Kinsey Anne Dalton!
A quiet beep sounded, and the elevator doors opened up. Morgan stepped inside, but meanwhile Kinsey was still standing in front of the closed door of her new temporary home and her feet were refusing to work. She took a deep breath as discreetly as possible and did her best to pull herself back together when she felt as out of place as salt in the sugar bowl.
Oh God, what had she done?
She was living next door to temptation, and that was just as bad as living in the shitty apartment with the toilet in the kitchen—well, almost. Either way, she felt like a woman who was going to be caught out in the open with her drawers down.
“You ready?” he asked, holding the door to the open elevator for her.
No. She most definitely was not ready for whatever was coming next.
Chapter Ten
Griff
Kinsey was here at Dixon’s house, talking to everyone and having a grand old time, while all Griff could do was stand on the edge of the living room and scowl while scrolling through the work email on his phone.
Of course, he still clocked the way she laughed at all the right spots when Dixon told her about being chased by Grandma Betty’s attack goose at Gable House. While he shot off a quick emailed response to a question about the latest test results for a new line of hydrating lipstick, he couldn’t help but notice how she heaped praise on Morgan for helping her pick out the perfect bottle of wine to bring to dinner and confessed that she came from more of a moonshine and sweet tea family. Then, when she and Dixon’s fiancée, Fiona, bonded over the importance of STEM education for elementary students, he ignored the incoming text from his dad and shut out everything else but Kinsey.
Normally, this would be where all the pieces clicked together, quick and easy to create a solution. This time? Yeah, he had a better chance of getting Nash to stop talking for twenty-four hours than to make sense of the situation with Kinsey and how he’d been so fucking wrong about love.
He’d done his research. Lust was simply a chemical reaction, a twin hit of dopamine and norepinephrine, followed by a wave of serotonin and then the release of oxytocin and vasopressin to seal the deal. That’s what people were talking about when they said they were in love. They were only putting a life-complicating societal construct on top of what was simply biology. At least, that’s what he’d thought until Kinsey Dalton walked into his gym and he knew the second he’d heard her go general on three grown men that she was the one for him—the woman he hadn’t even realized he’d been waiting for.
Caught completely unprepared, he had no plan, no ideas, and no fucking clue. What was he supposed to do when he’d finally met “the one” and not only was she engaged already, but he couldn’t talk to her even if she were single and flirting her perfect ass off with him? He was an idiot.
A second text notification from his dad flashed across his screen.
Right on time to remind me what an idiot I am, Pops? His dad had won a Nobel Prize in chemistry at the age of forty-two, and to say he was self-important would be an understatement. He loved nothing better than to point out how Griff was wasting what little intelligence he’d inherited from his father on barbecue sauce and Lego sets. It was everything in Griff not to remind his father that he also managed all of R&D for the most innovative cosmetics company in the world.
Knowing he’d regret it, but that it was better than floundering for solutions to a problem that didn’t have any, he tapped the notification.
DAD: The state of affairs Morgan has created for herself is vexatious.
Jesus. And to think half his DNA was from this pompous asshole. Griff looked up from the screen, his gaze catching Kinsey’s. That same shock of awareness that had thrown him at the gym when he’d heard her the first time hit him again, making his jaw ache all over, as if Mac had just landed that bone breaker of a punch a second time.
She smiled at him, and everything went fucking haywire. It was like his brain sent the signal to his mouth to turn up at the corners, but instead his body said fuck that noise and he jerked his head down so fast, his chin almost hit his chest.
DAD: Hello? Are you there? Is your silence because of a question about the definition of the words I used or do you disagree?
The message had Griff grinding his teeth. Just because he chose not to use it didn’t mean he didn’t have a fucking world-class vocabulary. It was so typical of his dad when he was drinking. The insults that sliced right through any of Griff’s defenses. The declarations about the stupidity of everyone who wasn’t Holden Beckett. The inserting himself into everyone else’s business with the intent to force people into living the way he wanted. Still, Griff and Morgan were all the bitter old man had left, so Griff pulverized his molars and maintained limited contact, mostly via text.
Shoving aside the urge to ignore what was no doubt a rye-fueled stewing session, Griff started to type out a response in hopes that all the old man needed was to vent, and then he wouldn’t sling his poison at Morgan.
GRIFF: What situation and why are you concerned?
DAD: This new roommate of hers. It’s highly unusual that someone your sister just met is invited to live with her. Is this a flimflam? Have you conducted a thorough background check?
It was as if their dad had never met his daughter. Morgan was impulsive and headstrong in all caps with a soft heart for everyone and everything. She was exactly the kind of person who would share an apartment with a stranger. Kinsey, however, was no stranger.
GRIFF: She’s known Kinsey for years.
DAD: Online. That’s not real.
GRIFF: Bullshit.
The throb started behind his right eye, the one that always seemed to make an appearance whenever he talked to his dad.
DAD: Cursing is the last resort of the intellectually lacking.
He forced out a long breath as he counted to ten and loosened his white-knuckled grip on the phone before letting himself answer.
GRIFF: Is there a point to this conversation?
DAD: You should be watching over your sister.
He let out a pained groan as his temples got in on the throbbing in his eye. He should have known better. No good ever came from responding to his dad’s texts. The only thing worse would be to visit the family home upstate in person so that he could see his dad drunk enough that he stood at such a tilt that he nearly tipped over. The man was brilliant, a stone-cold genius—even now, when his brain was pickled, he was the smartest person Griff had ever met.
He was also an asshole who wanted to control Griff and Morgan as if they were still children.
GRIFF: Kinsey’s a grown woman.
DAD: Exactly.
He didn’t even know how to process that level of misogyny. That was four-hundred-course level of patronizing patriarchy even for their dad, who excelled at it so much that Griff didn’t even have to put any effort into hearing his dad voice a million unwelcome thoughts in that vein.