Her Rebel Heart Read online

  When he left, he didn’t want to leave with regrets.

  He wanted to leave with good memories.

  So he lowered his mouth, suckled her bottom lip, and lost himself in the world that was Kaci.

  * * *

  Kaci woke up with a start when her Jeep stopped moving. A steady pitter-patter of raindrops plinked off the canoe up top.

  They were home.

  She needed to go check on Miss Higgs.

  “You know you drool in your sleep?” Lance was aiming those soft, kind eyes at her again. Not the smoky, let’s get naked again eyes he’d used for two more stops along the river, or the amused you’re being obnoxious, but it’s strangely enjoyable eyes he’d used when she’d been, well, her all afternoon.

  But the gentle, understanding we can still be friends after we quit sleeping together eyes he’d used the few times she’d reminded him that they were temporary.

  As if he knew exactly how bad she’d fallen for him, but he didn’t want to embarrass her by pointing it out.

  Because he was that kind of nice.

  “Kace? You awake?”

  She forced herself upright and rubbed at a kink in her neck. “Shoot, if you’d driven any slower, we would’ve been going backwards. How many old grandpas passed us on the way?”

  “Twenty or thirty,” he said with a smirk.

  It should’ve taken another ten minutes to get to her place, and she suspected he knew it as well as she did.

  “Any of ’em moon us?”

  “Just the one. You need to put the canoe away somewhere?”

  “Rented it from the school.” She stifled a yawn. “I’ll return it Monday.”

  His fingers tangled in her hair. “Best date I’ve had in a long time,” he said softly.

  Her heart swelled. She stifled her smartass imagine if it’d been with a nice girl comment and instead leaned closer to him. “Doesn’t have to be over. I mean, I guess we’re even for the flight stuff, but if you wanted to come up…”

  She let her words taper off, because his easy smile tilted down. Sympathy overtook his dark eyes.

  He was done with her. Finished. Tired of her.

  Their deal was over.

  She lunged for her door. “Never mind. You got things to do. Don’t let me keep you.”

  “I’m flying tomorrow,” he said. “Crew rest starts in thirty minutes.”

  Nice excuse. But dang if her heart didn’t feel as if it were being squeezed like an underinflated balloon at the thought of him up in the air. “Sure. Fly good tomorrow.”

  “You like camping?” he said.

  “Old-fashioned or pampered?”

  “Either.” But that snicker-grin said he’d laugh at her if she asked for a camper or a cabin.

  “You know I can’t resist a good campfire.”

  “Good. I’ll pick you up Friday night.”

  Her pulse fluttered, and she couldn’t even muster a sassy but what if I have plans? “I’ll take care of the firewood.”

  He hooked a hand behind her neck and pulled her in for a lingering kiss.

  She didn’t want to stop at a kiss. She wanted to toss him in the backseat and have her way with him. They had twenty-nine minutes still.

  And spending the day with him hadn’t been enough.

  She splayed her hands across his chest. His heart thumped beneath the solid wall of muscle.

  He pulled out of the kiss and rested his head on her shoulder. His breath came in ragged gasps that pulled at something deeper and higher than the longing between her legs. “I cannot understand how you can be this sexy,” he said.

  Captain Swaggery Pilot God was one to talk. “It’s a gift.”

  He chuckled, his breath hot through her thin blouse. “Suppose it is.” He pressed his lips to her collarbone one last time before reaching for his own door handle. “I’d offer to carry something inside, but I’m afraid of the lecture I’d get.”

  “Wimp,” she teased.

  If he carried something inside, maybe he’d stay.

  He winked at her. “Don’t miss me too much this week.”

  “You’re not even going to offer me your shirt as an umbrella?” She was bordering on pathetic, but she didn’t want him to leave.

  Who knew if he’d come to his senses before Friday and change his mind about camping?

  He treated her to a wicked grin. “I’m gonna sit in my truck and watch your shirt get wet.”

  “Your momma would be appalled.”

