Show Me

by Abigail Strom

  Airin had always accepted that her mother was a remarkable woman. After the death of her husband—naval aviator Frank Delaney—Dira had devoted her life to Frank’s lifelong dream: sending a human being to Mars.

  She’d started by putting her degrees in aeronautical engineering, electrical engineering, and applied physics to work. Partnering with two other scientists, she’d created an ultralight, extremely powerful rocket fuel that had the potential to revolutionize space travel. Her invention had other potential applications as well, including as a room-temperature superconductor that could transform energy production and storage here on Earth.

  Her first patent, granted years before in the field of nanowire technology, had already put her on the map as an energy innovator. But the new rocket fuel was an even bigger breakthrough. It made Dira Delaney one of the wealthiest women in America, and it enabled her to start her own privately held company. DelAres was accountable to no one but her, leaving her free to pour money into her pet project: sending a manned mission to Mars.

  A female Elon Musk.

  That was what the New York Times had called her in their profile a few years back.

  “They should call him the male Dira Delaney,” her mother had muttered when she saw the story.

  People who met Dira through work described her in many different ways. They said she was brilliant. Obsessed. A visionary. Ruthless. Airin was one of the only people in the world who had ever seen a different side of her. She’d seen a mother desperate about her daughter’s heart condition, at times frantic, despairing, enraged, and, in the end, humbly grateful for the course Airin’s treatment had taken.

  Airin knew the deep well of feeling that lay behind her mother’s very thick skin. But ever since the doctors had declared her last surgery to be a complete success—and Airin herself to be completely recovered—her mother’s two sides had been merging into one. Airin was seeing more and more of the scientist and businesswoman and less and less of the mother.

  At first, she’d thought Dira might be preparing herself emotionally to let her sheltered daughter finally experience the world. But over the course of the last few months, it had become clear that the opposite was true. Dira was still determined to protect her. This time, though, her desire was fueled by all her ruthless efficiency and unrelieved by any softer emotions.

  Softer emotions.

  For some reason, the phrase made her think of Hunter. As a sudden, overwhelming memory of their kiss in the alley flooded her, she gripped her fork hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Hunter was a guy she’d met at a bar. It was the kind of thing that happened to normal women all the time, and it had finally happened to her.

  But normal women didn’t make a single sensual experience the center of their lives.

  What she was feeling now wasn’t just about Hunter. It wasn’t just about the romance she hadn’t experienced in her twenty-four years.

  It was about the life she hadn’t experienced.

  “I want to talk about grad school again,” she said abruptly.

  She’d attended college from home. Her mother had negotiated a special arrangement with MIT, and she’d earned her degree—a double major in biology and computer science—remotely. Dira insisted she could get a graduate degree the same way.

  Maybe she could, if she wanted to pursue computer science. That was a field that lent itself to distance learning. Biology, though, had been much more challenging. And a field like medicine—which was at the top of her interest list right now—would be impossible to study remotely.

  Her mother, of course, had different ideas about her future.

  “Have you thought more about software engineering?”

  Airin shook her head.

  Her mother’s lips tightened. “If you’re still considering that absurd idea of becoming a doctor . . .”

  “It’s not absurd.”

  Dira used her crisp white linen napkin to wipe an invisible crumb from the corner of her mouth. Then she laid the napkin precisely in the center of her plate and rose to her feet.

  “I don’t care to have this conversation right now, Airin. I hope you enjoy yourself while I’m gone. I’m leaving Thomas here to . . .”

  “Babysit me?”

  Thomas was one of her mother’s assistants, but he’d started out as a bodyguard. Dira trusted him implicitly. Airin did, too, but that didn’t mean she wanted him dogging her movements like a Secret Service agent.

  A single line appeared between her mother’s arching brows. “Protect you. And, of course, assist you with anything you may need during my absence.”

  Of course.

  She’d learned long ago to pick her battles, and this one didn’t seem worth fighting right now.

  “I hope you have a good trip, Mom.”

  Dira nodded. “Thank you. All indications suggest that I will.”

  Airin spent the morning researching medical schools online and the afternoon swimming in the ocean. The ubiquitous Thomas, a decent guy who probably wished he could do something more valuable with his time than chaperone his boss’s daughter, was thankfully out of sight during both of those activities. She locked the door to her suite while she did her online research, and in the ocean she could feel alone even surrounded by people—including Thomas, who watched her like a private lifeguard as she dove and swam and floated in the Pacific.

  She opted to go to bed early. Hours of sun and sea had left her deliciously tired, and between that and a really comfortable bed she expected to drop off within seconds of her head hitting the pillow. Her windows were all open, and a cool, salt-tinged breeze wafted through the room. It was a perfect night for sleeping.

  But as she lay with her eyes closed and the covers up to her chin, she felt more and more awake with every passing moment.

  Finally she gave up. She threw off the covers and rearranged her pillows, leaning back against them with her arms wrapped around her shins.

  The windows showed a star-filled sky above a wine-dark sea. She stared out at the night with her chin on her knees, wondering where Hunter was right now.

