Robyn Amos - Cosmic Rendezvous

She smelled so good. And her body felt so delicate in his arms.

Instead of crushing her lips and plundering her mouth as he wanted, he forced his lips to trail down her jaw to the safer territory of her smooth brown neck.

Only now he was immersed in her scent, and it clouded his already hazy mind. He couldn’t resist the urge to lick the indent at the base of her neck, and it immediately constricted with her gasp of pleasure.

Her hands dipped to the small of his back just above the waistband of his jeans. Taking that as encouragement, he let his hips rock against hers, knowing she’d feel the full extent of his excitement.

Leaning into him, Shelly raised her lips to his once again. Finally, she seemed to have let go of her inhibitions and was taking the lead.

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worked a multitude of day jobs while pursuing a career in writing after graduating from college with a degree in psychology. Then she married her real-life romantic hero, a genuine rocket scientist and she was finally able to live her dream of writing full-time. Since her first book was published in 1997, Robyn has written tales of romantic comedy and suspense for several publishers, including Harlequin Books, Kensington Books and HarperCollins. A native of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, Robyn currently resides in Odenton, Maryland.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This book is for Gretchen England. Thanks for letting

me steal pieces of your life for this book.

Remember me when you get into space one day!

Dear Reader,

My husband is an aerospace engineer, and therefore, so are many of our friends. I got the idea for Cosmic Rendezvous when one of those friends announced that she was moving to Houston to train astronauts on a new vehicle that will soon replace the space shuttle. A bunch of us were sitting around a table playing Texas Hold ’Em and joking that my friend would move to Texas and marry a cowboy. But not just any cowboy…a space cowboy. That’s when Lincoln “Lightning” Ripley was born—Mr. Right Stuff himself.

I had a great time researching this book because my husband took a real interest in helping me with the technical aspects. We visited Houston with the double mission of catching up with my friend and touring Johnson Space Center. We dined in a pub where astronauts go to hang out and viewed the underwater lab where they simulate a weightless environment. I also learned that the Houston humidity is hard on a woman’s hair. Hopefully I was able to bring all of those experiences to life in this book.

Shelly and Linc have a tough road to travel to find their happy ending. But in Cosmic Rendezvous, they eventually discover that no amount of stubbornness, stress or catastrophes can stand in the path of true love.

I love to hear from readers. E-mail me at robynamos@aol.com or visit me on the Web at www.robynamos.com.

Happy reading,

Robyn Amos

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

Shelly London shifted her stare from the blinking error message on her monitor to the window and back again. She was tempted to hoist her computer through the glass and jump out after it.

Moving to Houston to train astronauts on an experimental spacecraft for NASA wasn’t nearly as cool as it had originally seemed.

She’d felt as though she’d been caught up in a tornado from the minute she’d stepped off the plane from Washington, D.C. Between setting up her new home and overseeing the final design and production of the spacecraft, she’d barely had a moment to herself.

And there certainly hadn’t been time to find a decent hairdresser, she thought, patting her gel-slicked topknot. Houston’s humidity had gotten the best of her, and it had been one bad-hair day after another.

She knew her life would never resemble a rerun of Sex and the City. Expensive clothes and shoes, fabulous parties with beautiful people and an endless string of handsome men weren’t her destiny.

But at least back in D.C., she’d been stylish and put together, making the most of her cute potential. She’d had a social life, with girlfriends and dates when she’d wanted them, and close family ties with her mother and sister. Shelly knew it would take some time to build a life here in Houston, but it was slower going than she’d expected.

Still living out of boxes, she was lucky to put together a shirt and pants that matched. This made it easy to fall into the collegelike culture of her fellow aerospace geeks. Rolling out of bed for shift work, she dressed in blue jeans and old T-shirts, and ate whatever fast food was available.

She was close with those on her engineering team—most of whom she’d brought with her from D.C.—and knew the affable group of guys couldn’t care less how she looked. But just once since she’d moved to Houston, she’d like to have a good-hair day.

Yesterday, out of a desperate need for a touch-up, she’d pulled off the highway and walked into a hair salon. She’d figured that with the name Lady of Color, she had a fighting chance of getting a stylist who could straighten her frizzled mess. She’d been right about one thing. The salon did specialize in African-American hair. Unfortunately, it didn’t specialize in doing it well.

Shelly’s hair had been bone straight when she left the salon yesterday, but that had lasted only until she walked through the thick, souplike humidity to her car this morning. By the time she’d driven to her office—with the windows down, because the air conditioner was broken—she’d looked like a wet poodle.

After two months and two containers of hair gel, Shelly had been looking forward to sporting something other than a bun or an unruly ponytail. No such luck. Thanks to the emergency gel she’d retrieved from the trunk of her car and the wide rubber band from her desk drawer, she was back to her perpetual bad-hair-day look.

In fact, it was looking as if it was going to be a bad day all the way around. In the dark monitor of her computer, which she was rebooting for the third time, she saw the reflection of a thunderstorm headed her way. Actually, it was Lightning. Lightning Ripley.

But she refused to use Lincoln Ripley’s self-indulgent nickname out loud. Shelly didn’t care how many engineers on her team suffered from hero worship. Or how often she heard women in the ladies’ room drooling over his chiseled features and rock-hard muscles. Shelly was convinced Ripley’s reputation was all hype.

By her estimation, he was a cocky, overconfident hotshot, channeling Will Smith in Independence Day. Ripley thought he was a hero destined to become a legend, and Shelly didn’t want any part of it.

Guardian Rescue Mission, or GRM, was her baby. Draco, the spacecraft, was her design. And she wasn’t going to let some ego-driven astronaut ruin the very thing her entire career and reputation were riding on.