She struck him as the type who’d appreciate earning that knowledge more than she’d appreciate having it spoon-fed to her. As the type who appreciated the mystery and the unknown. The puzzle.
He’d let her play with that for a while.
In the meantime, he’d learn what he could about her.
The first thing he discovered in the parking lot was that her Jeep seemed pristine. No tufts of Gertrude’s fur in the back, no indents of her body, no stray Mardi Gras beads or her maid’s cap.
But the Jeep’s tires were muddy.
Conclusive?
Nope.
But he was just getting warmed up.
“I’ll figure you out yet, Dr. Kaci Boudreaux.”
And he was looking forward to every minute of the game.
7
By the time Kaci left her office Monday, her nerves were shot. She needed to go set off a few bottle rockets. Or fling a pumpkin. Or set off fireworks.
Something.
Going into her lab would probably be the wisest course of action, but she didn’t like her grad students to see her flustered.
She didn’t like anyone to see her flustered.
Ron had taken to emailing her daily. Easy enough to ignore at first. She filed his messages away in her Trash folder.
It wasn’t that she was angry with him. She was simply done with that part of her life, and they both needed to move on.
But today’s subject line had gotten her attention.
Suggestion for your next paper, he’d written.
And like a dingbat, she’d clicked.
He’d been very complimentary.
At first.
So proud of her for being selected to give a keynote address at the Stuttgart conference. Really impressed with her papers and articles and also that she’d managed to get both into such prestigious publications.
But he was concerned she’d overestimated a key compression ratio, and his research proved it. They needed to talk before she went to Germany.
Preferably sooner, so she didn’t embarrass herself and James Robert College in the process. He knew how hard it was to be a woman in a technical field—ha!—and he was simply looking out for her best interestif she wanted to make tenure.
Hey, Kaci. You’re wrong, and you’re about to make a fool of all of us. Let me hold your hand and patronize you.
Ron’s research was still hypothetical. Yes, he’d earned his doctorate before she had, but he was only beginning to get his first real research lab up and running, with most of his time before this summer occupied with other academic pursuits in his military career. Kaci had hard numbers and a year’s worth of experimentation and data to back her up, with three years of preliminary work before that.
Her results had been replicated in two other universities since her paper was published, including in Stuttgart, and she was in contact with chemists at another university who had been integrating her research with theirs.
She didn’t mind collaboration.
Shelikedcollaboration. If she’d done something wrong, she wanted to know, and she wanted to fix it. Make it better. Stronger.
