Her Rebel Heart Page 19

  Tara’s bright eyes narrowed. “That’s not fair. If I say I won’t help you, I’m a bad friend. If I say I will help you, we’re taking on a doomed mission. You can’t detach. Not if you’re already attached. And you are definitely attached. Kaci! You bought new underwear, didn’t you? Tell me you didn’t buy new underwear.”

  “I—”

  “You did.”

  “Online. I didn’t go to the store or anything. Click-and-buy doesn’t count as shopping. It might not even look good.”

  Tara gasped. “You bought lots of new underwear! Oh, honey. You’re going to do this, aren’t you?”

  Kaci’s phone dinged. She checked the display and didn’t even care that she knew a dopey smile was spreading over her face.

  So we’re clear—what exactly should I plan on wearing next weekend? Lance’s text said.

  Nothing you wouldn’t mind getting dirty, she replied.

  His answer came back almost immediately. So if I don’t mind getting my nothing dirty, I can wear that?

  Tara, who was snooping, growled. “This is not good, Kaci.”

  “You’re right.” Kaci typed an answer quickly. You sure you want to risk that?

  Knowing you? Probably not. Rather not get my nuts taken off with a potato gun.

  “Not fair that he knows me so well,” Kaci said.

  Tara took Kaci’s latte and helped herself to a big gulp. “You need to walk away.”

  “Will you watch Miss Higgs for me on Saturday?”

  Her friend’s dark curls bounced when she nodded. “You know I will. And I’ll stock more chocolate. And if you change your mind, I’ll still be there. And I’ll still have chocolate.”

  “Might need some tequila too.”

  “Try to grab one of his socks. Or maybe something out of his wallet. So you have something to blow up when it’s over.”

  “Good thinking.”

  But Kaci had a feeling blowing up anything of Lance’s wouldn’t bring her any satisfaction.

  Because she didn’t want to let him go.

  * * *

  Friday night Lance strolled into his house with a smile in his heart, whistling a tune. He sidestepped Juice Box’s pile of crap in the laundry room, and even the scent of burnt meat didn’t kill his buzz.

  He’d had a two-day mission out to Seattle this week, and tomorrow he would finally get to find out what kind of date a woman like Kaci Boudreaux would plan.

  Juice Box was waving a hot pad over a smoking Crock-Pot. “Dude, how old’s this thing? My mom never burns beef like this.”

  Lance glanced in the pot. “You put water in it?”

  “Natural juices, Thumper. It’s supposed to have natural juices.”

  He sucked in a grin. “Thought we talked about you saying natural juices.”

  “Shove it, old man. Nikki’s coming over tonight.”

  “Same girl three weeks in a row? Reputation’s gonna take a hit if word gets out.”

  “Different Nikki. Easier to remember their names if they’re all the same.”

  Lance grabbed a can of peanuts from the cabinet and ignored the plush buzzard sitting on top of the mail on the counter.

  Juicy had been bringing buzzards of various sizes and softness into the house the past two weeks. Kept saying someone at the squadron asked him to drop it off, but Lance knew better.

  Just like he knew Devon was lying about this being a different Nikki.

  The kid was trying to fit in.

  “It’s not the same as homemade, but Publix makes a damn good fried chicken,” he said.

  Juice Box grunted.

  “Chicks dig it when you make brownies. Could get a box mix at the store. Already have eggs and oil here.” And Lance would be spending the night at Pony’s house so he wouldn’t have to know what Juicy did with his girl tonight.

  “We’re just grabbing a bite before we head out to party. No big deal. You taking brownies to Dr. Blondie?” Juicy asked.

  “She’d rather have a spring-loaded slingshot and a bag of vegetables to fling.”

  Juice Box dropped the whole Crock-Pot in the sink and turned to face him. “You sure you know what you’re doing with this girl? She’s…not all there. You know?”

  Lance tossed back a handful of peanuts and let his silence speak for itself.

