“Anticipation.”
“Hmm.”
He squatted beside her. “And the joy of an afternoon in your company.”
“Pushing it, Captain. Get your mitts off my potato gun.”
Dang man.
When he grinned at her like that, as thoughhe could see right through her bluster, she wanted to kiss him again.
She made quick work of checking that everything was in working order, then reached for her purse and pulled out a sack of potatoes. “Let’s get to it.”
“You’re not serious about orbit, are you? The FAA doesn’t like foreign objects in their airspace.”
“You going prissy on me, Captain Chicken Pants?”
“I’m goingadulton you.”
“No need to get your flight suit all tied up in a twist. We’ll keep it below the radar.” She cocked her head at him. “But Icouldput it in orbit.”
“I have every faith in you. Not so sure the dudes in the back row did though.”
Thedudes in the back, her fellow professors in the Physics Department, were no better or worse than any other set of menshe’d worked with. “They think I’m biding my time until I get knocked up with a few kids and decide to stay home instead of playing at being a scientist.”
“My sister gets that a lot too.” He grinned. “But she’s trained to fire real rockets. None of this homemade stuff.”
“You keep talking, I won’t let you do the firing.”
“It’s all my pent-up anger and frustration with women. I can’t help myself.”
She eyed him. He didn’tsoundpent-up and frustrated.
In fact, he sounded downright happy.
Those brown eyes went puppy-dog pathetic. “I’m sure I’ll be better after I fire your potato gun.”
“How long were y’all together?”
A muscle strained in his neck, and he shifted his attention to the burbling creek. “Three years.”
“Long time.”
“She was in school half of it. Getting a master’s in education. She took a ‘starter job’ with a high school in Atlanta last year, so I asked to be assigned here. Wasn’t my first choice, but it was the closest I could get.”
“And she didn’t want to move.”
His lips straightened into a grim line. “Couldn’t find a job here this fall. Should’ve known something was up when she wouldn’t move here and let me take care of her.”
“I liked moving when I was a kid,” Kaci said.
Lance turned a surprised look on her. “You did?”
She nodded. “I liked going where nobody knew me. Starting over. I’d always try to be someone else, tell the other kids I was secretly a princess in hiding, that sort of thing. After Momma settled us back home in Mississippi, I wished we could move again.I didn’t like my classmates and they didn’t like me.”
“That seems so unlikely.”
She shoved his arm, but despite all his valid reasons for not liking her, he was still here, egging her on. “My daddy understood me better than Momma ever has. I always knew he’d forgive me for whatever stories I made up, and then probably take me out to have some fun setting off bottle rockets or launching produce. But once he was gone, I had to try harder to fit in. I just—oh, listen to me. This here’s aboutyou.” She stood and dusted her pants, then grabbed her potato gun. “You’re gonna have to point it down the creek that way—that’s west, right?”
