Read Online Her Perfect Stranger by Jill Shalvis - Free Book Online Page A

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. "I hear what you're saying," she said, a bit unsettled by how that simple exchange could rattle her wits. "But these kids—middle school, not elementary—won a national contest in D.C. It was a publicity stunt, designed to bring the public's attention back to the space shuttle and the International Space Station in a positive way." That she personally agreed with her team—that they had far better uses for their very limited time in space—didn't matter. Her hands were tied. She had no choice. "We have to do this. The president promised we would." "Commander, surely he could—" She shook her head at Jimmy, hating that she couldn't find her cool, purposeful calm with Mike sitting there watching her. This should be easy, persuading her team to do whatever she wanted them to do. She shouldn't feel their bitter disappointment in her inability to change the unchangeable. "The president personally asked NASA for this favor, and we agreed." "Yes, but when we agreed," Stephen pointed out, clearly annoyed, "it was before we knew about the additional time problems we were going to face, both in transport and on the station." As the payload specialist, he had viable concerns regarding the time constraints. Corrine knew this, which didn't make her tough stance any easier. The International Space Station, or ISS, had had its share of problems, the current and biggest being the defective solar panels already in place. Since astronauts were housed on the ISS on a permanent basis, repairing the problem was crucial. No one wanted to spend critical hours every day of their ten-day flight baby-sitting the students' projects, which included exposing seeds, hair, bread, hamburger and even bubble gum to the weightless environment of space to see if they were affected by the change in pressure, altitude or anything else. "We still hadn't figured out how to add the required replacement parts to our payload without crushing the original load," Jimmy said. "Much less allow time for the repairs Stephen has to perform." He lifted a troubled gaze to both Corrine and Mike, who as commander and pilot, together would run the ship. "We're running out of time." "Not to mention, maneuvering into the tight area of the ISS is going to take a miracle," Frank added. "Are you prepared for that? Prepared to tell the other countries in this mess with us that we couldn't figure it all out because we were too busy handling amateur science experiments?" "You don't understand the pressure NASA is under to have the public on side in this huge tax expense," Corrine said evenly. "The microgravity of space has become an important tool for developing new and sophisticated materials." She purposely didn't look at Mike, so she could let her famed iciness fill her voice. She was in charge here and had the final say, whether they liked it or not. "And