Chapter 3
Just after dusk, Kaci sat at the edge of the fairgrounds with Tara Shivers, her roommate and sometimes partner in crime.
Tara was an adorable brunette. She’d been a friend of a friend looking for a new apartment at the same time Kaci had moved here just under a year and a half ago.
They’d both been newly divorced from military men, adjusting to a new town, and eager to get on with their lives.
Like too many military wives and ex-wives, Tara was overqualified for jobs that required little to no experience, but underexperienced for jobs that required her educational qualifications.
So she was taking classes toward an accounting degree at James Robert while working nights and weekends at Jimmy Beans, the coffee shop just off base.
She was moderately more levelheaded than Kaci, which had made her the perfect choice as an assistant to keep Kaci from going too redneck and getting herself arrested tonight.
“Are you sure this is legal?” Tara said from her perch in the back of Kaci’s Jeep.
“Nothing illegal about improving a catapult.” Kaci flung her knife into the dry earth.
She pried off the pumpkin’s top and shoved one of her ex-husband’s old medals inside.
“I’m so done with military men. They’ve died on me, divorced me, and now they’ve taken my girls’ trophy.
If I could put the whole lot of them in this pumpkin and launch them instead, I would. ”
Especially the one who’d given her the hottest kiss of her life and then run away. She’d shove him in that pumpkin first.
Pompous bastard.
“Can mine go in too?” Tara’s flashlight bobbed in the night.
“Absolutely.” Kaci patched the pumpkin back up, then loaded it into a slightly modified Ichabod.
Her girls were winning this contest next year, dang it. No more arrogant, dark-haired, hypnotizing-eyed flyboys would beat her team.
He’d been right.
Even if his squadron had juiced their pumpkin, it wasn’t against the rules.
Not in this contest.
Which meant her girls simply had to have a better catapult. And she probably owed him and his team an apology.
Without kissing.
Sweet baby José, that had been the worst way ever to work off steam after a day of bad news. What she got for running out of tequila at home.
“So, ah,” Tara said, “usually wouldn’t you like to see where you’re aiming something like that? It’s kinda dark outside.”
“Miles and miles of cornfield, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. Hush on up and help, or get out of my way.”
Tara’s laugh interrupted a hooting owl. “Miss Goody Two-Shoes? Have we met?”
“Stand back. I’m letting her rip.”
Tara scooted farther back. “Should’ve brought night-vision goggles.”
“You got a pair?”
“It’s the one thing of Brandon’s I didn’t burn.”
“Lordy goodness, girl. Why didn’t you say so?”
“I didn’t know exactly what you were up to.”
“Huh.” Kaci set the catapult, then stepped back and tugged Ichabod’s release mechanism.
The sound of rattling wood as the pumpkin took flight eased the ache in her chest and the irritation in her belly and brain.
Tara was right. She should’ve brought night-vision goggles so she could see if her tweaks to Ichabod were helping or hurting.
A soft thud echoed in the darkness.
“Aaahh,” she sighed.
Nothing like destruction and exploding pumpkins to lift a woman’s burdens.
“I thought you already did this after your divorce,” Tara said while Kaci grabbed another pumpkin and started cutting the top off. “Didn’t you say something about a blowtorch? Or was that in one of my books?”
“This ain’t about him. It’s about military men in general.”
“It’s a conundrum. They’re so hot in books, but such jerks in real life.”
“Amen, sister.” Kaci actually loved military men—for the most part, they were honorable and strong and handsome, just like her daddy had been. But there was so much about them she just couldn’t swallow anymore.
“You gonna tell me what happened today, or should I guess? No, wait. Can I guess? Please?”
She fought against a smile and lost. In addition to being an underemployed former military wife, Tara wrote romance novels in her spare time. “Go on,” Kaci said. “I could use a good laugh.”
“The pumpkin-chucking contest was actually a recruiting event for a black-ops mission requiring a team of redneck engineers, and they didn’t pick you?”
“Hush your mouth. You know I would’ve been first on that list.”
Tara laughed. “There were vampires?”
“You can do better than that, sugar.”
“Werewolves?”
“Getting closer.”
“Ol’ Grandpappy showed up with your secret love child.”
When Tara had discovered Kaci’s ex was thirteen years her senior, she’d given him the nickname. For that alone, Kaci would claim her for life. “Nope.”
“Oooh, wait. Did Mr. Kiss-and-Run show up?”
Her shoulders hitched. She forced herself to snort in what she hoped was disbelief while she stuffed her pumpkin with an old pair of uniform socks she’d found in a box of notes from her grad student days.
