Chapter 12
Kaci’s windows rattled when the door slammed.
She suppressed a shiver and nuzzled Miss Higgs’s head while she choked out the teary gasp she’d been holding in.
There was a nice guy, a patient guy, a decent guy who had bent over backward to spend time with her and help her get over her fear of flying.
He’d tolerated everything she’d thrown at him, and then told her he understood.
He’d come back time and again.
And now he’d given her an earth-shattering orgasm, and she couldn’t stop crying.
Kaci Boudreaux did not cry.
Crying was a sign of weakness. And she wasn’t weak, dammit.
But she also wasn’t used to feeling.
And she didn’t know what to do with all of the feelings coursing through her body.
The elation. The satisfaction. The comfort. The intimacy. The vulnerability. The joy.
There was too much emotion for her to handle.
She settled Miss Higgs on the bed, then stepped into the bathroom for a good, long shower. By the time she was out and dressed, she almost felt Kaci-ish again.
Not exactly normal, but not drowning in emotions either.
Miss Higgs was sleeping peacefully on the quilt. Tara had texted—she was heading back from her parents’ place and would be home sometime after dinner.
Kaci left the bedroom, intent on finding a sandwich in the kitchen.
Instead, her heart went into overdrive, adrenaline crashed through her veins, and she yelped. “How in the Sam Hill did you get back in here?”
Lance tossed his phone aside, but he didn’t rise from his perch on the couch. “Never left.”
Her eyes flew to the door, then back to him. “You fake-left.”
“You for real ran away.”
“I…” She trailed off. Because “I can’t handle my feelings for you” wasn’t something she could admit to him.
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.