“Captain Wheeler?” A brunette with a pixie haircut, round cheeks, and a ruby smile squinted at him. “I’m Madeline Scott. Evan’s wife.” She put a hand to her round belly. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
Flincher stepped to his wife’s side, holding a squirming little girl with two tiny pigtails that made her look like she had horns. “Still owe you, man.”
“Nah,” Lance said. “Doing me the favor. Good to get in the extra flight hours.”
But he wasn’t as excited to get out of Georgia as he’d been two months ago.
And that little blondie Flincher was holding was making Lance think about his favorite blonde.
Again.
Would she go to Germany? Would shetake any more crap from her fellow professors?
Would she get back together with her ex-husband?
Lance nearly growled.
“You need anything, you let us know,” Madeline said. “Is your family here today?”
“Just me.”
The insta-pity in her eyes made his joints twitch. She patted his arm. “We’ll make sure to send you extra care packages. Hope you like drawings. Izzy here’s crazy with a crayon these days.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“Yes, we do,” Flincher said.
We.
Flincher had a family. The sweet wife, the adorable tot, one more on the way. Even Pony had a few buddies out to see him off.
But not Lance.
Because he’d fucked up with the onlyperson in the world who would’ve wanted to be here for him.
Two weeks into December,Kaci and Tara hadn’t found any new members for their club, but they were doing just fine on their own.
Kaci had gone to her doctor for antianxiety medicine. She’d made appointments to meet with fellow physicists from Austria, Japan, and six other countries while she was in Germany, and she had a hypothesis niggling at her that she wanted to investigate as soon as she got back. Her speech was ready and approved by the dean, and even her cranky, girl-hating, fellow physics professors hadn’t been able to find fault with it.
Ron had canceled his plans to attend the conference too.
The Physics Club kids were tweaking Ichabod in anticipation of a watermelon-flinging contest coming in June that was within driving distance and, with Kaci’s endorsement, three of them had been selected for scholarships from the James Robert Physics Association alumni group.
Life was good.
Except she kept checking the base’s webpage for Lance’s squadron.
It had been a slow news week when Lance and his buddies shipped out a few weeks ago, so they’d been covered on the local news.
Tara had been working that night, and even though Kaci knew she should’ve put on a movie or streamed a TV show, she’d recorded the news and then watched, craning for any glimpse of Lance, reaching for Miss Higgs, who wasn’t there, stifling tears when Lance himself came on for an interview,steady and authoritative and heart-stopping in his aviator sunglasses and green flight suit.
And she might’ve rewound it to watch it again.
And another one or two—dozen—times.
He was doing what he was born to do. Kicking ass and taking names. Keeping the world safe.
So she needed to do what she was born to do. Make the world better through physics.
