Yeah, the last thing she wanted was for her overactive brain to flash to that jerk while she was flicking the bean. Bath first. Orgasms second.
Twenty minutes later, she was chin-deep in bubbles, her hair pulled up into a top knot, and halfway into the perfect sexy-times fantasy that involved a guy with a brain as big as his biceps when the perfect plan to kill off Todd hit her. Why it always worked out this way in the tub, she had no idea, but she wasn’t about to question it. She had a solution and best of all, with her heart broken because she’d been dumped, people would give her space at the lab to work away her sadness. It was the best of all the worlds—no more Todd and a license to work her face off. Satisfied but a little drowsy, she answered the buzz of her phone without thinking first.
MEEMAW: You won’t believe what that snake did now.
Kinsey giggled. There was no need to ask who the snake was, considering it was bingo night.
KINSEY: Mr. Fairbanks is just doing his job.
The three little chat dots popped up immediately. Oh man. Whatever had gone down in the Elks Lodge, it must have been wild. The old people took their church-sanctioned gambling seriously.
MEEMAW: He cheats.
All that explained it. Ashley Yeats must have won two in a row. Mr. Fairbanks had dated Miss Ashley a million years ago, and now that she was a widow, he had his eye on her. The whole town was watching and waiting to see if he’d be successful in getting a second chance. That, however, didn’t mean he was throwing bingo in her favor.
KINSEY: You can’t prove that.
GRIFF: Can we leave at six thirty instead?
Heart doing a little fluttery thing—obviously, she must have run the bath too hot—she stared at the new message notification from Griff a minute before clicking on it and responding.
KINSEY: Sure.
She’d barely hit Send when a new message notification popped up.
MEEMAW: So I’m assuming you’ve figured out the Todd problem by now?
Her plan was the perfect distraction to get Meemaw to forget about Mr. Fairbanks and his probably cheating ways.
KINSEY: Figured out the perfect way to kill off Todd.
GRIFF: WHAT?!
Kinsey sat straight up in the tub, sending water sloshing over the side. She checked the message she’d just sent and then the name of the person she was sending it to. Then, because maybe things would change if she looked again, she closed her eyes, counted to ten, and then opened them to look again. The information hadn’t changed. She’d sent that last message to Griff instead of Meemaw.
Holding her phone in the air, she sank down under the water to her eyebrows.
Shit.
Shit.
Shit.
She stayed under until her lungs started sending an SOS and reemerged, wiping away the bubbles from her face before she opened her eyes. She immediately wished she’d stayed under longer.
GRIFF: ON MY WAY OVER
Oh shit.
Oh fuck.
Oh fold her up and make her eat stale store-bought biscuits for the rest of her life.
She scrambled out of the tub, leaving wet footprints across the tile as she hurried as fast as she could to grab her robe and wrap it around her—realizing as soon as she did that drying off with the towel first would have been far more prudent. Now it was sticking to her skin, and she was still dripping water everywhere she went.
The option of drying off disappeared, though, at that second because there was a knock on the front door.
“Kinsey,” Griff called through the door. “We need to talk.”
She closed her eyes and sent up a prayer. Not that it would help. Even Dolly Parton—patron saint of women, corn bread, and country music—couldn’t save her now. Kinsey was well and truly screwed.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Griff
Griff had a set of keys to Morgan’s place, and his first instinct had been to use them because whatever this Todd asshole had done to Kinsey to make her consider knocking him off, it had to be bad—really bad—and that meant he wanted to help make sure the sniveling little prick got what was coming to him.
Okay, he wasn’t about to go the do-you-want-to-bury-a-body route, but he’d definitely gain a set of bloody knuckles if that’s what was needed.
Who in the hell are you right now?
At the moment? The guy people assumed he was when they saw him and crossed the street to avoid meeting him head-on—and all because Kinsey was hurt enough to plot murder.
Not that he thought she’d actually kill someone, but the idea she’d been pushed to considering it—even if it was just a joke—had him about to lose it. That’s why he’d grabbed the spare keys to Morgan’s place, stormed out of his apartment, and then had turned around, jaw aching from hard clenching, and had put the keys back in the junk drawer next to the fridge.
Now here he was, cooling his fucking heels on the wrong side of the door.
Kinsey opened the door a whole two inches. “Griff, it’s not what you think.”
Yeah, and the last thing they needed was to be discussing revenge in the hall with all the security and closed-circuit TVs this building had. “Let me in.”
“I’m sure it sounded serious but when I said—”
“Kinsey,” he said, laying a shit-ton of shut-the-fuck-up in the one word as he cut his gaze toward the security camera by the elevator.
She let out a soft sigh. Then she opened the door.
The second he walked into Morgan’s living room—Kinsey’s living room, too, now—he froze. Well, his dick and his brain kept moving, but the rest of him shut the fuck down. Her hair was all in a giant blond ball of fluff on top of her head. That ball was dry, but the rest of her hair was soaked, dripping water that followed the long line of her neck and soaked the collar of her robe.
Meanwhile, the blue cotton material was soaked and clung to her every curve from the rounded mounds of her tits to the dip of her waist and back out again at her hips. Bountiful. Kinsey Dalton was fucking bountiful.
It was almost enough to melt his brain, until he realized what he was doing and how damn disrespectful it was—she was, after all, in her own home and he’d basically already barged in. So he forced his focus upward to her face, but the trajectory of his gaze traveled right over the hard points of her nipples.
Some part of his brain noticed that one was higher than the other and the perfect so-called imperfection made her even hotter to him. Griff locked that information away to analyze and appreciate fully later. Fine, he shouldn’t be appreciating Kinsey’s nipples, but he was human and she was fucking fantastic and there was no way he’d ever forget it.