saw Jessica in the
waiting room.

* * *

The look on
Deke’s face told Jessica all she needed to know.

The launch was
a go.

But she
asked anyway, praying for a different answer
,
“What’s the verdict?”

He put his hand
on the shoulder of one of the engineers she recognized from the
OPF.

“I’ll meet you
at S&L in ten minutes, Scott,” he said. Then he took a step
closer to her and whispered, “Let’s talk outside.”

She followed
him through the lobby doors to the side of the building where round
concrete tables were used for outdoor lunches and open-air
meetings. Today the tables were empty except for a few mourning
doves picking at crumbs.

Deke leaned
against the edge of one of the tables. The adrenaline that had
started pumping at the sight of him the night before surged again,
threatening Jessica’s stability. She wanted him to pull her close,
to kiss her. Instead, he put his hands in the pockets of his flight
suit and clenched a muscle in his jaw.

“We’re
launching with a skeleton crew on Sunday morning,” he finally
said.

“Why a skeleton
crew?”

“The mission
objectives have been realigned.”

She crossed her
arms and glared at him. “Don’t give me NASA-speak.”

“We’re only
going up for one reason, Jess. To get Petrenko. He’s worse. Another
embolism caused a mini-stroke. We’re taking as few people as
necessary.”

The truth hit
her. “Fewer lives to risk.”

He narrowed his
eyes. “Correct.”

“But yours is
one of them.”

“Correct.”

Brick by brick,
he was erecting a wall, but she was determined to tear it down.
“Why are you acting this way?” she demanded, taking a position
directly in front of him. “What changed since I drove you home last
night?”

He stared at
her, a frightening darkness in his expression. “Everything changed.
And nothing.”

“What does that
mean?”

“It means that
this wasn’t supposed to happen, Jess.”

“What wasn’t?
This launch?”

He closed his
eyes. “You’re being naïve again.”

“
Then
enlighten me.
What
wasn’t
supposed to happen?”

“This,
Jessica.” He pointed his finger from himself to her and back again.
“This was supposed to be for fun and pleasure.”

The words
stabbed her. “It’s not?”

“You know damn
well what I mean. It’s turned into a lot more than I expected.”

“And just
exactly what did it turn into?” She wanted to hear him say it. She
needed to know.

He shook his
head as though he were amazed. “Somehow, it turned into a
full-blown walk down the aisle, sweetheart.”

She bit back a
laugh, a weird giddiness electrifying her sleep-deprived body.

“I swore I
would never put anyone through that kind of torture.” His quiet
statement erased the temptation to laugh.

She crossed her
arms, a nervous smile threatening. “That might not be the torture
you seem to think it would be.”

But he didn’t
smile back. “It would be if you watch that shuttle explode into
thin air on Sunday morning. It would be when we’re doing an
emergency landing in South Africa and the gear doesn’t come down
because of a computer glitch. It would be torture for both of
us.”

Slowly, she
took a step back and stared at him as a painful realization hit
with as much force as his casual reference to a walk down the
aisle.

“
You
know, Deke, you are
not
the
risk-taker you think you are. You may not be scared to die, but you
are terrified to live. You’ve built this wall around yourself that
protects you from the one thing that could hurt you
or
help you. Love. And, worst of
all, you’ve done it with hypocritical nobility, telling yourself
that you only want to protect someone. But the someone you want to
protect is
you
.”

He started to
shake his head.

“No—” She held
up her hand to stop his denial. “You’re so sure that you might not
‘come home from work,’ as you say. Let me ask you a question. What
is it you want to come home to, Deke? An empty house? A lonely
sailboat? The encyclopedia of aviation?”

“Stop it,” he
said, taking her hands and pulling her closer, his navy eyes
flashing. “I want to come home to the same kind of security my
parents had. The same loving home that you envied so much when you
were there. But I can’t, Jessica. I chose a different life. I can’t
guarantee any reunions and I just don’t think that’s fair to
you.”

He held both
her hands up to his face, near his lips, and she could feel his
breath on her fingers.

He searched her
eyes, her face, a question in his expression. “So when did you
decide you’d be willing to leave your glamorous job in Boston to
live in the flats of Florida with an astronaut?”

“When I fell in
love with one.”

Then she
held her breath. Waiting for the response she needed to
hear.
Tell
me, Deke. Tell me you love me.

He pulled her
to him and kissed her hard on the mouth—a frustrated, angry, hungry
kiss. When their lips parted, he kept his eyes closed, but she
watched his forehead crease. “I have to go fix that damn shuttle,”
he whispered, his face still close to hers. “I won’t see you again
until… will you be here when I land?”

Disappointment punched her.
He couldn’t say it. He didn’t love
her
.

“Ahem.” At the
sound of the obvious intrusion, she spun around. “I’ve been looking
all over for you, Jess.”

Sunglasses hid
his expression, but she recognized the admonition in Bill Dugan’s
voice.

* * *

Jessica jerked
away from Deke and immediately regretted it. Damn Bill Dugan. What
the hell was someone from Ross & Clayton doing here and why did
he show up at the most critical moment of her life?

Deke must have
read it as a cue, because he stepped two feet away from her. “I’ve
got to go, Jess.”

He started
walking toward the parking lot. She fought the urge to scream and
run after him and kick Bill in the shins on the way. She was sick
of hiding her feelings for this man.

Bill adjusted
his sunglasses as he approached her and Deke disappeared around the
building.

“What are you
doing here?” she demanded.

“
What
you
are doing
here is a far more interesting question,” he said with a sneer.
“Pretty cozy with a client, Jess.”

The adrenaline
in her veins changed to hot lava and threatened to spew at him in
the form of frustrated, angry words. “I was having a private
conversation,” she said through clenched teeth.