They hadn’t parted onbadterms. They’d parted onwe have different livesterms.
Mildly embarrassingdifferent livesterms, what with her slipping out that she loved him, but still. Notbadterms.
She couldn’t be a military wife and still meet her professional goals, and when he was finally far enough from his breakup that he could see clearly, he’d realize he was just having fun, and they weren’t destined soul mates like Tara’s couples in her books.
But Kaci couldreadthe email from Lance. Reading it didn’t mean she had to respond.
Or care.
Her heart swelled.
Too late. She already cared.
And she probably always would.
With a defeated sigh, she clicked on the message.
Proud of you, was all it said, with a link below to the article from the Gellings paper.
I’m freaking proud of me too, you dolt, she wanted to reply.
Or maybeShove it, flyboy.
But she’d discovered her pride wasn’t the best at speaking for her.
She hesitated longer than she wanted to admit, looking for hidden messages between the three words. Ten letters. Ten letters could say so much. But these ten letters said so little.
True, they said he’d been thinking of her enough to read an article about her and forward it to her. Or that one of his squadron buddies had hacked his email and sent her a message to screw with them both. Or possibly she was asleep, and he hadn’t actually sent the email, but she wished he had.
She growled at herself.
She was thirty-freaking-four years old. If she couldn’t reply to a simple email from afriend, she had more issues than she thought.
Thank you, she typed. And then she hitSendbefore she could overthink it.
Thank youwas appropriate. He’d gotten her there. He’d taken her up on her first airplane ride. He’d believed in her. He’d challenged her. He’d held her. He’d pushed her.
And he’d taken five minutes out of his deployment to let her know he was thinking about her.
She hadn’t seen the man in over a month, and he still tied her up in needy, emotional knots.
Of all the men she’d known in her life, none had treated her like Lance did. Some men wanted her for her body. Others for her brains. She’d known a few who had dug her potato gun.
But Lance had honestly seemed to likeher. All of her. The redneck parts. The physicist parts. The female parts. The obnoxious parts.
Regardless of anything she’d said to him, what she’d done to him, he kept coming back.
He could’ve been perfect for her.
But she would never ask a man to sacrifice something she wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself to be with him. She wasn’t willing to give up her tenure-track position, which meant she wasn’t willing to move away from Gellings.
So how could she ask Lance to leave the military for her?
And why would he want to?
She found Momma working at her desk in the pristine den, vacuum marks still visible in the plush carpet. Momma’s reading glasses were perched on the end of her nose while she stared at the monitor.
“Enough beauty rest for one day?” Momma said.
