Her Rebel Heart

by Jamie Farrell

  “Just didn’t want all y’all’s delicate male egos to take a hit,” Kaci called back.

  “You ever lose gracefully?”

  “Sugar, I don’t lose.”

  “Kaci, we kinda lost tonight,” Tara murmured.

  “Hush on up. This here’s called messing with their minds.”

  Lance stood, all six-foot-something tall, and sauntered to their table in what looked like two steps.

  Primitive interest stirred low in her belly.

  Chemical pheromones. Instinctive biological needs designed to ensure continuation of the species. Thank the heavens for evolved brains that were above all that.

  Nothing to do with her firsthand carnal knowledge of what he could do with his tongue. Or any curiosity over whether he’d be willing to give her another demonstration.

  “You know what’s irritating?” he said.

  “You talking?” she guessed.

  “I was going to say you talking.”

  She pulled herself out of her seat and stared him down. Didn’t matter that he had well over half a foot on her and that there was a little voice in her head reminding her she’d been wrong more than she’d been right when it came to this man. She was the daughter of a beauty queen, and beauty queens didn’t let anyone see them sweat.

  “That’s not very gentlemanly of you,” she said.

  “Your double standards are also irritating.”

  Holy Moses on a stick, the man was staring at her mouth.

  Maybe he did want to kiss her again. “Oh, I have double standards? Excuse me, Captain Make-The-Lady-Think-His-Grandmomma’s-Dying. And don’t get me started on what else you’ve done wrong.”

  “And you’re changing the subject. You lost, fair and square. Say it.”

  “You lost, fair and square,” she parroted.

  She had, and they both knew it. But his eyes were swirling into matching black holes, and she was too far inside their gravitational pull.

  “I’m starting to see why you’ve got an ex-husband.”

  Ooh, that was low. “That supposed to be an insult to him or me? Because you’re missing the mark on both.”

  “Do you just talk to hear yourself say words, or do you actually pay attention to what’s going on around you?”

  “The average wingspan of a camel is cake times force triangulated.”

  “Well, at least I know you’re not an idiot.” His sarcasm was lacking, those black holes had practically swallowed his irises, and she had the distinct impression that he could see the list in her soul that was bullet-pointed with every last one of her fears and insecurities.

  Which was the only possible explanation for everything that went down next.

  “Kaci? This chump bothering you?” Ron asked.

  She had to blink twice before she could tear her gaze from the intensity that was Lance’s attention on her, and then she had to blink again before her brain processed that her ex-husband had his hand on her elbow.

  She yanked her arm away. “Don’t touch me.”

  “If he’s a problem—” Ron started.

  If he was a problem? There was a problem all right. Her ex-husband wouldn’t leave her alone, and she was having irrationally pornographic thoughts about a freaking irritating, arrogant military pilot.

  “He ain’t a problem,” she said. “He’s my new boy toy, and this here’s called foreplay.”

  And before her brain could catch up, she yanked a fistful of Lance’s polo, went up on her tiptoes, and pulled him down to lay a smacker on his lips.

  Except somehow, that smacker turned into something more than just lips smeared together.

  Somehow, his hand cupped her neck.

  Somehow, his mouth parted over hers.

  And somehow, his teeth scraped over her lower lip, and then his tongue licked the sting away, and then a surge of primal lust made her want to wrap her thighs around his hips and see how much cowboy this flyboy had in him.

  “Move along, folks,” Tara said somewhere in the hazy distance. “Nothing to see here.”

  She wrenched her mouth free, immediately wishing she could put it back while simultaneously wondering if she shouldn’t have gone into researching time travel so she could rewind the past ten minutes to before she got a wild hair to make Ron jealous with Lance.

  Again.

  Ron was still there, waving his grumpies like a flag in a hurricane, his scowl so big it needed its own ZIP code. “Was that really necessary?”

  “No, but it was damn fun,” Lance said. He had one hand on her ass, and though he’d answered Ron, he was staring at her.