  “Yep,” he agreed.

  One more flash of that boyish grin, and he was climbing out of her Jeep. Raindrops pelted his Bama shirt. He lifted his hand in a wave before he dashed the four parking spaces over to his truck.

  Kaci touched three fingers to her lips and told herself the comforting lie that another date—an overnight date, complete with a bonfire and probably her potato gun—wasn’t any big deal.

  They were friends.

  With benefits.

  And she could totally handle it.

  * * *

  “You’re hopeless,” Tara declared ten minutes later.

  Kaci dropped her coolers in the kitchen. “Yep,” she agreed. “But I’m a pretty satisfied hopeless.”

  She joined Tara on the couch, where Miss Higgs was squeezed between Tara’s belly and her laptop. “Write anything good today?” she asked.

  “No. My dang hillbilly Sleeping Beauty story fell apart when I couldn’t convince my brilliant astrophysicist princess to kiss the weirdo passed out in the room over the bar.” She slid a meaningful look at Kaci. “You could learn a thing or two from her.”

  “You haven’t even asked how it went.”

  “Don’t have to. You’re still wearing that sappy grin.”

  “I know it’s not serious with Lance,” Kaci told the dark TV screen. “But it’s dang fun hanging out with a guy who seems to like me for me.”

  Miss Higgs shuddered out a snore.

  “Has she been eating okay the last few days?” Tara asked.

  Shivers prickled Kaci’s skin. “She’s been a little picky, but she’s always been persnickety like that.”

  Tara didn’t call her out on the way she was stretching that truth so thin even a blind man could’ve seen through it.

  Miss Higgs had been ridiculously picky about her food this week. And Kaci had been telling herself it was simply because the cat was crotchety.

  She reached over and scratched the kitty’s head too.

  “She’s a sweet cat,” Tara whispered.

  “She found me after a horrific beauty pageant,” Kaci murmured. “I was fixin’ to toss a homemade cherry bomb into a dumpster behind the auditorium, and this little white ball of fluff charged me. She’d speared a wine cork with one of her teeth, so it looked like she was smoking a short, fat cigar. She kinda wobbled like she’d been drinking the wine too. But she stopped me from tossing that cherry bomb and probably stopped me from ending up in juvie.”

  “Only you, Kaci.”

  “My momma said she probably had fleas and we couldn’t keep her, but I threatened to rip the shoulder pads out of my pageant dress and then cut up all the ruffles, so we compromised. Miss Higgs got to come home and have a flea bath, and I agreed to enter the Miss Grits pageant.” She stroked her fingers softly over her cat’s fluffy head. “She hated Ron.”

  “She’s a good judge of character.”

  “She’s getting old.” Kaci’s throat went tight.

  “Here.” Tara lifted the cat and gingerly put her in Kaci’s lap. “I think you two need each other tonight.”

  Kaci buried her face in Miss Higgs’s fur. The cat’s rusty purr vibrated against her chest.

  She’d moved to Georgia determined to find stability.

  But even though she had no intention of moving, life kept changing on her anyway.

  * * *

  The weather had taken a chilly turn, but despite the overcast skies, Kaci’s Physics Club was happy at their booth on the campus mall on Wednesday for Club
Day during Spirit Week. She approached the group from behind, bringing pizzas for her kids who were manning lunch hour. Running out for food had been a good excuse to get off campus and run home.

  Miss Higgs hadn’t touched her food today.

  Or yesterday.

  Not even when Kaci offered her fresh tuna.

  Wanda Hamm was watching Miss Higgs again today while Tara was at class and her study group. Thank goodness, because if Kaci had walked into her empty apartment an hour ago and seen her cat sleeping as peacefully as she was on the Hamms’ couch, she would’ve lost it. She’d picked up the cat and snuggled her, relieved to still feel that rusty purr going, but the sympathy had shone bright in Wanda’s eyes.

  She shook away the melancholy and dread and concentrated instead on the Physics Club booth.

