Chapter 5
He’d also gotten a message on his phone that shouldn’t have been funny or cute or interesting in the least, but which had made him grin so hard he laughed.
He’d follow up on that later though. Tonight, he was headed out with the guys again. Being single was starting to feel almost natural.
Pony and Juice Box were already at Taps.
The local bar and grill where Lance had had his disaster of a kiss with Dr. Boudreaux hosted trivia on Thursday nights.
Since it was homecoming week for James Robert College, the bar was featuring beer specials, and Juice Box had wanted to check out the ladies.
Lance was mildly curious if the students would be the only people out celebrating, but he’d only admit to being there to keep an eye on Juice Box.
He settled in at the table with his buddies and passed fist-bumps around.
“Ready for this, Thumper?” Pony said.
“Hell yeah. Got a feeling we’re gonna win tonight.”
The hairs on his arms went up.
“You boys keep on thinking that,” Dr. Kaci Boudreaux said. His stomach tilted when that Southern honey voice hit his ears.
He almost smiled.
She’d shown up.
She didn’t look at him, but he knew she knew he was there. “Me and Tara here are gonna whomp your rumps.”
Juicy’s gaze locked on something below a woman’s usual preferred target zone.
Pony glanced between Kaci and her curly-haired friend. “She a doctor too?” he asked Kaci.
“Better. She writes romance novels.”
“Aw, man, that’s hot,” Juicy said.
“Oh, sugar, you have no idea.”
Lance tilted his seat back. She still hadn’t looked at him. It was like she couldn’t see his part of the table.
All the better. This would be fun. “Got your message,” he said.
The tendons in her neck tightened. She kept her nose up, without a hint of a blush touching her porcelain skin. “Loud and clear, I hope.”
“It was loud,” he conceded.
Her companion, the curly-headed Tara, sucked her cheeks in. But she also gave him a second once-over, which she hadn’t done with any of the other guys.
“And we’re going to kick your ass as soundly at trivia as we did with pumpkin-chucking,” he added.
“You wanna put your money where your mouth is?” Kaci’s blue eyes darted to him, then away.
He had an insane desire to leave his money out of it and put his mouth somewhere it had no business being.
Getting involved with Kaci Boudreaux was a terrible idea.
But damn, was it fun to push her buttons. “No skin off my back. I’ll add it to your bill.”
This time, her gaze landed hard on him, and she held it steady without blinking or flinching. “Aww, you poor thing. You go on and keep asking, but I’m not giving you my number.”
He didn’t answer and instead let a wolfish smile creep over his face.
She’d called his cell phone. He already had her number. Which a brilliant physics professor should’ve realized.
Her poise faltered. “Anyway, good luck to you, gentlemen. And I hope I can still call you gentlemen when the night’s over.”
She and Tara left, taking seats two tables over. Close enough to watch and see if his table was Googling for trivia answers, far enough away that they could talk about him and his buddies without being overheard.
Much.
“You didn’t tell me he was hot,” Tara clearly said.
“Honey, the skinny dark-haired one. Not the cute one with the muscles.”
“I know, Kaci.”
Pony grinned at Lance. “Cute? Girl needs glasses. I ain’t cute, and you ain’t hot.”
“She calling us cheaters again?” Juice Box asked.
Lance watched Kaci and Tara lean closer together, whispering and pretending they weren’t watching him back. “Looks like.”
“That chick can call me anything she wants. If you don’t want her, Thumper, I’ll take her.”
“She owes me a new keg,” Pony said.
“Wouldn’t hold your breath,” Lance said to both of them. “But we can show ’em who has the brains around here.”
Because when it came to this chick, winning was where it was at.
Two hours later, Kaci was drowning in a sea of embarrassment thanks to her mouth being too big for her brain.
Again.
“We have to bet it all,” Tara said. Their meals were gone, sweet tea drained, and they were fighting for thirteenth place against Lance’s table.
No, he wasn’t Lance. That was just what his voicemail wanted her to believe.
He was still Captain Catapult. Captain Kiss-and-Run.
When she’d asked Tara to come out tonight on the pretense of breaking up her routine—and to avoid listening to those hypnosis tapes she’d picked up at the library—she hadn’t intended to run into him.
But there they were in all their arrogant flyboy glory, beating Kaci and Tara by one point in a battle not to be last.
She hated losing.
She didn’t mind that there were four tables of James Roberts students beating her—none were obnoxiously rowdy or in any of her classes, all had at least one sober driver at each table, and she’d happily give them the high of beating a professor in trivia, if they even knew who she was—but she minded losing to Lance and his flyboy buddies.
