But that wasn’t why he was here. He shut the door behind him, planted his feet shoulder-width apart, and crossed his arms. Was that to keep himself from reaching for her, pulling her closer so he could envelop her in his arms, hold her close, and show her that he was on her side now, tomorrow, and forever?
Yeah. It was.
It fucking sucked.
“You can’t kill Todd.” Pulling his attention away from the way she looked standing in the middle of the living room with the city skyline glimmering in the rush-hour sunlight behind her, he marshaled his mental activity to finding a solution that wouldn’t end with a felony charge. “But we can make his life hell.”
Kinsey wrapped her arms around her middle and did this grimace-smile thing that wrinkled her nose. “That’s sweet, but—”
“Not sweet.” He was very much not fucking sweet, or nice, or some other bullshit right now. He was pissed. No. Furious. It made his entire body tense as adrenaline surged through him. All he could think about was protecting Kinsey—not from herself. The woman was beyond capable of that. No, he wanted to do whatever it took to help her get her vengeance. “How bad do you want him to hurt?”
Her blue eyes went wide. “Griff.”
He waited, but there wasn’t anything after that; it was just his name. He couldn’t blame her. They’d just met. To her, he was only her friend’s older brother. She was pity fake dating him. He meant nothing to her even if she meant everything to him.
“No one gets to do whatever the hell he’s done to you.” He held up his hand when she opened her mouth to speak. “You don’t have to tell me what he did. It doesn’t matter. It’s upset you. That can’t stand.” It might have been the most words he’d spoken in years. Yet they were still coming, bubbling up inside him and fighting to get out. “So we have options. We’ll approach it like a boxing match. What are his weak points? How much damage do you want to inflict? How can I help?”
Kinsey’s mouth was agape as she stared at him, blinking. “He’s not real.”
Now that stopped his mouth cold. Each one of the words made sense on their own, but put together in the context of her fiancé, Todd? It was a glitch in the matrix. “What?”
She closed her eyes and let out a long, deep breath through her nose. Then she opened her eyes, looked him dead in the face, and said, “I made Todd up. He’s not real.”
Griff’s brain screeched to a halt. It was just white noise between his ears that was loud enough to almost drown out his raging pulse and the internal scream of fuck yeah.
After an audible gulp, she started pacing from one end of the long L-shaped couch to the other, a hand clutching her robe, no doubt so it wouldn’t flutter open with the speed of her walking. “Okay, so I know it was immature and ridiculous, but it was the best solution I could come up with at the time.” She turned and headed back toward him, her cheeks pink with obvious embarrassment and her eyes watery. “I—”
He held up his hand. She fell silent, her whole body tense and her gaze locked on some object over his left shoulder.
“Let me get this straight,” he said, his brain catching back up and the never-ending line of possibilities, options, and opportunities speeding through his mind like cars on the Autobahn. “Todd—your fiancé—isn’t real. He doesn’t live in Canada. The ring is fake.” He paused long enough for her to nod her confirmation that he was right. “I’m assuming you got sick of dealing with all the bullshit that goes along with being a woman in the lab and went with a rapid-acting solution.”
She nodded.
It was science’s dirty little not-so-secret. An old-boys’-club network that advised against hiring women, as they were often a distraction for others in the lab and the scientists whose egos couldn’t take being turned down for a date so they retaliated. It had all gone public a few years ago on social media and, while the sunshine had disinfected it somewhat, the assholes lingered. The scientific cosmetic industry was insular and hard to break into. Her laser-focused self had zoned in on the fastest, simplest, most efficient solution to the problem with a fake fiancé.
“So there’s no Todd in danger of being murdered?” he asked, as if he wasn’t already sixty steps ahead of that point.
She shook her head and let out a sardonic chuckle. “Not by me.”
No.
Todd.
The staticky sounds disappeared under a once-in-a-lifetime-size wave of fuck yes. Kinsey Dalton—the woman he loved—was single. He had a chance. Forget falling out of love with her, which was pretty much impossible anyway.
Now he just needed to make her fall in love with him.
Oh yeah, that should be a piece of cake, because you’ve got such an amazing way with words.
Pinching the bridge of his nose to keep from going further down that thought hole, Griff slammed the door on his father’s voice inside his head—the one always predicting failure and fuckups in every part of his life that wasn’t inside a lab.
“You’re pissed,” Kinsey said. “I understand if you don’t want to go on any more of the dates. I’m sorry.”
The dates. That’s how he could do this—but it wasn’t going to happen because he’d lied about his intentions. “You might be the one to want to back out of the dates.”
She rested her butt against the back of the couch and cocked her head. “Why?”
He closed the space between them, putting his hands on either side of her, his grip on the couch tight enough that the wood framing bit into his palms. “Because I fell hard for you the minute I heard you in the gym solve five problems in one breath.”
The words came out of his mouth a million times more confident than he felt, the potent mix of want and need and hope powering him.
“That moment was pure super-achievement porn. I still think about it.” The urge to tilt her chin upward so he could kiss her, hold her, fuck her until she came around him had his toes on the edge of somewhere dangerous, which was exactly why he couldn’t let himself touch her—not yet. “You have a fucking sexy brain.”
It physically hurt to move away from her, but he had to. He wasn’t just some Neanderthal here to throw Kinsey over his shoulder and carry her back to his cave. He took a half step back, but her hand on his arm, her touch so light it was barely there, stopped him from taking another.
She straightened up, moving forward to fill the space he’d vacated, and lifted her face so she was looking him in the eye. “My brain?”
“Sexiest thing I’ve ever encountered.” Five words that were the greatest truth he’d ever known.
Cupping his face with her soft hands, she raised herself up on her tiptoes. “Thank you.”