  As though he couldn’t decide if he’d lost his marbles or if he’d found the next best thing to chucking pumpkins.

  Her belly quivered.

  This man wasn’t safe. Or reliable. Or even nice.

  At least, not in her experience.

  “You go on home,” she said to Ron. “My business isn’t your business anymore.”

  Ron turned the colonel stare on Lance. “If you hurt her—”

  “Sugar, my momma’s got me covered,” Kaci interrupted. “And she don’t get him till after I’m done, and I know you know how I handle men who hurt me.”

  Ol’ Grandpappy gave a heavy sigh, but he moseyed away with a parting, “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  Kaci swallowed hard, then put on her daughter-of-a-beauty-queen posture and peered down her nose at Lance, even though she had to look way up to do it. “I do believe you can consider that debt paid in full. I trust we won’t have any reason for further communication after this.”

  “Sure,” he said. “We can do that.”

  She blinked. Seriously? It was that easy? “So glad you—”

  “If you can convince me that kiss didn’t make you feel anything.”

  Lordy goodness, that kiss made her feel something. That kiss made her feel everything.

  And that was terrifying. “Anything good, I assume you mean? Because I’m gonna tell you right now, you’re not backing out of this deal when I tell you that—that kiss, as you call it, made me feel bored.”

  Those black holes in his eyes were using their gravitational force to suck away her defenses.

  “It turned you on,” he murmured.

  She swallowed. “You being turned on ain’t the same as me being turned on. That’s called projecting, and you slobbering all over me didn’t even register with my lady bits.”

  She was such a liar.

  But the alternative was admitting this man got to her. And she was in a no-men zone. She had to be. Her research, her job, getting to Germany all took priority. “Tara, let’s get out of here.”

  “You talk a good talk, Pixie-lou,” he said, “but you felt something. Can’t deny it.”

  “Can and did.” She faked a yawn. “Y’all enjoy your night.”

  “You afraid to feel?” he asked. “Or are you afraid to feel with me?”

  “Wow, how much did you have to drink tonight?” Tara gripped Kaci’s arm and tugged. “Hope one of your buddies is driving you home, Captain.”

  Breaking eye contact physically hurt. Like plucking a suction cup off the inside of her elbow. But Kaci tore her gaze away anyway, then turned to follow Tara.

  “Still expect payment on that bill,” Lance called.

  Kaci kept her head high, but she couldn’t find the oomph to put a swing in her step too.

  That man was downright terrifying.

  Not because she felt violated by his kiss.

  If Ol’ Grandpappy could’ve kissed her like that, they might still be married.

  No, she felt violated by his insight into her psyche.

  “He’s so dadgum full of himself,” she said to Tara. “I got me half a mind to make him pay for putting me in a spot like that.”

  “For kissing you like that?” Tara said dryly. “Because I’m not sure that deserves vengeance so much as it deserves an encore. At least, if it were me, I’d be going for the encore.”

  “For teasing me,�
� she said. “And sending me that ridiculous bill.”

  Tara slid her a sideways glance. “You want war?”

  Kaci sagged against her Jeep. Did she want war? Or was she already at war? “What’re you proposing?”

  “I know a guy who used to be in the 946th, and I also know where they keep their mascot. If you ask me, the captain’s good for a battle.”

  “Tara Shivers, you are a terrible influence on me.” But, oh, did taking his mascot sound tempting. He wanted her to feel something? He wanted her to pay a big bill? She’d dang well get her money’s worth.

  “You can thank me later,” Tara said.

  Kaci grinned at her. “You bet your britches I will.”

  Chapter 6

  If any of Kaci’s students had told her that they were considering sneaking into a rival fraternity house to steal a mascot, she would’ve threatened to call their mommas and have the police waiting for them.

  But the beautiful thing about being a full-fledged grown-up was that she didn’t have to make the same threats against herself that she did to her students. Which was why, Saturday night, she and Tara were decked out in black, creeping along the edge of a cornfield and heading toward a shed at the very edge of town limits.

