Her Rebel Heart Page 14

  Not to a military pilot.

  Not to a man just off a breakup.

  Not to anyone, really.

  Feelings didn’t solve physics equations. Feelings wouldn’t get her tenure. Feelings didn’t improve her research habits or lecture style.

  Lance sat there, leaning over with his elbows on his knees, and waited.

  He’d tossed his clothes back on, though his T-shirt wasn’t tucked in. His video game system was still hooked up to her TV. And his dark brown eyes were twin orbs of interested, nonjudgmental questions.

  Unwelcome moisture stung her eyes again.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked.

  The arrogant flyboy was gone, and in his place was a simple man asking an honest question.

  She shook her head.

  He watched her, but for once, she couldn’t find the words she wanted.

  Or maybe she simply couldn’t find the courage.

  “Do you want me to leave?” he asked.

  She shook her head again.

  “No more rules, Kaci. You can talk. I won’t take my clothes off.”

  She couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed.

  The wise answer was probably neither, but she was leaning more toward both.

  He patted the couch. “Up for some Bama football?”

  The man was brilliant.

  Kaci tried to affect a snooty sniff. “Neither of our teams are playing today, and we both know it.”

  He flashed a grin, and the tension in her neck and shoulders eased. “Might catch some highlights.”

  She slowly approached the couch and curled into the opposite end. “Suppose I can watch some TV with you. Seeing as how you’d have to put up with your roommate if you went home.”

  He nodded gravely. “Nice of you to let me stay.”

  He didn’t push for more on why she’d run away, but he was doing that Lance thing again.

  Just being there.

  Accepting her.

  Acting like he still wanted to know her.

  Kaci didn’t have room in her life for a relationship, and sweet baby gingerbread knew Lance probably wasn’t in a love-and-commitment place either, but that just made them fit better.

  For now.

  * * *

  Lance showed up in the squadron room Monday morning feeling off-center. He hadn’t slept well, and he didn’t want to pinpoint why.

  “Colonel’s looking for you,” Pony said when Lance dropped his bag at his desk.

  The commander’s door was closed, so Lance flung himself into his seat and took a minute to log in to his email. “Say why?”

  “Need to know, and apparently I don’t.” Pony’s chair squeaked when he swung it around to face Lance. “Heard you got some arrangement with the blond professor chick.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Want my keg, dude.” He swung back to his own desk. “And your head better be in the game when we leave.”

  Lance had four weeks. By then, he would’ve seen Kaci through her fear of flying, let her touch his catapult, they’d have had their date, had sex a few more times, and he’d be fine.

  “Wheeler.” Lieutenant Colonel Santiago stuck his head out of his office. “Got a minute?”

  Lance dutifully followed him into the standard-issue seventies-style office. Award plaques, signed squadron photos, and a military coin rack hung on the fabric-covered walls. Lance sat on the flat-cushioned chair across from the colonel and propped his flight boot over his knee.

  The colonel’s desk chair squeaked when the man sat. He pushed his keyboard out of the way, then kicked his feet up on the desk. “Ready for deployment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice of you to step in for Flincher.”

  “Like to think he’d do the same for any one of us.”

  Colonel Santiago inclined his head. “Juice Box working out?”

  Lance almost smiled. He’d discovered his roommate wasn’t so much horny as eager to fit in, and he thought being a man would get him there faster. “At home or here?”

  “Both.”

  “He’s figuring it all out. He’ll be fine.”

  “Seems you’re a good influence on him.”

  “Kid just needs a friend.”

  The colonel smiled a shark’s grin. The hairs on Lance’s arms stood up.

  “You heard we’re looking for a few good IPs,” Colonel Santiago said.

  Oh, hell no. Lance’s bags were packed. He wasn’t staying here to babysit kids younger than Juice Box while the rest of the guys went out on the mission.

  Hell, he wasn’t staying here period. “Sir, with all due respect, I’ve done my time in the South. Like to see the rest of the country. The rest of the world.”

  “You want to run away.”

  “I want the experience I signed up for.”

  “Since the fiancée’s out of the picture.”

  “Life changes. Have to change with it.”

  “You’re a damn fine officer and an even better pilot. That hasn’t changed. So what are you going to do for your country?”

  Aw, fuck.

  “Been watching you with the young guys,” Lieutenant Colonel Santiago continued. “They look up to you.”

  “So I need to be out there doing my job.”

  “Your job could be here, making sure the guys you’ll be flying with for the next fifteen years are getting the best training they can get. Spend three years in the training squadron, you’ll get your pick of assignments after. Italy, Germany, Hawaii…anywhere.”

  Lance swallowed the “no fucking thank you” trying to make its way out.

  Two problems with the colonel’s scenario.

  First, it would take him off the mission. No deployments. No front line.

  More time stuck here in that house he’d bought for Allison, three hours from home, six hours from his first squadron. Much as he still loved Bama football, he was ready to see something new, to be somewhere new. Maybe to be someone new.

  Second, the colonel said fifteen years as though that was as long as Lance would last.

