Fucking A. Being willing to watch each other wallow in the emotional gutters of heartbreak was harsh even for their brand of competitiveness. If Griff bought that bullshit Nash was slinging, he’d be pissed as hell. But he knew his cousins better. Soft touches, the both of them. This was reverse psychology at its most elementary.
Anyway, it wasn’t like he wasn’t already uncomfortably familiar with the sensation of caring about someone who didn’t give a flying fuck about him.
Hello, daddy issues, it’s Griff calling.
Loosening the tightness in his jaw—and giving his molars a break—he rolled his head from side to side like he did before stepping into the ring or sitting down in the chair at the tattoo parlor for the latest addition to his full sleeves. Battle required focus and calm. Usually, it took all his concentration to quiet the billion and one thoughts clanging around in his head—or the sound of Kinsey’s voice, but he wasn’t going into that now. He wasn’t about to give that up to his cousins.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said as he started scanning the latest report on the new extreme hydration serum they were launching next year.
“Because you’re not gonna catch feelings?” Nash scoffed.
“No.” He already had—but his cousins didn’t need to know that. No one needed to know that, because he was going to fix it. That’s what he did. He found solutions to impossible problems, like falling in love at first sight with an engaged woman. Hell, he hadn’t even seen Kinsey before he had fallen over the edge into this mess. Well, he had six dates to climb his way out of the chaos and fall out of love with Kinsey Dalton, because unrequited love was the last thing he needed in his life. “Kinsey Dalton is not going to be the love of my life.”
“That may be the case, but let’s go through the motions anyway,” Dixon said. “When you wouldn’t answer your texts last night, we had a great conversation with Kinsey, setting everything up for tonight.”
Griff grunted an of course. He’d figured that was the case with what Kinsey had said this morning.
“You have reservations at Montclair’s,” Nash said, not even pretending that the place wasn’t Griff’s biggest nightmare.
He let out a groan that he felt all the way down to the jagged scar on the top of his big toe. “You’re kidding.”
His cousins’ evil chuckles told him exactly how much they were not.
Exclusive, expensive, and exhausting—those were the three words Griff would use to describe Montclair’s, the restaurant that had become the it place for dates. According to the media—because God knew he would rather have every tattoo removed than set foot voluntarily in that place. Snobby. Overpriced. Tiny little servings of food. A no-cell-phones rule so he couldn’t monitor his latest eBay auction bids when the conversation with Kinsey petered out—and it would; it always did with him.
Montclair’s was hell on earth, and Griff had reservations.
Chapter Seventeen
Griff
The sky had just opened up and rain started to pelt Griff on the shoulders when he threw open the door to Montclair’s and rushed inside. It wasn’t like he was gonna melt or anything, but looking like a drowned rat in front of Kinsey was not his ideal. His plan was to fall out of love with her as fast as possible, not embarrass himself.
Good luck with that.
Clenching his jaw, Griff ran his fingers through his hair, clearing the sound of his father’s voice out of his head. He’d been ditching the old man’s calls all day and it had him on edge—something he nearly teetered over when he spotted Kinsey chatting with the man in the tux standing behind the host station. Unlike him, she’d found the time to go home and change before dinner.
Her back was to him as she chatted with the maître d’ at the host stand. She’d freed her hair from the morning’s tight ponytail and let it flow down across her shoulders in golden waves and had changed from the all-black work outfit to an icy-blue dress that clung to her curves and had him ready to swallow his tongue. She looked like she’d just walked off an Alfred Hitchcock movie set, the cool blonde who was up to something—the only question was which side she was on.
She turned when the door shut behind him, her smile genuine. “Oh, good. I was afraid you weren’t coming.”
He went to say hi, but nothing came out. Instead, he just stood there with his mouth clamped shut and his eyes wide as his brain took a side trip to a fantasy land where he got to unzip that dress and let it fall to her feet, fill his hands with her tits, and listen to that honeyed drawl as she came on his fingers, his tongue, his dick. The number of scenarios that flooded his mind replaced all other thoughts and plans. His auction strategy, his plans for the next round of safety tests on the new CC cream formulations, his unwinding of Nash’s suspect motivations for this bet, and his half-assed plots to shut down his feelings for Kinsey disappeared.
There was just her, taking up all the space in his head and the calm that settled in his chest even as the rest of him revved up, tempted beyond rational thought into wanting her to fall for him like he had for her—like a two-ton block of concrete tossed into the harbor.
The guy in the tux at the host table held out his hand, palm upward. “Just a friendly reminder that the use of phones is strictly prohibited on the premises, sir.”
That brought Griff back to reality.
She was engaged to someone else.
This was a pity date.
She didn’t want him or to be here.
He needed to accept all of that and fall out of love with her as fast as he’d fallen for her. He could do it—he had to do it—or he was exactly as smart as that box of rocks his dad was always comparing him to.
He tightened his grip on his lifeline to work—not to mention the eBay auction for the vintage 1994 Lego Eiffel Tower set. “No. I have an eBay bid.”
That sounded even sillier out loud than it had in his head, and he gritted his jaw.
The man tapped the sign that stated communication devices were not to be used inside. “Then I’m afraid I can’t let you in.”
So be it. That just made things easier. If he didn’t spend time with Kinsey, then it would be that much easier to ignore this pull she had on him.
Gaze still locked on Kinsey, he took in the way she watched him, with total focus, as if she was trying to unravel him. Oh, honey, I’m already beyond unraveled for you. Shit. That is not what he needed to be thinking about. Instead, his attention should be on winning the Eiffel Tower set that at three and a half feet high was the tallest kit Lego had ever released and came with four elevators and nearly 3,500 bricks. People didn’t put the unopened kits up for sale very often, and the auction closed in half an hour.