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 jalapeno 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.”