  Wasn’t any way in hell he was planning on serving his twenty and getting out. He’d damn well stay in until he had as many stars on his shoulders as the Air Force would give him, and the stars wouldn’t come until he’d been in at least twenty-five.

  But that was only if he was out there, on the front line, doing the mission year in and year out.

  Three years here in the training squadron?

  Might not be career suicide, but it was damn close.

  And a cushy overseas or tropical follow-on assignment wouldn’t change that.

  “With all due respect, sir—”

  “Think it over, Captain. Got a couple weeks to get your paperwork in if you want to volunteer.”

  “I don’t need a couple weeks.”

  “Take them anyway.”

  Lance might be stubborn, but he wasn’t stupid, and the colonel didn’t want to hear no this morning.

  Fine.

  Lance could tell him no just as easily next week.

  And because the Air Force was the Air Force, they could just as easily tell him too bad, he had to do it anyway.

  The colonel dismissed him with a twinkle in his eye. “And go see your girlfriend,” he said. “I hear she’s an inspiring teacher.”

  He was going to break Juice Box’s neck. “Don’t have a girlfriend, sir.”

  “Then go see whoever she is.” He flicked a hand toward the door.

  Conversation over.

  Out in the squadron room, he got a few curious stares, but he ignored them all.

  He needed to call Cheri. She’d done a stint as an instructor pilot right out of undergrad flight training, and she’d gotten her choice of airplanes afterward and a near-guarantee of a thirty-year career. Being offered an IP job now, as opposed to right out of pilot training, apparently implied a cushy chance to kick back and count on retiring ten years earlier than planned.

  The Air
Force might still tap him to do IP duty, but damn if he’d volunteer for it.

  Still, later that afternoon, he still found himself on the James Robert campus, strolling through the main physics building to the musty lecture hall.

  He slipped into the back of the room unnoticed.

  Odd. When he was an undergrad, the back rows had always had a smattering of people in them.

  In Kaci’s lecture, the whole class was no farther back than halfway.

  She stood down front, facing the side wall while she hung a stuffed pink pig on a string connected to a pulley. Her voice carried without the aid of a microphone. In fact, he wasn’t certain the room was even equipped for a microphone. They were old-school here.

  Instead of her usual sassy twang, she spoke with a confident authority. Still Southern, but not redneck. He’d noticed the same authority, though her voice had been more relaxed when she’d been with her student last week. And though Lance couldn’t see her students’ faces today, he recognized the posture.

  Leaning in. Interested. Not sleeping.

  Some took notes, mostly on their electronic devices but a few on paper notepads.

  Kaci was making gravity the most fascinating concept in the world.

  Impressive skill.

  Too bad she was afraid to fly. Half the guys who showed up for C-130 training were disappointed they hadn’t gotten fighters. Needed that fire lit under them to love their birds the way Lance did.

  He tugged at his collar and sank lower in his seat, letting Kaci pull him out of his own thoughts.

  She yanked the pig up until it was at the top of the pulley, about twenty feet in the air, with a red laser dot centered on it.

  The dot, he realized, was coming from the laser scope mounted on a crossbow on the table. He smothered a grin behind his hand.

  She was going to shoot a stuffed pink pig in her classroom. A pink pig identical to the one sitting on the bar at Pony’s man cave.

  “Who wants to tell me what’s going to happen when we fire this crossbow?” she said.

  “It’ll miss,” said a girl up front.

  “Why?”

  “Gravity.”

  The door opened behind him. Three older men in slacks and button-downs entered and took seats across the aisle. Two women hovered in the doorway. “Has she shot it yet?” one whispered.

  “I don’t think so,” the other whispered back.

  The dark-haired one was vaguely familiar—had she been with Kaci on trivia night?—and he was almost certain the short-haired one was the department secretary. She’d helped him get into Kaci’s office to deliver his offer.

  “She’s insane,” one of the men across the aisle muttered to his colleagues.

  “Can’t believe she’s going to Germany,” another added. “What the hell were they thinking?”

  Lance curled his fingers around the armrests. He’d endured years of lectures from Cheri about letting her fight her own battles since they both signed up for ROTC in college. About letting her earn her respect without interference.

  Still, he glared at the three dudes until the chubby, balding one who’d called Kaci insane noticed him. “She’s fucking brilliant,” Lance said.

  The older man gave him a once-over. “Who are you?”

  “Just a guy interested in basic physics.” He jerked his head toward Kaci. “Best lecture I’ve ever seen.”

  “You enrolled here?” the second dude said.

  “He’s here on a cooperative effort with the base, working to bring attention to STEM careers,” the secretary interjected. “It’s a community outreach project.”

  First Lance had heard of it, but sure. “Heard this was the best lecture to get started with,” he said.

  “If you like train wrecks,” the third muttered.

  “Wasn’t a train wreck until you walked in,” Lance muttered back.

  Assholes.

  Kaci pointed to the girl who’d said the crossbow wouldn’t hit the pig. “Jess, come on up and do the honors.”

  The girl jumped up. She had her hair tucked into a baseball cap, and she was wearing a Dr. Who T-shirt. Kaci leaned into her, pointing to various things on the crossbow, then stepped back.

  Jess fired.

