Space in His Heart Read Online Free

had started when she got off the plane in this
swamp didn’t start forming a puddle around her feet.
    Stuart Rosen, bless him, immediately closed
the meeting with assurance that the kinks in the program would be
worked out. As the room emptied, Jessica took a chance that Stuart
was truly the good guy the Washington-based NASA account team had
promised when she had accepted this hellacious assignment. Your
idea, your job, Tony had said.
    As if she’d had a choice.
    “Stuart,” she said, tapping papers into a
manila file, “couldn’t you have warned the poor man ahead of time
that he’d been hand-picked to be the next household
heartthrob?”
    Humor twinkled in Stuart’s warm eyes. “And
ruin that classic NASA moment?” At her flabbergasted look, he
laughed. “Just kidding. In all seriousness, I thought Colonel Price had told him. We’d better go see our fearless leader right
now.”
    She eyed the burly, slightly balding man who
would now be her daily client contact. She had only met him a few
minutes earlier, when she arrived at Kennedy Space Center for her
first meeting to brief NASA’s public affairs team on the plan.
She’d been uneasy at the sight of so many people at the
presentation, but Stuart had assured her this was standard
procedure.
    “Then you might have warned me he’d be
lurking up in the cheap seats.”
    “Didn’t your colleagues at the agency let you
in on the NASA secret, Jessica?” He smiled and shrugged. “Brilliant
engineers. Lousy communicators.”
    “I don’t know about that. Commander Stockard
certainly made himself clear.” Jessica turned to the image of a
larger-than-life astronaut that still burned on the screen.
    The blurred photo really didn’t do him
justice. It didn’t capture the intensity of eyes so blue they were
downright navy. It certainly didn’t reveal his power or the way he
could slash a person with a few words. Mesmerized, she had been
barely able to breathe, let alone look away from him while he
ranted about explorers and telescopes and terrorism.
    “If he has the same effect on the women of
America,” she muttered, “we could actually pull this off.”
    And that, Jessica reminded herself as she
removed his image with a single click of her laptop’s mouse, was
really the only thing that mattered. Complete success if she had a
snowball’s chance of preserving everything she’d worked for years
to achieve. Her whole world basically hung in the balance, and she
wasn’t about to let some astronaut with an attitude tip the
scales.
    A few minutes later, Stuart and Jessica stood
in the lobby outside James D. Price’s office. She squeezed the
leather strap of her briefcase and studied a dramatic oil painting
of a space shuttle poised for launch. A metal plate captioned the
picture with five words.
    Failure is not an option .
    No kidding. She simply couldn’t go back to
Boston a failure. She’d rather take on all of NASA, including the
insolent Commander Stockard, than lose her shot at the highest rung
of the ladder she’d been climbing. Much as she hated leaving home
and the visibility she needed as she vied for the top job in
Boston, this was the biggest opportunity she’d ever have to prove
herself to management. Nothing—make that no one—would ruin it for
her.
    Stuart leaned closer and spoke in a hushed
tone, “By the way, our boss is retired Air Force, but everyone
still calls him Colonel.”
    She nodded in understanding.
    “We don’t want to waste his time,” Stuart
continued. “So please go straight into your agency’s backup
plan.”
    “Backup plan?” Jessica squared her shoulders
and turned to face Stuart. She had a cardinal rule in business and
it served her well: pick your battles.
    This one was worth fighting.
    Plus, they had no flipping backup plan.
    “I promise you we have a winner here.
Commander Stockard is exactly what we need to make this work.”
Jessica thought about the force of his penetrating gaze, his
classically handsome