  Caleb’s wedding had been that afternoon, she remembered. The reception would probably go on into the wee hours.

  She bet they were having fun. All three of those guys had been fun, and Caleb was such a sweetheart she was sure the guests at his wedding would be the kind she’d want to spend time with.

  The thought of laughing, happy people—normal people—celebrating a wedding made her feel wistful. Her mother didn’t enjoy weddings and rarely attended them, and the last one Dira had gone to had been for DelAres’s CFO. That had been two years ago, during a period when Airin had been hospitalized, and she hadn’t been able to go. The pictures she’d seen afterward had made her wish she’d been there, if only so she could’ve reminded her mother to smile a little more often.

  There’d been a time when Dira Delaney had smiled a lot. Before her husband was killed, before her mother passed away, before her daughter was diagnosed with a heart condition.

  The day Airin experienced her first episode of tachycardia, Dira had been smiling like a sunrise. They all were. They were at Cape Canaveral to watch a NASA shuttle launch, and aviator Frank and engineer Dira were explaining the experience to their nine-year-old daughter. She hadn’t really needed the information to appreciate the coolness of a rocket launch, but information had always been her parents’ first language.

  “The hardest part of a space journey is breaking away from Earth’s gravity,” Frank told her as they waited for the countdown to begin. “A craft leaving the surface of our planet needs to travel at seven miles per second, or nearly twenty-five thousand miles per hour, to reach escape velocity. It takes a lot of fuel to generate that kind of speed, and fuel is heavy. The more fuel, the more weight, and the more thrust it takes to lift. A catch-22 we’ll need to solve if we really want to become a spacefaring species.”

  Dira was looking at the shut
tle on the launch pad. “Those astronauts are sitting on eighty-eight tons of rocket fuel right now,” she said. “It takes a special kind of crazy to do that.”

  “And a special kind of cool,” Frank added, squeezing Airin’s shoulders. “You think you’ve got enough crazy and enough cool to go into space, kiddo?”

  “Yes,” she said with complete confidence. She and her dad had decided long ago that she’d be the first human being to walk on Mars.

  “The project I’m working on now could be a possible solution,” Dira said, her thoughts turning to science. “If we can compress hydrogen to the point where it becomes a metal, it would conduct electricity even at low temperatures.”

  “But how could you turn a gas into a metal?” Airin asked.

  Frank grinned. “Your mom will figure it out. She’s an engineering badass.”

  Dira rolled her eyes at that, but she was smiling, too.

  That smile was the last thing Airin remembered before her life changed forever.

  It didn’t seem like a big deal at first. Her heart began to beat faster—that was all. But then it was beating faster and faster and faster, until she was dizzy and gasping and terrified.

  The worst part was seeing her terror reflected in her parents’ faces before she finally blacked out.

  A week later, they had a diagnosis and a treatment plan.

  The diagnosis had been the easy part. Wolff-Parkinson-White, all the doctors agreed—also known as WPW syndrome.

  In a normal heart, an electrical signal starts near the top and travels through a pathway across the entire muscle, causing it to squeeze and pump blood through the body. In a person with WPW, there’s an abnormal extra pathway. If the electrical signal follows that pathway, the heart short-circuits and beats much faster than it should. This can cause dizziness, fainting, and in rare cases, sudden death.

  Treatment, they were told, depended on the severity of the condition. Sometimes medicine could take care of the problem. They tried that first, and for a while it seemed like her condition was under control.

  Until it wasn’t anymore.

  The next step was to try radiofrequency catheter ablation. That was a procedure where a surgeon threaded wires along her blood vessels, from her inner thigh all the way to her heart, to disconnect the extra pathway. They were told this was almost always effective . . . unless there was more than one abnormal pathway. Then the ablation had to be performed again.

  And again.

  By this point in her treatment, her father had stopped talking about her becoming an astronaut. He stopped talking about Mars, too. He spoke instead about heart-healthy diets, exercise, and physical therapy programs. Her mother made the decision to pull her out of school so they could better control her environment, monitor her condition, and respond to the ever-more-frequent episodes of tachycardia.

  Being homeschooled was the first step toward an isolation that only grew worse after her father’s death. She and her mother retreated into their own private worlds of misery, and when they emerged, the dynamic between them had changed. Dira’s overriding mission now was to shelter and protect her daughter from anything that might harm her . . . which seemed to include the entire world.

  Doctors continued to discover abnormal pathways in her heart, and her tachycardia grew more severe. Finally, it developed into atrial fibrillation. When her heart rate reached six hundred beats a minute during one episode—and after multiple ablations had failed to solve the problem—the decision was made to perform open-heart surgery.

  During the months that led up to this procedure and the months after it, it felt like her mother controlled every molecule of air she breathed. Even after the doctors pronounced the surgery a complete success and her WPW syndrome completely cured, her mother had barely relented. It had taken a week of badgering to convince her to let Airin come to Hawaii.

  This trip was her first true taste of freedom in years. And then last night, with Hunter . . .

  No. If she started thinking about Hunter, she’d never get to sleep.