“He did! Kaci! You need to spill. Right this instant.”
Kaci plopped the pumpkin into Ichabod, checked the catapult’s settings, then gestured for Tara to stay clear. “Firing.”
She pulled the release mechanism, and Ichabod tossed that pumpkin like yesterday’s gravy.
Watching that gourd fly off and disappear into the night sent a thrill through her veins almost as heady as if she’d been riding a rocket herself, though infinitely less terrifying.
Which was exactly what had sent her to that bar a month ago, looking for a distraction for her life.
What should’ve been the highlight of her career so far—being asked to headline a conference on efficient combustion at one of the largest physics symposiums in the world—had her shaking in terror.
Because going to the symposium in Germany meant she had to fly.
“Is he a werewolf?” Tara said. “Is that why he had to run away? Because he was about to shift into wolf form? No, wait. He has to take a wife so he can inherit his family business, so he’s engaged, but he doesn’t actually love her.
Or—oh. Oh, no. He’s dying, and only a kiss from his true love will save him, so he goes bar-hopping every night to try to find her, but his time’s running out, and—”
“His team beat my girls,” she said.
Tara flashed her light in Kaci’s eyes. “Seriously? It was the guy from the bar?”
Kaci ducked out of the light. She grabbed another pumpkin and went to work hacking a hole around the stem.
“I heard a team from the base won,” Tara said.
Kaci nodded.
“He’s military? Stationed here?”
“Looks like.”
“Oh, Kaci, this isn’t good.”
“It’s just fine. He’s gonna stay on his side of the base, and I’m gonna stay far, far outside of it. It was one night. And I know better than to get involved with another military man. Besides, he was a horrible kisser.”
“You know what’s crazy?” Tara said. “I know I was a bad military wife, but every time I see a man in uniform, I still kinda want to jump him.”
“Girl, you got issues.” As if she could talk.
“I’m not the one shoving BCGs in a pumpkin. Crap. Birth control glasses. Dang it. Military-issue prescription glasses. There. That’s not too military, is it? I’m trying to quit speaking military. Did Ol’ Grandpappy really wear those?”
“Yep. And you do me a favor and give me ten minutes’ warning if you’re fixin’ to call him that to his face. I wanna be there.”
“Won’t happen. He doesn’t come to Jimmy Beans anymore.”
“Wish he’d do my office the same honor,” she muttered. She could do with seeing her ex less.
“Rumor is he wants you back.”
“He had a fling with his secretary after I left and realized how good he had it with me.”
Kaci was also nearly certain he’d issued his ultimatum—drop everything and have kids now, or they were over—without actually intending to follow through on it.
But even though her parents’ marriage had been cut short when she was still in grade school, she had known without a doubt that husbands and wives shouldn’t have to threaten divorce to get their way.
Also, Ron had been right when he dumped her.
She’d never loved him the way a wife should. “I ever tell you about the time he made a pass at my momma?”
“Omigod, no!”
“Said he thought she was my sister.” Kaci loaded the pumpkin into the launcher. “That man just wants what he can’t have. Just like they all do.”
She double-checked Ichabod, then gave him an extra crank to see how much torque the catapult could take. “Fly good, magic pumpkin,” she said.
She stepped back. “Ready?” she said to Tara.
“Oh, yeah.”
“Great.” She tugged the release mechanism.
“No, wait, wait!”
The pumpkin whizzed into the darkness and the catapult bounced, its weight thudding on the ground. “What? What?”
“Fire!” Tara pointed in the direction the pumpkin had just sailed.
An orange glow flickered on the horizon. Small, contained like a campfire, but still a fire.
Directly in Ichabod’s firing path.
“Oh, shit,” Kaci whispered.
She didn’t hear the pumpkin thud to the ground.
But she heard something else.
Voices.
Loud, surprised voices.
“What do we do?” Tara shrieked.
Run.
She wanted to run.
But her daddy would’ve skinned her hide six ways to Sunday if she didn’t own up to her own messes.
“Get on up in the Jeep. I’m gonna go make sure nobody’s hurt. And don’t touch my pumpkins.”
Kaci might have been thirty-four years old, and her daddy might’ve been gone too many years already, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still scared to death of her momma. So she set across the field, praying everything was fine.
Lance couldn’t get the blonde off his brain.
The whiskey he’d been nursing helped marginally. So did shooting the shit with his buddies about today’s pumpkin-chucking contest. As did patting Gertrude, a stuffed wild boar they kept in the unofficial squadron bar.