“Your mother drank a lot, didn’t she?”
“Beauty queens don’t drink. They sip.” She dropped the crossbow in a box behind the table and gathered the rest of her things. “But this former Miss Grits is getting ready to school you in something called closure. You ready?”
He honestly didn’t think he needed closure, but if Kaci was taking him on a field trip to redneck land, he was all in. “Absolutely.”
13
Kaci told Lance to meet her at her place in half an hour. When she got home, her first stop was to check in with Wanda Hamm across the hall. Her sweet neighbor had taken Miss Higgs while Kaci was at work and Tara was in class, since Kaci hadn’t wanted to leave her cat alone. “How was she?” she whispered.
“Happy as can be,” Wanda replied. “She slept most of the day, but she ate the tuna you left.”
Miss Higgs was snore-purring on the Hamms’ flowered couch, but she opened one frosted eyeball and stretched a paw in greeting before drifting back to sleep.
“Do you mind keeping her for a few more hours?” Kaci asked. “I have a friend who needs some help with something, and Tara’s working tonight.”
“Of course. She’s welcome here anytime. Poor girl shouldn’t be alone at her age.”
She kissed the kitty’s head and thanked Wanda again. She darted to her own apartment, dug out a box from beneath her bed, grabbed a few supplies from the kitchen, and was back down in the parking lot as quickly as she could get there.
She’d just shut her tailgate when Lance pulled up beside her. He hopped down from his truck and eyed the back end of her Jeep. “Tell me you have a license for that.”
So he’d noticed what she was carrying. “Ain’t doubting me now, are you?”
“You didn’t say ‘ain’t’ once in your lecture.”
“Duh.”
He grinned at her, and she couldn’t helpsmiling back.
Things had been odd between them when he left her apartment last night—she’d kicked him out before Tara got home so she wouldn’t be subjected to any eye rolls or lectures from her roommate—but the minute he’d walked into her classroom, her heart had kicked into overdrive and launched itself against her ribs like it’d been shot out of a cannon.
He’d come all the way from the base to see her in the middle of the afternoon.
And she was irrationally happy to see him. She hadn’t gotten heart flutters over a boy since high school.
Temporary insanity, she told herself.
Otherwise, she’d worry what it meant for her long-term emotional health.
Because Kaci wanted to make tenure. She wanted to stay at James Robert. She wanted to keep doing her research, keepvolunteering with the Physics Club and other kids, and keep teaching students, both about physics and about life.
And Lance would get orders and leave one day.
Simple as that.
Her brain knew it. Her heart needed to remember it.
“So where are we going?” he asked.
“Little spot I know.”
After the pumpkin-chucking disaster, she wasn’t risking open fields anymore, even known open fields in the daylight. Instead, she steered her Jeep out of town, pointed it south, and kept going through pine forests and pecan orchards with the help of her phone for directions. With the windows down, talking was impossible.
After about an hour, she pulled onto a gravel road. Lance had been leaning back in his seat, but he sat straighter, his darkeyes going more alert. “Where are we?”
She flashed him a smile. “Somewhere we can’t hit a darn thing for miles.”
They bumped along the road for several minutes before she stopped in a little clearing that would’ve been fantastic for camping. She killed the engine, hopped out, and grabbed the case from the back. “Before we go, you sure you don’t want to keep those? Looks like you could get a pretty penny for the sparkly one.”