  She slid back down in bed, curling up on her side and closing her eyes. Hunter was participating in a biosphere project. He wouldn’t have any contact with the outside world for eight months. Thinking about him was an exercise in futility.

  There was, however, a solution to her thinking-about-Hunter problem. She needed to sneak out again. She had to prove to herself that her encounter with Hunter wasn’t the only interesting thing that would ever happen to her. Tomorrow night she’d make another expedition to Waikiki, and she might even try her hand at flirting.

  But as she tried to imagine herself talking to another man, his eyes were always hazel. And when she finally drifted into sleep, it was Hunter she dreamed of.

  Chapter Five

  Caleb’s wedding was like something out of a chick flick, designed to make men gag and women swoon. Jane was beautiful, the vows made Hunter tear up, and there was even a damn rainbow in the sky.

  He loved every minute of it.

  That had been yesterday. This morning, he’d driven Jane and Caleb to the airport. Now he was in Waikiki for one last hurrah, because tomorrow he was going inside a two-room Martian habitat for eight months, with seven other people for company.

  Forty-eight hours ago he’d celebrated Caleb’s last night of freedom. Tonight it was his turn.

  People asked him all the time how he would handle living in isolation for so long, eating freeze-dried food and drinking recycled urine and only going outdoors in a Mars suit. The truth was, he looked forward to it.

  Well, maybe not the recycled urine part. But the rest would be okay.

  He wasn’t claustrophobic. He could get along with just about anyone. And as long as he had a mission to focus on, one that was a stepping stone to his goal of walking on Mars, he could put up with anything.

  What he couldn’t handle was being aimless. He couldn’t take being a useless no-load with nothing to work toward. Going to Mars was the kind of goal he could sink his teeth into, and being part of the first manned mission would be worth any sacrifice.

  Humanity’s future lay in space exploration. And to be there at the beginning of that journey was all he’d ever wanted.

  Even so, spending eight months in a sealed biosphere was a hell of a thing. He deserved to give himself a sendoff. So here he was in Waikiki, footloose and fancy-free and ready to make the most of the next several hours.

  He couldn’t go too crazy, of course. The helicopter taking him to the Big Island was leaving at six o’clock in the morning. He’d given himself a midnight curfew and a one-drink limit, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy himself.

  Caleb and Jane were on their honeymoon. Stu was off God knew where with a girl he’d met at the wedding. There were a few other people on Oahu he could have partied with, but since both solitude and strangers would be in short supply for the next eight months, he decided to go out on his own.

  He parked in the Halekulani garage and started walking. He didn’t have a particular destination in mind; he just wanted to people watch and take in the sights.

  After a while, he recognized the block he was on. This was where he and Caleb and Stu had ended up two nights ago. Another few minutes brought him to Leilani’s, the bar where he’d met—

  Airin.

  He stopped short in front of the window. There she was, sitting on the same bar stool, having an animated discussion with the bartender.

  She was dressed very differently tonight. It looked like she’d gone shopping in her hotel’s boutique for resort wear or island wear or whatever they called it. She was wearing a gauzy floral dress with spaghetti straps and no back, and when he realized that probably meant she was wearing no bra, something happened in his body.

  Shit. He’d been telling himself to stop thinking about Airin for forty-eight hours now, and he hadn’t had much success until this afternoon, when thoughts about his upcoming mission had finally taken their rightful place at the forefront of his brain. And now
here she was in that dress.

  He swallowed hard. Blood was rushing to his groin, and every nerve ending in his body was on fire. Why the hell had he come back here? Why had she come back here?

  The only thing to do was turn his ass around and go somewhere else. Anywhere else. A last night of freedom before an eight-month mission was one thing, but going inside that bar and talking to that woman was something else.

  If he got pulled into her like he had two nights ago, it wouldn’t be good for his state of mind. What you wanted before a mission was a palate cleanser. A pleasant and forgettable distraction.

  There was nothing forgettable about Airin. His mystery woman had managed to get under his skin with one kiss, and spending time with her tonight was the last thing he should do.

  So why wasn’t he turning around? Why was he still standing here, staring through the window like a lovesick teenager?

  Danger, Will Robinson.

  Airin leaned forward to say something to Kaleo, and a lock of that satiny black hair fell forward across her face. She lifted a hand and tucked the strand behind her ear, and everything about that one simple movement mesmerized him.

  Her unconscious sensuality went straight to his cock. He remembered the way she’d responded to him two nights ago, as though their kiss really had been her first.

  He still wasn’t sure that was the truth. But standing here staring at her, unable to make his feet take him in the other direction, he knew he wanted her next kiss to come from him, too.

  Bad idea. Terrible idea. Get the hell out of here.

  But he would never know how that internal struggle might have played out. Because at that moment, something made Airin turn her head. She saw him, and her face lit up, and the sight went straight to another part of his body.

  His heart.

  She wasn’t even trying to play it cool. She was surprised and happy to see him, and both emotions showed on her face. And even though the smart move might still be to turn around and walk away, he just didn’t have it in him to do that.