  “This is great research,” Tara whispered. “I need inspiration for writing a man cave.”

  “But remember—no pictures, no fingerprints, and no vaguebooking on social media. Even a little,” Kaci whispered back.

  “They’re going to know it was you.”

  “Don’t mean I have to make it easy for them to prove.” A felony breaking-and-entering charge on her record would probably cause some issues with her dean, among other hoity-toities at James Robert. Not to mention the ammunition it would give the sexist pigs on the tenure committee. But she still remembered her daddy laughing over stories of stealing rival squadrons’ mascots and the pranks that had been pulled in retribution.

  This here was good old-fashioned fun.

  “Remember, if we get caught, run.”

  “And if we get caught again, embellish our stories enough that they don’t sound rehearsed.” Tara giggled. “I knew all those episodes of NCIS would come in handy one day.”

  “Girl, no more military shows. We’re over military men, remember?”

  “Ssh. Was that a dog?”

  Kaci stopped. She strained to listen, but all she heard were crickets and other night insects.

  “I guess not,” Tara whispered. “C’mon. Let’s go.”

  They crept up to the corner of the shed, squatting closer and closer to the ground as they went, Kaci clutching a pink stuffed pig from one of those kids’ shows she’d heard the department secretary moaning about. They passed evidence of a bonfire, along with a decomposing pile of pumpkin guts.

  This looked like the place. According to Tara’s friend, one of the guys in the squadron owned the land out here, and he’d converted the back-lot toolshed to a bar that all the guys could hang out at. A house was visible in the distance, barely outlined in the light from the waning moon. The house’s windows were all dark, as were the windows in the shed.

  “You know how to pick a lock?” Tara whispered.

  “I’m a physicist, not a criminal,” she whispered back. “But if lots of these guys use this place, there has to be a key hidden somewhere.”

  “Like in a flowerpot?” Tara deadpanned.

  “More like under a fake dead skunk, from what I’ve seen of these boys.”

  They crept about the edges of the building, checking beneath windows and on top of the doorframe. On the second pass around, Kaci almost tripped over a rock. “Huh.”

  She knelt on the ground and felt beneath it. “Bingo.”

  Tara crept back to join her. “What if they have an alarm system?”

  “Sugar, they got at least a dozen dumb flyer jocks who know where this key is. You think they’re gonna ask ’em to remember an alarm code to get in here?”

  “Pilots have really good memories for stuff that’s important,” Tara whispered back. “I dated this guy in college who used to recite emergency procedures in his sleep.”

  Kaci slid the key into the lock. “Guess we’ll find out the hard way.” She had to jiggle it, but eventually, the lock turned. She twisted the knob, and it released with a click that echoed through the night.

  “Ssh!” Tara hissed.

  No lights flipped on, no security systems beeped, no lasers lit the night—not that lasers worked the way Hollywood said, and Kaci would know—and no masked ninjas leapt out to stop them. “Your flashlight ready?” she asked.

  “Ten-four, good buddy.”

  They slipped into the dark shed. Tara hit the switch on her flashlight, and both of them gasped.

  The planked oak floor wasn’t unusual. The bearskin rug wasn’t unexpected. The bar running the length of the back wall, big-screen TV, pool table, and man-couches were requisite.

  But the centerpiece of the room was a taxidermied wild boar, complete with tusks, Mardi Gras beads, and a maid’s cap. Its gray-black fur had patches of wear, as though it had once been used for target practice, or maybe as though the guys in the squadron had rubbed the thing’s lucky shoulder one too many times. Beneath its marble eyes, proud snout, and curved tusks, its mouth was split in a goofy grin.

  “Sweet baby Jeremiah the bullfrog,” she whispered.

  “This is so going in a book,” Tara whispered. “I’ve only ever heard rumors of her existence. That has to be Gertrude. Bet she weighs two hundred pounds if she weighs an ounce.”

