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  Sleek, wet and muscular, that had been Mike, standing there on deck.

  She’d taken one look at him and had lost every thought in her head. He’d known it, too, damn him; she could still see the slow, baby-here-I-am smile he’d sent her.

  This had to stop. She’d had him once and that should be enough. It should be over.

  But it wasn’t.

  She couldn’t even look at him without having that stupid, adolescent, weak-kneed reaction, and it was really making her furious.

  She’d read his personnel files, shamelessly soaking up his private information. He had four brothers, all in the military. His father, too, was a military man. His mother, a Russian, had died when Mike had been only four, so it was no wonder he was so incredibly masculine. He’d grown up in a house full of Y chromosomes, and then had gone into an industry overloaded with testosterone.

  That was a problem, she decided, rolling over to punch her pillow. Because while Mike definitely knew how to treat a woman—he had, after all, made her purr more than once—he had no idea how to do anything other than pamper a female, much less work for one. To work beneath her command was going to be utterly foreign to him, and with both of them needing their control…well, it wasn’t going to go smoothly, this mission, she could see that.

  What she couldn’t see, exactly, was what to do about it.

  She wasn’t herself around him. She had a hard time sticking to that cool, icy facade she favored, mostly because he saw right through her.

  She hated that.

  With a sigh, she heaved herself out of bed for her usual middle of the night run to the bathroom. It was annoying, but then again, if she’d just sleep the night through like normal people, instead of obsessing, she wouldn’t have to go at all, would she?

  The hall was silent, both when she crept into the bathroom and when she came out two minutes later. Which was why she nearly screamed when she ran into a solid rock wall of a chest.

  Even as those big, warm hands came up to steady her, she knew. “Mike,” she said in a breathless whisper, blinking through the dark.

  “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “You have a weak bladder, too?”

  “I don’t have a weak anything.”

  “Everyone has a weak something.”

  “What I have,” he said softly, reaching up to tug on her ponytail, “is a weakness for long dark hair flowing wild and free, and dark-blue eyes melting with desire when they look at me, instead of two icicles.”

  “I’m going back to bed.”

  “Not until we talk.”

  “It’s late.”

  He flicked the light on his watch. “Actually, it’s early. I’ve been listening for you, Corrine. We need to get this over with.”

  “Maybe you’d rather try to beat me at my morning run again.”

  He scowled. “So I underestimated you.”

  “You thought me nothing more than a fragile doll.”

  “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

  “I bet. Look, Mike, this is never going to work. Surely you can see that. You have a problem with me being the commander of this mission.”

  “What I have a problem with is you pretending you don’t know me. You pretending we didn’t sleep together, that we didn’t make love—”

  She slapped his hand over his mouth and whipped her head to the right, then to the left, making sure no one could hear them. “Damn it,” she breathed. “Could you stop talking about it? Why do we have to keep talking about it?”

  Grabbing her hands away from his mouth, he held them at her sides, slowly backing her up against the wall until she had the cool plaster at her back and his hot, hot body at her front.

  She hadn’t given much thought to her pajamas—men’s flannel shorts and a loose tank top. As they were her favorites, they’d been washed to a thin softness. Thin enough to feel every inch of him, and her body seemed to recognize how much she’d enjoyed those inches, because she closed her eyes in order to better concentrate on the sensations.

  “Corrine,” he whispered, his voice low and rough now, as if he, too, couldn’t help himself. “I don’t understand you. Help me understand. Why can’t we just…be? Why do we have to ignore this?”

  Why? He had to ask why? There were a million reasons, starting with the fact that they had to work together professionally, with no personal hangups between them. The mission depended on it. NASA counted on it. Billions of tax dollars were at stake. There could be nothing dragging them down emotionally. “There is no ‘this,”’ she said with a finality she didn’t feel.

  He ran a finger over her jaw, down her throat to the base of her neck, where her pulse had taken off. “Liar,” he chided softly as her nipples beaded and thrust against the material of her shirt.

  “Mike.”

  “Yeah.”

  She let out a disparaging sound. Oh, Mike. Why couldn’t she forget? What was it about what they’d shared in the dark, dark of the night with no music and no candles, no romantic devices, nothing but the two of them turning to each other? They’d needed nothing but each other, and that scared her.

  Hell, it terrified her. “There can’t be a this,” she whispered.

  “Oh, there’s a this.” His finger continued its path over her collarbone to her shoulder, nudging the edge of the tank off it. Stepping even closer, he dipped his head and nipped at the skin he’d exposed, while his fingers continued their seductive assault on her senses.

  Thunk. The back of her head hit the wall as she lost the ability to hold it up. “Mike—”

  “How can you ignore me?” He dipped his head so that she could feel his breath on her skin. “After what we shared?”

  “It was…just…sex,” she panted as he dragged that clever mouth back up her throat now, feasting as he went, his fingers toying with the edging of her top, and the curve of her breast.

  “Yeah. Sex. Great sex.” He waited until she cleared her glassy gaze and looked at him. “I made you come, remember?” His hips slid to hers. “Over and over, until you were screaming.”

  She was going to scream now. “Stop.” Since she wanted to mean it, she put a hand to his chest. “I want you to forget all that. If we’re going to make this work, you have to forget.”

  “Corrine—”

  “Forget, Mike.” And while she still had the strength, she wrenched away. But instead of going back to bed, she went into the bathroom and cranked on the shower.

  Cold.

  As she stripped and stepped beneath the icy spray, she could swear she heard Mike’s soft, mocking laughter.

  6

  THE MEETING WAS NOT going well. Corrine knew this, and she tried to get a handle on things—things being mostly her own emotions. But with Mike sitting there so calm and put together at the conference table, it was all but impossible.

  She could feel his eyes on her, searching and intense. And though it had to be only an illusion, she thought she could smell him, all clean, sexy male. She certainly could feel him, and he wasn’t even touching her.

  She’d dreamed about that, his touching her. He did it far too often. Always in such a way as to seem innocent, of course. A brush of an arm here. A thigh there. Here a touch, there a touch, everywhere a touch.

  She was losing it.

  “Facts are facts,” she said into the tense silence. “We’ve been asked to conduct these experiments, and we will.”

  “But we can complain about it, at least. They’re not NASA based, or even university experiments,” Frank said. They’d been having this bickering session for an hour. “It’s a bunch of elementary students from Missouri, and they want to test seeds. I think we can all agree that, with the unknown time factor involved in repairing the already installed solar panels, combined with constructing the new ones, we have better things to be worrying about than kids with seeds.”

  Both Jimmy and Stephen nodded. Corrine looked at Mike.

  He returned the look, his expression closed, and said nothing.