Katherine Garbera - Beyond the Limits

“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.

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