  Juice Box didn’t flinch. “I’m all about having fun with a girl for fun’s sake, but you seem to be getting attached. You just got dumped, man. Seeing this chick? Not a good idea.”

  “Appreciate the concern.” The kid was trying to be a good wingman. Lance got it. But his relationship with Kaci wasn’t anyone else’s business. This was for fun. A distraction. Not serious. “But you’ll do better worrying over what you’re going to feed your date tonight.”

  He left the peanut can on the counter, snagged the mail and the buzzard, and headed to the master bedroom.

  Juicy was wrong. Lance had this under control. Tomorrow was about fun. Curiosity.

  Hanging out with a woman who was more than she seemed, but who knew this wasn’t serious.

  That was his story, and he was sticking to it.

  Chapter 17

  When Lance pulled into Kaci’s parking lot Saturday morning to the sight of her Jeep parked sideways across two spaces with a canoe on the top, he might’ve felt another of those unwelcome happy pangs in his heart.

  For all the trials she brought with her, she knew how to show a guy a good time.

  She stepped out of the redbrick apartment building, tight hips swinging in painted-on jeans, shitkicker boots on her tiny feet, and a gauzy white blouse hanging open over a pink tank top that expertly put her breasts on display. Her hair was tucked up under a ball cap and her eyes were hidden behind big sunglasses. She swung a hard-sided lunch cooler while she marched to her Jeep.

  He’d been too tied up with managing his ex-bride-to-be and wedding plans this past summer to go floating. A day on the river sounded damn perfect.

  He hopped out of his truck. “You pack beer?” he called.

  “Does a fish have scales? Of course I packed beer. Hope you like peanut butter and jalapeño sandwiches.”

  “Sure. Love fluffernutters best though.”

  She gave him a mock stern glare. “You been snooping in my cabinets?”

  “Yep.”

  He reached her side and looped his arms around her back. She smelled like sunscreen and marshmallows, and the combination went not just to his head, but it also made his groin twitch and his heart beat faster.

  “Hope you know how to paddle,” she said. “Gonna be cold if we fall in.”

  “Just gives me an excuse to warm you up.”

  She shivered, but her grin told him it was a good shiver. “Don’t go making promises you can’t follow through on. Glad to see you wore something trashy.” She thumped the big Bama A on his chest, then slid out of his arms. “Let me go say bye to Miss Higgs, and we can get going. You got a hat?”

  While she disappeared inside, he retrieved his own ball cap from his truck, along with the small tackle box and collapsible fishing pole he kept tucked behind his seat.

  Twenty minutes later, they were flying down the road, old-school country rock blaring from the speakers. She’d let him drive—“Whatever the gentleman wishes,” she’d said with an overly dramatic sigh—and given him full control of the radio.

  Other than the way she kept checking her phone—worried about her cat, she said—Kaci’s sass was back in full force today. They bashed each other’s college football teams. She insulted his pumpkin-chucking skills. He teased her about her aim. And when he pulled the Jeep to a stop at the river an hour later, he realized he’d been smiling almost the entire ride.

  Wasn’t something he could’ve said about his time with Allison.

  Or even with his buddies.

  “You put this thing up here yourself?” he asked her while he untied the canoe.

  “Could’ve if I’d wanted to,” she replied.

  “You want to get it down?�
��

  “Nope.”

  “You sure? I could do the woman’s work and get out lunch while you do the big manly things.”

  She tilted her sunglasses to hit him with the full effect of her sharp blue eyes. “Sugar, big manly things are why we have wars. And if you don’t want to walk home, I suggest you get that canoe down and hope you can beat me to the back of it. Because I know you’d take a bunch of ribbing if those friends of yours found out you let a woman push off the bank for you.”

  “Only because they’d be jealous.”

  She laughed, and that spot behind his breastbone went warm.

  Her phone beeped, and she dove for it.

  “All okay?” Lance asked.

  A soft smile came over her lips. “Yep.” She flashed the screen so he could see a picture of her furball stretched across a laptop keyboard.

  “Your cat’s running a computer?”

