Kaci jumped up beside him. “Uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?”
He glanced down at the potato gun.
Still pink, still in one piece.
She pointed. “You done took off the top of that tree.”
As they watched, the top fifteen feet or so of the pine wobbled, then slowly toppled, crashing end over end into the forest below with a rustling, muted crash.
“Who’d you say owns this land?”
“It’s the backside of a national forest,” she whispered.
He scooped up a third potato and shoved it into the barrel. “So I should hurry?”
“Might not be a bad idea.”
It took less than thirty seconds for him to shove Allison’s wedding band into the potato and finish loading the gun.
And the satisfaction that came from shooting it far, far over the trees wasn’t something he could’ve gotten from flying a plane, drinking with his buddies, or even getting laid.
It was a farewell. A farewell, and a truewelcome to Georgia.
And he felt lighter than he’d ever thought he could be here.
They packed up the potato gun and hustled back to Kaci’s Jeep.
“So,” she said once they were safely back on the road, “you have dinner plans?”
He let his hand slide down her thigh and squeezed the firm muscle. “Hope so.”
She flashed that impish grin his way, complete with a promise of what she wanted to do to him once they were off the road, and for that moment—and several hours afterward—all was right in his world.
14
Tuesday morning, while Miss Higgs was home with Tara and while Kacicould’vebeen in her lab running numbers, she booked her airplane ticket to Germany.
Her stomach knotted so hard she almost had to bend over, but it was done.
She was going to Stuttgart. She’d present her research and subsequent hypotheses to some of the world’s most brilliant minds. The stuffy old billy goats who had run the Physics Department here at James Robert for decades wouldn’t be able to keep her out.
Because after she did Stuttgart, she’dapply to go to other conferences. She’d put on her professor face, and she’d show them all that she could do it.
And no one else would ever have to know she’d been afraid to get on an airplane.
She was still perspiring, though, when someone knocked on her office door. She fanned her blouse and took a slow, even breath. “It’s open,” she called.
And dang if Ron Kelly himself didn’t walk in.
She barely kept herself from rolling her eyes. “Dr. Kelly.”
“Great news,” he said. “I’m going with you to Stuttgart.”
“The hell you say.”
“My department chair saw your planned topic, and he thought it would be good for me to be there in case you need backup.”