“Dollars to donuts those boys are betting it all,” she said. “Bet two points. If they’ve got the answer, they’re gonna beat us no matter what. If they don’t, two points are all we need.”
“You sure?”
“Sugar, math is a third of my life. Trust me on this one.”
“Okeydokey.” Tara scribbled their final trivia bet on a scrap of paper, then dashed it up to the judge.
Lance was watching Kaci.
Captain Kiss-and-Run. Lordy goodness, if she let him have a real name, he’d be a real man, but he couldn’t be a real man because there was no way that boy was even flirting with thirty yet.
Which obviously hadn’t mattered that night she met him, but one night of making out was far different from whatever this was.
Plus, Kaci was off men.
As he’d gotten the message.
Loudly.
The man was a pain in her rear end.
And she wasn’t proud of knowing she was probably a pain in his rear end too, but she didn’t like the way he rattled her.
Tara slid into her seat as the last question was announced. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer called, “your final question: What college football team has won the most national championships?”
Lance’s team erupted in cheers.
“Alabama,” Kaci whispered. “Write Alabama. Freaking elephants.”
“They’re Bama guys?” Tara wrinkled her nose. “Figures. Who’s writing these questions? As if half the bar won’t know that one.”
“Makes up for asking us the pumpkin capital of the US. Who knows that kind of stuff?”
“So you can chuck ’em, but you don’t know where they’re from?” With a cheeky grin, Tara ran their answer up to the judge. When she plopped back into her seat, her grin had turned grim. “You know he’s watching you again.”
“He can watch all he wants. I’m done with men.”
And fear shot through her belly every time she said it.
She could swing her hips and show her boobs like nobody’s business, but if she never had another man in her life, it wasn’t the sex she’d miss. Or even having someone reach up to the high cabinets without needing a stepstool, or having a date to faculty functions.
She’d miss the companionship. The safety of knowing there was another person in the world who cared and who wanted to look after her and who would be there.
Sure, she could look after herself just fine.
She’d never make a lot of money, but she made enough to take care of herself and Miss Higgs and not have to run home to Momma in Mississippi.
She knew how to cook, clean, and brew up a pot of sweet tea.
She could make up her face with her eyes shut.
She could still balance a book on her head while walking around in heels if the occasion warranted.
She truly didn’t need a man.
But there was that lingering shot of panic in her gut again.
“I’d do him,” Tara said.
“Hush your tongue,” Kaci hissed.
Because that shot of heat rushing through her midsection this time wasn’t panic.
It was far uglier.
“As a onetime thing,” Tara said. “For research, of course. Maybe I’ll write a pilot one day.”
“Tell me you don’t sleep with men just for research.”
“If I did, at least I’d be sleeping with something. Oh, hey, did I mention that I saw Ol’ Grandpappy in the back corner thirty minutes ago?”
“What? Here?”
“He looked a little blocked up.”
Kaci closed her eyes and blew out a breath.
Ron could go anywhere he wanted. It was a free country. So long as he left her alone and never mentioned counseling or came to visit her at work again, she’d be fine.
They weren’t married anymore, and she didn’t plan to marry him again. “He always looks blocked up. It’s because he puts the ass in academics.”
“There’s no ass in academics.”
“It’s silent until he’s involved.”
Tara squinted at her. “Why’d you marry him?”
Because he was safe. Calm and rational, competent and levelheaded, in a field with low mortality rates, at an age when decreasing testosterone levels would make him less likely to be reckless and wild.
Because he could talk to her on an academic level.
He understood her love of physics in a way her momma never had, so he’d accepted her as normal in a way Momma never had either.
“He said all the right things about my potato gun.”
“Is that a euphemism, or do you actually have a potato gun?”
“Do armadillos have armor? Of course I’ve got a potato gun.”
The announcer interrupted them to give the final standings for the night.
And, unfortunately, Kaci and Tara were dead last.
“Better luck next time, Dr. Boudreaux,” Captain Kiss-and-Run called.
The guy she’d realized was Pony—whom she owed a new keg—didn’t smile. The younger one did, but it held an offer Kaci would never cash.
“Just didn’t want all y’all’s delicate male egos to take a hit,” Kaci called back.
“You ever lose gracefully?”
“Sugar, I don’t lose.”
“Kaci, we kinda lost tonight,” Tara murmured.
“Hush on up. This here’s called messing with their minds.”
Lance stood, all six-foot-something tall, and sauntered to their table in what looked like two steps.
Primitive interest stirred low in her belly.