It was an all-consuming passion, one that had cost her two good men and many more friends. She didn't regret the loss. The lovers and the friends wanted too much of her time, time taken away from the left seat. Cal wasn't the only man she'd ever been with who understood that, but he was the only one who was, so far, willing to accept it as part of the price of her companionship.

It was also the Challenger. It wasn't something she talked about a lot because the few times she had she'd received some very odd looks. It wasn't that she wanted to ride a rocket and have it explode beneath her. She didn't suffer from a death wish, she had every intention of living to be as old as she possibly could and then tack on another twenty-five years to read all the books she'd missed when she'd been focused on technical manuals. It was that the Challenger had left shoes to fill, and her feet itched to step into them.

Her father had been all for her applying to the astronaut program. Her mother, a stay-at-home mom, had never quite forgiven her for embracing such a dangerous occupation, especially since she was an only child, but she loved Kenai and supported her nevertheless. She had no family distractions, and after her two abortive attempts at romance no relationship distractions, either.

Sometimes she worried a little that she was turning into a drone. But mostly she was excited and challenged by her profession, a siren song that lured her, enticed her, charmed her, enslaved her. Call it the call to adventure. The Power of Myth had been assigned reading in her modern lit class. She'd liked it well enough, but one thing she had never understood, either in the text or in any of the subsequent novels they read and applied it to, and that was the hero's refusal of the call. She could not conceive of a day when adventure called and she wasn't the first to step up to answer.

Although the month Sheik Jilal al-Hussein spent with the Carnivore Crew did test her resolve. He seemed to take space travel as his birthright, a privilege that required no reciprocal sweat equity. He was by turns dismissive, contemptuous, and downright rude, and always and ever arrogant. He questioned everything, from the shuttle emergency escape procedures to how to work the toilet, which, to be fair, was a procedure that tested them all. He demanded a list of the food items that went into their on-orbit menu, searching the ingredients for pork products, and he looked mutinous at the news that he would have to hang his sleep sack mere feet away from two female infidels, neither of whom were his wives.

The less said about his delayed ride on the Vomit Comet, the better. He refused to go on a second, for which the test director of the Reduced Gravity Program sent the Carnivore Crew his profound thanks.

"The Reduced Gravity Program?" Cal said, grinning.

"NASA-speak for riding simulated weightlessness maneuvers in the KC-135."

"At which the sheik did not perform well?"

"At which the sheik outpuked Barfin' Jake Garn. We v/ere all kinda hoping he'd make himself too sick to ride. If he's that seasick on orbit, it's going to be seriously uncomfortable for all of us, even Rick, who's been up twice and never been sick."

Cal understood. In rough weather on Munro, all it took was the smell of one seasick crewman to infect his entire berthing area. "Who picked this guy anyway?" Cal said.

"We're launching his company's satellite." Kenai's voice was muffled, speaking as she was from a prone position on the sand. Cal was anointing her back with sunscreen, paying deliberate attention to every square inch of exposed flesh. Every now and then she let out an appreciative groan.

Munro was at the dock in Miami under Taffy's watchful eye. They had both managed to wedge a free weekend into their schedules, and Cal 's father had a friend whose brother-in-law knew someone who owned a luxury condo on South Padre Island who was more than happy to loan it to the senator's son for a weekend. Probably there was a legislative trade-off involved but that was his father's business and the less Cal knew about it the better. At any rate it was the end of the month, almost the end of the season, and the beach was almost deserted.

Kenai had temporarily handed the sheik off to Wolverine, who accepted the assignment with suspicious enthusiasm. Bill was a superb pilot, probably the best one in their class of astronauts-even the other pilots said so-and Kenai had a feeling that the sheik was on for his training ride in the backseat of a T-38. She hoped for Bill's sake it didn't prove as stressful as the Vomit Comet. "When's your next patrol?"

"We're scheduled to leave November fourth. Probably be a week or two after that."

"Sounds like a shuttle launch."

He laughed. "It's a forty-year-old ship. Lots of moving parts that weren't necessarily designed to work together. I've got a good engineer officer this time around, and he's determined we're not leaving the dock until all systems are go."

"Good for him."

"And then of course the crew has to get their grocery shopping done."

"You don't feed them?"

"We feed them, and we feed them pretty well, but three months is a long time. Comfort food gets you through it."

She raised her head. "What's your comfort food?"

He ran a suggestive fingertip down her spine. "Hmm, well-"

This time she laughed, and tucked her face back into her arm. "Given my absence," she said, her voice muffled.

"Good tortillas. Corn, not flour. I don't know where he gets them, but Senior orders in these huge green flour tortillas and makes wraps out of them."

"You don't like wraps?"

"I don't like green tortillas."

"Eyew. I don't blame you."

"I make chips out of the ones I buy. As long as the tomatoes and the cilantro last I make salsa to go with them. Guac if we have avocadoes."

"You go down to the galley?"

"I've got my own. Didn't I show you?"

She'd only been on Munro once, the first time they'd met. By mutual agreement, after that they had met away from both of their worksites. They'd met at her house in Houston, where the astronaut corps had press avoidance down to a fine art, and at his rented penthouse suite in Miami, where the security was as expensive and thorough as his trust fund could make it. He had agreed to borrow his father's Lear for a trip to Alaska after his next patrol and her first deorbital burn, but she had yet to tell her parents she was dating someone again and Cal had yet to bring anyone home. From the outside this might have seemed a little paranoid, but they were both people who valued their privacy. They were also the both of them a little spooked to find someone who fit this well this late in the game, and there was an unspoken agreement not to hex it by inviting anyone else in. They were both grimly aware that the first paparazzi who scored a photo of Senator David Tecumseh Schuyler's fair-haired boy snuggling up to NASA payload specialist Kenai Munro would be set for life.

"What's the mission for this patrol?" she said.

Unseen by her, he made a face. "The usual. Intercepting drug smugglers."

"What happened to that boatload of migrants you picked up on your way in?"

"Repatriated. Immediately. We dropped them at the dock at Port-au-Prince."

"Harsh, after what they went through to get to America."

"At least they lived. They can try again."

She raised her head. "You sound like you're sorry you caught them."

He shrugged and capped the bottle of sunblock. "It's my job. It's what I get paid for. If I don't like it, I can get another."

Her brown eyes were steady on his face. "And if it weren't?"

He stretched out on the towel. "Then, hell yes, let 'em in. They spent their life savings on passage to America, looking for a better life. Nothing our ancestors didn't do, it's why we're here. Those folks on that freighter, they suffered for the chance, bled for it." He thought of the little girl falling overboard when the freighter started to roll. "Some of them died for it. Who the hell am I to bar the door? Who knows what that kind of single-minded drive and determination and willingness to sacrifice would bring to the United States?" He took a swig from his beer. "My father's successor could have been on that boat. We'll never know now."