  The arrow thudded into a strip of Styrofoam on the wall four feet below the stuffed pig.

  Several students clapped. A few groaned. Some kid called out, “You shoot like a girl.”

  Kaci strung the crossbow and pointed. “All right, Blake. You come do better.”

  Lance picked the kid out by the way his friends jostled him and jeered.

  But Blake didn’t move.

  “Come on up,” Kaci said again.

  “I was just kidding, Dr. Boudreaux.”

  Kaci took up a perch on the table, ankles crossed, legs swinging. “It’s funny to mock your classmates for their gender?”

  The room went deadly silent.

  “I’m a physicist, not a biologist,” she continued, “but above all, I’m a scientist. And this idea of gender differences fascinates me. Scientifically, can you elaborate on why having a penis might make a person better able to shoot a crossbow?”

  The kid shook his head.

  “Sounds like some interesting research, doesn’t it?”

  A muffled groan went up among the students.

  “Anyone who can scientifically prove to me that having a penis directly correlates to superior crossbow proficiency gets an A for the semester,” Kaci said. “In the meantime, this classroom will be a safe and welcoming learning environment for everyone who enters that door regardless of age, race, gender, religion, sexuality, or any other discriminatory factor. Understood?”

  Murmurs of, “Yes, Dr. Boudreaux,” echoed off the walls.

  She hopped off the table. “Can someone tell me how we’re going to impale this pig today?”

  “This is way better than last year’s pig-impaling day,” the secretary whispered.

  “Y’all must like this lecture,” Lance said to the three men across the aisle. “You come every year too?”

  None of them acknowledged him, but the loudest of the group left.

  The dark-haired woman took the seat beside him. She leaned in to whisper softly so only he could hear. “Dr. Asshole is on the tenure committee.”

  Lance didn’t know much about academics, but he figured that was a bad sign for Kaci.

  “If she makes it to Germany for this conference, she’d basically have to be tossed in jail for some kind of heinous crime before they could deny her tenure. She’s eligible to go before the board in another two years.” She leaned back and crossed her arms. “So make sure she goes,” she said softly.

  He nodded.

  Wasn’t his fight.

  But he liked Kaci. And she was good at her job. Also, considering his job depended on the laws of physics, it was technically in his best interest to make sure the people designing those planes had the best education possible.

  Just as it was in Uncle Sam’s best interest to make sure every pilot flying one of his birds was as well-trained and motivated as he or she could be.

  Lance’s gut tightened.

  He didn’t want to stay in Georgia. Didn’t want to give up his deployments.

  He shouldn’t have come here this afternoon.

  Up front, Kaci moved to the whiteboard. “Okay, we’ll try it this way,” she said. “How are we going to calculate where to aim to compensate for gravity?”

  The second man across the aisle left.

  Kaci flicked a glance in their direction when she turned to face her students, and a glimmer of a smug smile crossed her features.

  The third older dude across the aisle looked at Lance. “You’re right,” he said. “She’s damn good.”

  “And he’s not on the tenure committee,” Kaci’s friend murmured.

  Twenty minutes later, the kids had figured out a better way to impale the pig that didn’t involve any equations at all, and Jess walked away with a holey pig as a souvenir.


  The last dude left along with the two women. Kaci stuck around answering individual questions, but eventually, the last student hightailed it out of the lecture hall too.

  Kaci leaned back against her table, arms crossed, and waited until Lance reached the front of the lecture hall. “If you’re fixin’ to start a fight, I don’t have a lick of care left in me,” she said.

  He pulled a small box from his pocket and popped it open. “Still owe me some ring disposal.”

  She eyed the box with Allison’s one-point-five carat, princess-cut diamond engagement ring and the two simple his-and-hers wedding bands that went with it, then lifted her gaze to his face.

  “That’s all you want?”

  Not nearly. But it was all he could ask for. And if he had to be stuck here at Gellings, shutting a few more doors on what should’ve been his life with Allison was a good step. “Yep.”

  “Huh.” Her redneck side visibly glimmered to life in that smile. “Let me get all this cleaned up. If Miss Higgs is doing okay, I got an idea where we can go.”

  God help him, he was irrationally excited to find out what she had in store. “Great lecture,” he said while she shooed him away from the crossbow.

  “More fun than cherry bombs in a barrel of fish guts,” she said.

  Had any other woman said that, he might’ve laughed. But this was Kaci, and the probability that she’d actually done it was too high. “Have you tossed cherry bombs in a barrel of fish guts?”

  “Sugar, if you don’t know the answer to that question, you ain’t half as observant as I give you credit for.”

  He was ninety percent sure that was a yes. “Was this sometime in the last few months, or were you significantly younger?”

  She grinned. “Bless your heart, you don’t really think I’m gonna tell you all my secrets, do you?”

  “Your mother drank a lot, didn’t she?”

  “Beauty queens don’t drink. They sip.” She dropped the crossbow in a box behind the table and gathered the rest of her things. “But this former Miss Grits is getting ready to school you in something called closure. You ready?”

  He honestly didn’t think he needed closure, but if Kaci was taking him on a field trip to redneck land, he was all in. “Absolutely.”