  “Nah, they took out her innards.” They were probably still looking at dragging forty to fifty pounds of stuffed boar across a cornfield though.

  Her pulse amped up, and she grinned. She’d have to drive her Jeep out here, and they had to do it without being heard or seen, and somehow cover up the boar for the ride home.

  If she was taking this thing home. It was a beaut, but even Kaci’s redneck had a limit.

  She plopped the twelve-inch pink stuffed pig onto the bar, right next to the pumpkin-chuckin’ trophy that should’ve gone to her girls, then circled back around the boar. “Gertrude, sugar, we’re fixin’ to take you joyriding.”

  “Kaci, I don’t think we can—”

  “Don’t you be doubting us now. We came, we saw, and we’re gonna conquer.”

  “Before or after we get caught?”

  That was the real question of the night, wasn’t it?

  * * *

  Sunday afternoons were supposed to be for watching football games.

  Instead, Lance was standing in the middle of Pony’s man cave with half the squadron, stone-cold sober and honestly more pissed than he’d been when Allison called off the wedding.

  “What kind of fucker would steal Gertrude?” Pony snarled.

  “Could’ve been the fighter jocks,” Juice Box said.

  Lance eyed the pink stuffed pig sitting right where Gertrude was supposed to be, and his brain flashed back to a sassy blonde.

  She wouldn’t have.

  She couldn’t have.

  Could she?

  “No ransom note?” he asked.

  “Just the fucking pink cartoon animal.”

  Was that something Kaci Boudreaux would do?

  And what was with hoping it was? Chick was trouble with a capital W-O-M-A-N. But worse because she was smart, and she knew it. She was also a walking wet dream, and she knew it. And she was dangerous, which she honestly might not know.

  “Your sister got any friends in the fighter squadron here?” Pony asked Lance.

  Odds were good. She’d either know somebody, or she’d know somebody who knew somebody.

  How things worked in their world. “Probably be quicker to go pay them a visit than to wait for Cheri to call around.”

  “Got footprints out back,” somebody called.

  “We reporting this to the cops?” Juice Box said.

  Lance and Pony shared a look.

  None of them had been at Gellings
when Gertrude became the mascot for the 946th, but they both knew the story. There had been a refueler squadron here several years back, and the flying hogs had relieved them of their mascot not long before they went inactive and transferred to other bases.

  So while the unofficial story was that they’d given Gertrude a new home, the real version might call into question the boar’s true ownership.

  And nobody wanted the squadron to look bad.

  “We didn’t sign up for the military to hand our problems off to the local LEOs,” he said.

  “And this here, Juicy, is called tradition,” Pony added. “We’ll get her back. Question is, how much are the tiny dicks gonna pay first?”

  A rumble of agreement went through the room.

  “You sure it’s not that hot professor chick?” Juice Box said.

  A few of the guys snorted.

  He had an inexplicable desire to shove Juicy up against a wall and tell him to permanently remove Dr. Kaci Boudreaux from his brain and vocabulary.

  Kid was sniffing around something that’d get him in trouble.

  Never mind Lance wanted a little more of that trouble for himself.

  “That professor chick couldn’t have done this,” Pony said. “She throws. She doesn’t carry.”

  More laughs bounced around the party room.

  But Pony had said the exact wrong thing.

  That Kaci couldn’t have done it.

  Kaci could do any fucking thing she put her mind to.

  She was like Allison that way.

  That was the only way she was like Allison, though. Kaci didn’t seem the type to put on dinners or volunteer to teach Sunday school or to wear a dress.

  “Besides, how would she know Gertrude exists?” Pony added.

  Because Lance told her.

  That should’ve prompted a shitstorm of expletives in his head, but instead, he caught himself smiling again.

  Would she have?

  Undoubtedly.

  And the would removed any doubt about the could, because if he had learned anything about Dr. Kaci Boudreaux, he’d learned she never stopped.

  * * *