Cosmic Rendezvous. Robyn Amos

beneath those layers of makeup.

      Trying to keep up his spirits, he led his date into the living room. “The problem is that we don’t have any food in the house. Do you mind if we order pizza or something?”

      “Pizza?” she said, curling her lip in derision. “Why don’t we get my favorite French restaurant in the city to cater dinner?”

      Linc gritted his teeth. He just wasn’t in the mood for all that fuss. He also wasn’t in the mood for rich food, an expensive bill, and the huge amount of time it would take to get a delivery to his ranch from downtown Houston.

      Anisa seemed to read the look on his face. “You don’t like that idea, do you?”

      He gave her a sheepish nod. “I’m afraid it might be more hassle than I’m up for tonight. If you don’t want pizza, how about Chinese or Mexican food?”

      Her lip curled again. “How about I call some girlfriends and hit that French restaurant downtown, and you crawl into bed and get some rest?”

      Linc’s first heartfelt smile of the night broke out. “I think that may be for the best. I’m absolutely exhausted.”

      “I’ll take a rain check,” Anisa said as she headed for the door.

      Linc nodded, kissing her on the cheek, even though they both knew that check would never be cashed.

      Shelly noticed a significant change in her relationship with Linc over the course of the week. After her conversation with her sister, Shelly couldn’t help feeling a bit embarrassed and ashamed of herself. On top of that, now that she’d opened her mind to seeing him without bias, she was starting to admire him.

      Yes, she could now be counted among his silent groupies. Worse still, she’d started appreciating his confident but graceful strut, and the way his flight suit conformed to his leanly muscled body. She’d even caught herself studying his chiseled profile when no one was looking.

      As a result of this confounding development, she avoided Linc as much as she could. She laid out the training parameters and supervised the overall exercises, but when one-on-one contact was required, she used members of her engineering team as go-betweens.

      Linc made her life easy by following suit. The problem was that their mutual avoidance of each other hadn’t gone unnoticed.

      He sat at the back of the room when she was running briefings, he no longer publicly gibed her, and they sat at opposite ends of the table at lunch. By the end of the week, everyone seemed to have noticed the change.

      “What’s gotten into you and Lightning?” Quincy asked that Friday at lunch.

      A slight blue tint under Quincy’s eyes showed that he was tired, and his atypically rumpled shirt indicated that he was probably a bit stressed. Although those were common states for an engineer under a deadline, they never kept him from checking in on Shelly.

      She shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.”

      “I mean, at the beginning of the week, the two of you were at each other’s throats. Now you’re both acting like the other has the plague. Is there something going on between you two?”

      Shelly’s blood rushed to her cheeks. “Why would you leap to that conclusion?” she asked, hoping he couldn’t see the telltale reddening of her face. Had she suddenly become transparent? Could Quincy look right through her and see that her heart had changed toward Linc?

      She’d die of embarrassment if anyone guessed how much Lincoln Ripley was getting under her skin. She felt like her libido had betrayed her brain by falling prey to his good looks.

      The humbling truth was that she was just a typical woman. One who responded to bulging biceps, chocolate-brown eyes and a sexy voice.

      But in defense of her brain, he was also getting to her on a higher level. At the start of the week, she’d seen Linc as just a pretty boy who’d gotten lucky on a shuttle mission and was riding that success onto Draco. Now, at the end of one full week of training, she knew his reputation had been hard earned. Linc had smoked flight simulator records from day one. Those lightning fast reflexes—they weren’t a myth. Despite her pride, she had to acknowledge, Lincoln Ripley was the real thing.