  “I’ve kept her technological skills a secret from the government for years. Don’t betray us and make me hurt you.”

  She was chaos incarnate, and Lance couldn’t remember the last time he’d enjoyed unpredictability so much.

  Also, she turned out to be a moderately terrible canoer. Every time she tried to paddle, they ended up sideways. The first few times, she blamed him.

  And he let her.

  But eventually, she swung her body around on her bench. The canoe rocked. Lance grabbed one side and tried to center himself. He didn’t mind getting tipped, but they were pretty far downstream and it was November. Even southern Georgia would be nippy if they were sopping wet.

  “I give up,” she announced. “I got the principles down. I can tell you all about the laws of fluids and motion and momentum and inertia, but I can’t for the life of me make my body work right.”

  “Everyone has to have a flaw,” he said gravely. “Wouldn’t want you to be perfect.”

  She cracked up, and he grinned.

  “You hush,” she said. “Just because I got enough flaws for the both of us—”

  “Or for all of the state,” he said helpfully.

  She reached into the river and flicked cold water at him. “I was fixin’ to treat you to a little something extra at lunch, but I’m reconsidering.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Her pearly whites flashed in a big smile. “Got me there.”

  She was crazy and she was loud and she was bullheaded, but she was more too. He had a funny feeling he’d only begun to see the Kaci under the surface. He slid his paddle back into the water and pointed them back downriver. “What’s your research about?”

  He hadn’t asked if she was still planning on going to Germany, and he didn’t want to be disappointed if she was bailing.

  Based on the way her eyes slid to the side when she propped her elbows on her knees and settled her chin in her hands, he had a feeling she didn’t want him to know either. “Just some stuff I’ve been working on,” she said.

  “About…”

  “Efficient combustion.”

  “For what applications?”

  “Gas engines.”

  He waited. Moved his paddle to the other side of the canoe. Dipped it in the water, pulled back. They slid through the river, picking back up with the natural current while the sun glinted off the ripples.

  “You’re going to Germany to stand up in front of an audience and say, ‘Hi, I’m Dr. Boudreaux, and I study efficient combustion in gas engines’?” he prompted.

  Her cheeks went pink. “We’re on a river. Don’t need to open the floodgates.”

  “Is it proprietary?”

  “No.”

  “Is it boring?”

  “If you’re trying to bait me, you’ll do better with the fish.”

  “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

  She shifted, and he thought she was going to spin back around and face front. Even with her cap and sunglasses shielding half her face, he could tell by the set of her lips that she didn’t want to tell him anything.

  About Germany or her research.

  “When I was in college, I dated a guy who tried to pass off one of my research papers as his own,” she finally said. “I dated another one who almost got me kicked out of school when he cheated off one of my tests. And I used to talk to my ex about my research. He’s a chemist, but we work with similar concepts and principles sometimes. He put out a paper about his theories on my research, and it got picked up by a couple magazines, and he’s been trying to convince the higher-ups that I should come work on his team in the chemistry department so our joint brains can improve on what I’ve already done.”

  Lance’s grip tightened on his oar. He made himself unclench his jaw. “That’s a dickhead move.”

  “My dean isn’t having it, and Ron’s got his knickers in a twist over being called a sexist pig and me not wanting to go to therapy with him. So half my lab time is getting eaten up in playing university politics and dodging my ex-husband.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Now would be a nice time for a fish to jump in their canoe. A pumpkin to fly out of the sky and cannonball into the river. Hell, he would take coming face-to-face with a bear or a tiger for a distraction. Because he couldn’t stop himself from pondering a dangerous question.

  “I don’t want to know,” he muttered to himself.

  “Why I married a big ol’ geezer?” Kaci said. “He was probably just a dirty old man, but he treated me like he cared about my mind. He talked to me like I understood him instead of like I needed it told to me slow. I looked up to him. And then things just…happened. He got orders and offered me a ring so I’d go with him, and I was too young to realize I was just running away from one more place I didn’t fit in. I fit better with him, but I didn’t fit all the way. Not the way a wife should’ve.”

