“You go on and call me anything you want.” She hooked her hand behind his neck again, her touch hot and confident and sexy as hell, but also?—
Wrong.
Fuck.
He didn’t know her name.
He was kissing a woman, thinking about stripping her down and feasting on her most intimate parts, and he didn’t even know her name.
On the night he should’ve been getting married.
To a woman whom, just a week ago, he’d sworn he would love forever.
“Don’t stop now,” she whispered.
Pled, really. As though she wanted to disappear into the oblivion of him as much as he wanted to disappear into the oblivion ofher.
To not be whoever she was anymore.
To live a different life through him.
He jerked back. “Sorry,” he muttered.
He couldn’t look at her. He ran a hand over his stiff hair and fumbled off the stool.
He could still taste her on his lips, still feel the brand of her touch on his skin, still hear the rush of his pulse banging in his head as his life came back into focus.
The gut-wrenching, heart-bending, bleak reality of who he’d almost become.
“Sorry,” he said again.
And before she could say another word in that sassy voice of hers, he charged out of the bar.
2
Four weeks later…
Kaci Boudreaux might’ve been born with the face of a Southern belle and the brain of a quantum physicist, but she had the heart of a redneck. And today, for the first time in too long, that heart was in hog heaven.
Twenty feet down the way, the macho team from Gellings Air Force Base pulled the lever to release their catapult.
A satisfyingthwackof wood and springs bounced through the air, followed by the even more satisfyingcrunchof a pumpkin exploding upon takeoff. Orange innardssoared a measly twenty feet beneath the crisp October sky and rained down on the dry grass.
She whooped—a good ol’ rebel yell—and high-fived Zada Koury, her team’s student captain. “We got this, ladies!”
The Gellings team had one more pumpkin left to chuck in the fall festival today, but their catapult had too much torque, and the gourds didn’t have the surface tension necessary to withstand the force of the air pressure that came with the launch velocity. There wasn’t a pumpkin in the world with skin thick enough to survive being launched off that thing. Kaci would’ve loved to see it loaded down with a watermelon, or maybe a cannonball—man, that thing would probably give a boulder wings—but she was more excited about pending victory.
Her students, all ladies from the Physics Club at James Robert College, were aboutto be the first all-female team in the history of the Gellings Fall Fest to take home first place in pumpkin-chucking. And for tossing a gourd over a third of a mile at that.
If there was one thing Kaci Boudreaux knew, it was how to design a catapult. She’d nearly gotten herself a juvie record with that knowledge. But Ichabod, the catapult her team had entered, had been completely designed and built by the students.
“This means no homework for a month, right, Dr. Boudreaux?” Jess Peterson, a freshman who’d jumped right into the Physics Club with both feet at the start of the semester, flashed an impish grin.
“Why would I deprive anyone of the fun of physics homework? I’m fixin’ to treat all y’all to some ice cream though.”
The military boys were loading up their last shot. One of them snickered. Another shoved a third. Three more huddled overtheir pumpkin, rubbing it and whispering.
The judge said something to them, and all eight or nine backed up. Two of them wiped their hands on their pants.
