swallowed hard. It still was.
How could a man she hadn’t seen in thirteen years be the one person who knew her that well?
“Ride,” she said.
“Good choice. Meet you at the stables in ten?”
She nodded and walked away from him. She didn’t think as she changed into her favorite pair of jeans and her cowboy boots. She pulled her hair into a ponytail and walked out into the night.
* * *
THE STABLES HADN’T changed since he’d first visited them as a teenager. The barn was big and cavernous, the scent of hay and sweet corn welcoming him as he stepped inside. There was a narrow aisle between the horses’ stalls. Mick’s horse, Rowdy—named after a TV character from a Western Mick had watched in his youth—had always had the first stall.
As a teen, Ace hadn’t really appreciated being sent from Houston to some ranch out in the middle of nowhere. It had felt like the punishment it was meant to be. And he’d been just bratty and angsty enough to act like an ass for the first three months he’d been at the Bar T Ranch. But Mick kept giving him chores and allowed him the distance he needed to wake up and figure out that he’d made a mess of his life and that he was the only one who could fix it.
He walked past all of the hands’ horses before he came to the few horses Mitch kept for visitors. He saddled one with the name Carl on its stall door. Then he found Molly’s horse in the second stall. Molly had always used the stall next to her father’s. And while it housed a different horse than he remembered, the wood-burned sign she’d made when she was fifteen still hung outside the door.
He heard Molly’s footsteps behind him and turned to face her. He regretted leaving his bedroom when he’d heard her in the hall. She was a complication. Someone he’d never figured out how to deal with. Even from his moody, teenaged perspective there had been something about Molly Tanner that had made him want her.
“I saddled your horse,” he said.
“Thanks.” She took Thunder’s reins and led him to the mounting block.
Ace watched the way she moved. The long easy strides that made her hips sway with each step. The denim fabric of her jeans as it pulled tight around her thighs when she mounted the horse. She settled into the saddle and then glanced over her shoulder at him. Her chestnut hair was pulled up in a high ponytail and he couldn’t take his eyes off the long sweep of her neck.
“You coming, Jason?”
He nodded. NASA trusted him with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and paid him for his opinion and his thoughts, but at this moment he knew he wasn’t worth a dime. He was speechless watching this cowgirl in her element. She was at home here. Even if something happened and God forbid she lost the ranch, Molly would know who she was.
He’d never felt fully himself until he’d been above the Earth, the blue planet so beautiful at a distance and the rest of the universe spread out before him. If he was permanently grounded because of his health...who would he be? It was his goal to be part of the Cronus test missions, but that might be out of reach now.
Cronus wasn’t an acronym for anything. All of the NASA missions were named for Greek gods and Cronus had been chosen for this program because he’d fallen from the sky and started a civilization on Earth, according to mythology. Many were hoping the Cronus missions and the Mars manned missions would do the same for that planet.
Before Ace had gone up to the ISS for a year, Dennis Lock, Deputy Program Manager for the Cronus mission, and Dr. Lorelei Tomlin, the team medic, had designed a fitness routine to get him ready for the long-term mission program and to see if they could counteract the expected impact of spending a year outside the Earth’s gravitational field.
He’d had very little spinal-fluid loss, which was the result they had been hoping for, and he’d recovered relatively quickly from the standard loss in muscle mass, but the bone-density loss he’d suffered—and the raised calcium levels in his blood that came with it—continued to be a concern. At his medical exam Doc Tomlin had been as upset as Ace was by the unusually slow rate of improvement. He’d taken a leave to see if being away from Johnson Space Center and a different, off-site exercise regimen would help.
Osteopenia had the power to end the part of his career he loved most—actually being up in space. Something he wasn’t ready for. He was determined to beat this any way he could.
He mounted Carl, and Molly touched her heels to her horse’s sides and made a clicking sound, leading the way out of the barn.
The night was cool, not cold, and the sky was clear. Early May in south Texas wasn’t really hot yet, at least at night. For a minute he forgot about riding and just stared at the sky. His heart took a punch and he felt a sense of fear and loss. He had to be cleared for more missions.
“You okay?” she asked.
He thought seeing the stars would remind him of who he was, but it just emphasized what was at stake.
“Yeah,” he lied.
She loped along the fields past the grazing land where the cattle were kept, and he stopped thinking and just followed her.
Her ponytail flew out behind her head as she rode and it took all of his skill to keep up with her. Eventually he realized that Molly wasn’t riding with him. She was racing away from something.
Her dad.
He stopped trying to keep up and let her ride as hard and fast as she could. Even though he knew there was no running away from the ghosts that were carried in one’s soul.
Molly pulled up a few hundred feet in front of him and tipped her head back to the sky. He couldn’t help noticing again how long and slender her neck was. Everything about her body was sleek and elegant.
When he pulled up next to her, he noticed that her eyes were wide and wet.
“I forgot how much I love to ride at night,” she said.
“Me, too. It’s exhilarating.”
“It is. Thank you for this. I know you came here to figure out what to do with the ranch, not to deal with Mick’s hot mess of a daughter.”
“You’re not a hot mess,” he said. “I came back for you, too. We both have to decide what to do about this complicated legacy Mick left us.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “But not tonight.”
“Definitely not,” he agreed. “Where to now?”
She tipped her head back toward the stars again and he did the same. His breath caught as his eyes skimmed the sky finding what he was looking for. The International Space Station. Knowing where to look made it easy for him to spot it. He watched it moving slowly in orbit and thought of all the time he’d spent up there. He’d clocked more time than most of the other guys on his team.
“What are you looking at?”
“The space station,” he said.
“Where is it?”
He lifted his arm and pointed. “It’s in a slow moving orbit.”
“What’s it like up there?”
He shrugged. “Better men than me could probably put it into words. I just know up there...I’m free.”
“Like me when I’m riding,” she said, quietly.
He didn’t respond, just looked up at the sky, realizing he was going to do whatever he had to in order to get mission-ready again. He wasn’t done with that life. Not yet.
* * *
THEY GOT OFF their horses and left them to graze as they continued, walking. This was a side to Jason she didn’t know. In fact, there was a lot to the man she had no idea about. He’d been a boy when he left to go into the military and started on his path to becoming an astronaut.