  She wasn’t the type of woman who’d appreciate it, but he had an overwhelming desire to beat the shit out of her ex.

  “He wanted kids,” she added quietly. “I don’t know if I want kids or not, but I didn’t want ’em with him.”

  “You tell him that?”

  “I took a blowtorch to his car and figured that was a good enough message.”

  This woman was nuts. But he wasn’t entirely certain it was her fault. “This trip today isn’t a trap, is it?”

  She smiled, but even he could tell it wasn’t a happy smile. “You’re one of the good guys. When we’re done, it’s gonna be my fault, and even I won’t be able to find a way to twist it otherwise.”

  His heart flipped. “Kaci—”

  “You got planes to fly and bad guys to take down. I got kids to teach and engine efficiency to improve. We’re fun, but we both know we’re not forever.”

  She was right, but he still wanted to tell her she was wrong.

  He wasn’t in this forever. Hell, he was deploying soon. Getting out of Georgia, away from Gellings, just away.

  But he wasn’t as desperate to go. His life wasn’t suffocating him anymore, and he knew he’d still get out and see the world.

  Sure, time was part of it. Time and distance from his broken engagement helped.

  But the other part was Kaci. She wasn’t just a distraction. He couldn’t put into words exactly what she was—nor did he want to—but he knew it was something more.

  She reached for the cooler between them. “Was that your stomach or mine? All this fresh air gives me an appetite. Jerky? Trail mix? Beer?”

  He steered the canoe toward the riverbank. “You really pack fluffernutter sandwiches?”

  “You know it.”

  They pulled the canoe to shore under a canopy of pine and oak trees. Straggly bushes dotted the bank. Just a few feet farther in, they were in a semi-private alcove, listening to the river go by. Kaci unpacked a massive quilt for a picnic blanket, a stack of peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwiches, chips, beef jerky, grapes and apples, and set out a second cooler with an assortment of microbrew beers in bottles.

  Lance kicked off his shoes and stretched out on
the quilt. Blue sky peeked through the trees. Leaves rustled in the breeze. A lock of Kaci’s hair had fallen out of her cap and across her cheek while she set their lunch out. “You come out here often?” he asked.

  “Just once, this past spring. My Physics Club kids all got together for a day trip. They were disappointed I didn’t bring my potato gun.”

  “Still waiting for you to pull out some firecrackers or a collapsible catapult.”

  She shoved a beer at him. “Hush, you.”

  He set aside the beer and snagged her hand. When he tugged, she didn’t resist but instead curled up beside him, her hand resting over his heart. He flipped her hat off, and all those silky blond strands cascaded down onto his shoulder. “Pretty day,” he murmured.

  “Peaceful,” she replied on a sigh.

  “You like peaceful?”

  “More than I like to admit.”

  He traced a slow circle on her hand. “Nobody watching. You could go to sleep.”

  She inched her leg along his. “You could go to sleep.”

  Even through their clothes, her touch set his skin on fire. His pulse ricocheted through his veins, and all his blood surged south of his belt. “Didn’t say I wanted peaceful,” he said.

  “Sugar, you’re with me. Not wanting peaceful is a given.”

  “Not always.” He rolled them so she was on her back beneath him.

  Her fingers settled on his cheeks.

  He pulled her sunglasses off and tossed them aside. Her eyes were big blue questions, a peek at the vulnerabilities and insecurities she kept hidden from the world. She was full of big talk, but he’d seen her with her students. He’d seen her fight for her students.

  Kaci Boudreaux had a soft side he suspected few people were privileged enough to know about. “Kaci—”

  “No talking,” she whispered.

  He should argue, but she tilted her lips up and brushed them against his.

  He’d missed her kisses. Her touch. Her laugh. Her smart mouth. Her bravado.

  That soft side.

  He was deploying soon. She’d damn well better go to Germany, and who knew if she’d still be here when he got back? She could be recruited to go work for a university overseas.