  Unlike her lectures, where she suspected a good number of the kids would rather be sleeping no matter how hard she tried to make physics interesting, these girls wanted to be here. She had sixteen kids in the Physics Club, and she’d do everything she could to inspire their love of how things worked. Especially the twelve girls.

  The boys too—she’d take any kid interested in science—but when her daddy died, she’d lost the one parent who understood how to nurture her curiosity. Momma thought her time would’ve been better spent learning how to catch a husband than in figuring out how to build a better catapult.

  Kaci might have to fight harder and longer to keep her job simply because she was a woman. But she reached the students. She worked hard to make it worth their while to come to class, to make physics fun and applicable to life.

  She knew how to lay a foundation that would prepare them to be astrophysicists, rocket scientists, and chemical engineers. But more importantly, she knew how to lay that foundation in a way that made her students fall in love with the beauty of it.

  And she’d dang well fight with everything she had to stay here, teaching these kids until her position was secure, no matter what any of her fellow professors—Ron included—said or did.

  “Hey, you want to help us make lightning?” Zada called to a high school girl on a campus tour with her parents. Jess was demonstrating how to separate salt and pepper for several members of the football team. Two other students were laughing with the Eta Zeta Beta girls at the next booth, and it only took Kaci a moment to realize they were telling the story of how far their pumpkin had gone when they’d launched it off Ichabod at the Gellings Fall Fest.

  She knew Jess was having boyfriend troubles, and Zada had recently taken an extra four hours a week at her job in the registrar’s office because her finances were tight, but they were here.

  Her kids were going places. They’d do great things one day.

  There was plenty to be happy about today, even if part of her heart was breaking.

  “Dr. Boudreaux, back me up here,” Jess said. “These guys don’t believe physics has anything to do with football.”

  Her voice dripped with pity for the boys, and Kaci found herself stifling an unlikely smile. “There’s physics at work in every bit of football. Ever take a hit? That’s force. Toss a ball? Gravity and friction play into how far it goes.”

  “You’d win more if you took Dr. Boudreaux’s Physics 101,” Jess said.

  A groan went up among the boys, and several of the physics kids giggled.

  “More to life than winning,” Kaci said. “Who wants pizza?”

  Half her students—and the football players—attacked the boxes. She had an hour before her Wednesday afternoon lecture, and Jess and Zada seemed to have a handle on entertaining the passersby, so Kaci let herself drift into the back to watch and to be on hand for any other questions.

  “Kaci,” an unfortunately familiar male voice said to her right, “nice booth.”

  She refused to let the man see her twitch, and she dug deep not to be offended at his dry delivery with the barest hint of a suggestion that the Physics Club shouldn’t have a banner with flowers and hearts on it. “Ron, likewise.”

  There wasn’t a chemistry club, but the chemistry honor society was down at the other end of the mall.

  And she could wish all she wanted to that Ron had stayed on his half of the campus, but since he hadn’t, she truly did need to deal with her ex-husband. She could help Lance get rid of his wedding rings, she could call people cheaters till she was blue in the face, but since the airplane incident, she’d come to realize dealing with her problems was far better than launching them out of cannons.

  “What can I do for you today?” she said.

  He perched against a massive oak that had been around longer than the James Robert campus and scuffed his loafers against an exposed root. “I’ve been doing everything I can think of to show you I want you back, that I want to take care of you and be the kind of husband you deserve, but I can’t do that if we can’t talk.”

  “You’re not my husband anymore.” Keeping her voice even was easier than it should’ve been. She wasn’t mad. She was just done. And she didn’t care enough to fight. “We’re better the way we are than the way we were.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are, sugar.”

  “I get it, Kaci. I know you don’t want to put your research on hold to have kids right now. I know your job’s important. To you. To the world. We can fix this.”

  There was nothing to fix, but instead of being angry with him, she simply felt sad. She kept her voice down and watched her kids to make sure none of them were listening in. “You need to let go, Ron.”

  “If you’d come to therapy with me—”

  “You ask your therapist if it’s better to be with a woman who loves you or with a woman who doesn’t. I’m not trying to be cruel, but wouldn’t it be worse for me to lie to you?”

  “Is this about that kid you’re messing around with?”

  Her heart slammed into her ribs.

  Lance wasn’t hers. He was fun, he was smart, he was brave, and he wasn’t hers.

  She suddenly had more sympathy for Ron. “It’s about me not being a good fit for you.”

  He shoved away from the tree. “I knew you could hold a grudge, but this is extreme, even for you.”

  That did it. A red haze spiked in her vision. “Because you know better than me what I want? What I need? Because you’re the man, and my female parts interfere with my ability to think and act rationally?”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “I’m not the one who won’t take no for an answer.”

  “Um, Dr. Boudreaux?” Zada squinted her dark eyes, flicking glances between Kaci and Ron. “We need another aluminum plate.”

  Kaci turned her best disappointed-professor glare on Ron. She kept her voice low, but she suspected everyone was listening. “You bring up personal issues here again, I’m filing a harassment complaint with the chancellor. My job is no place to bring your emotional baggage.”

  She left him standing there and forced a smile while she turned to dig through the supplies under the pizza table. Her face was hot, but she kept her voice steady and concentrated on the solid, comforting physics principles Zada demonstrated for the prospective student.

  She didn’t want to be the woman who had married Ron Kelly. She didn’t want to keep fighting for professional respect. She didn’t want to have to resort to empty threats of harassment charges—which she would never file for fear of being labeled a whiner—to make her point.

  She simply wanted to teach these kids, do her research, and go home to her undefined and most likely short-lived relationship with one of the best men she’d had the privilege of knowing. She wanted not to have to think about Germany next month. She wanted Miss Higgs to live forever.

  Maybe Ron was right.

  Maybe therapy was a good idea.

  Chapter 18

  Lance pulled up to Kaci’s apartment late Friday afternoon with a light heart and a truck full of camping supplies.

  Some he hadn’t used in years. Others were new.

  De
spite being there to pick up the craziest woman he’d ever known, his soul was at peace. His pulse surged in anticipation. Campfires and starry skies and temperatures just low enough to require sharing body heat to keep warm.

  Yeah, this would be one hell of a good weekend. Best way to spend his last weekend in Georgia before he deployed.

  He took the steps two at a time to her floor and rapped on her door. But it wasn’t Kaci who answered.

  Instead, it was her curly-haired friend. “This isn’t a good time.” Her lips were set in a grim line, and her eyes dared him to contradict her. She started to shut the door on him, but Lance was quick with sticking a foot in.

  “We have plans,” he said.

  “Not tonight.”

  What the hell? “Did her ex-husband do something?”

  “We could solve that,” she murmured.

  He wasn’t too fond of her bloodthirsty undertones, but he’d be happy to take care of Kaci’s ex himself if the jackass was making more trouble.

  A sniffle came from inside the room. His heart knocked on his ribs with a pang. He pushed at the door. “Is that Kaci? Why’s she crying? What happened?”

  “Tell him to go away,” Kaci called. Her voice was sassless with a watery weight to it.

  Lance folded his arms and glared at her friend.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s gonna make us both change our minds,” she said. But despite the way she cocked her hip out—just like Kaci would’ve—she also backed away and let the door open wider.

  He didn’t wait to ask if that was an invitation.

  But when he stepped around her and caught sight of Kaci curled up in the blue-checkered chair beside her couch, her eyes puffy and her chin wobbly while she rocked her ancient cat, part of him wished he’d stayed outside.

  “We’re gonna have to reschedule,” Kaci said without looking at him.

  A piece of his heart sliced off and flopped to the carpet. “Aw, Kace, I’m sorry.”

  “Hush your tongue. She’s not gone yet.”

  Her friend sized him up, silently asking if he was man enough to stay or smart enough to leave.