“What do you do to relax?” she asked, her gaze intent on him as if no matter what the answer was, she’d be fascinated. “You have to have more hobbies.”
He was hot, his palms were slick, and his dick was getting hard. He had a plan for this, dammit, and it didn’t involve coming in his pants on the Waterbury Expressway.
“Legos,” he said, grinding out the single word. “I have a whole room’s worth and some more in storage.”
She let out a little gasp. “You have an entire room devoted to Legos?”
His gut twisted. Well, there it was. He’d lost her now.
“That is so cool!” She clapped her hands together. “What’s the biggest one you’ve ever made? Do you display them or is the room for building only? How long have you done it? How’d you get started?”
The rapid-fire questions and her enthusiasm quieted all his other thoughts, and he relaxed back against the leather seat.
“The Lego Architect Colosseum, which has more than nine thousand pieces and is based on the Roman one.” He continued answering her questions in order. “Yes. Since I was a kid. And my mom got me started. She used to do them with me, and when she died, there were a bunch left over that we’d planned on doing. I did them on my own and just kept doing them.”
They’d spread them out on the big dining room table that sat twenty, the one they only used when Dad was home and insisted. By the time Griff and his mom started building, he, Morgan, and Mom ate on the counter-height square table for four in the kitchen six days a week. They’d still used the crystal glasses—one filled with wine, the other two with cherry-flavored water—and the dishes came from one five-star restaurant or executive chef or another, but they got to sit close enough to one another that no one had to shout to be heard. That had all ended with the accident. After that, Dad still stayed away most nights or locked himself up in his study while he and Morgan made do with YouTube cooking tips and online grocery delivery.
Kinsey reached out and gave his shoulder a squeeze. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
Of course she’d known before he’d said anything. “Morgan told you.”
“Yeah.” She moved her hand back into her lap and turned her body so she was facing front again, her face angled so she was looking out the passenger window. “We bonded in our group over missing moms.”
He got into the far-right lane in prep for the off ramp. “Your mom’s dead?”
She shook her head. “My mom is still alive, she’s just out there somewhere doing whatever it is that’s more important than the kids she left on her mother’s doorstep. I haven’t talked to her in years. Sometimes there’s a Christmas card.”
“Ouch.”
She let out a sigh. “Pretty much.”
He pulled off the expressway, and they drove the five blocks to Paint and Sip in silence.
Way to go, numb nuts. Got any other topics you want to ask her about? Maybe her last heartbreak or when she lost her first pet?
He parked in the small lot on the corner—he sucked at parallel parking—and they sat there for a second.
“Sorry for dredging up mom stuff,” he said.
“It’s okay. I usually don’t tell people about her. It’s just that with you…” She paused and then gave him a shy half smile. “Well, with you I’m just comfortable.”
An unexpected warmth radiated through his chest as he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to a chipper beat. It wasn’t like him to feel like this, but around Kinsey? It was just different, better, easier.
He heard the click of her unfastening her seat belt a few beats before she leaned over and kissed him, her lips lightly touching his before she pulled back and opened her door.
“We better get in there before class starts.”
Stunned from the kiss and all those 428 possibilities that involved them both naked coming at him at once, he sat there watching as she got out of the car and shut the door, ready for their date.
So maybe he hadn’t fucked this up—yet.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kinsey
Kinsey’s lips were still tingling, and she had no clue what she’d been thinking about with that kiss. Really, it had been barely a kiss, more of a slight brush of her lips across his. Even Webster’s would have a hard time defining that as a kiss.
Yeah, keep telling yourself that.
She would because it was true, thank you very much.
Uh-huh, then why is your whole body tingling with anticipation and why did you scoot your chair a little closer to Griff’s when you sat down?
All right. That voice in her head could just shut the fuck up now.
Work today had pretty much proven that her life had gotten complicated fast even with ditching her fake fiancé. This wasn’t a date—it was just helping out her friend’s older brother win a bet. All his talk last night and that kiss that had seared her right down to her toes curling in the carpet? Well, that was just the lust talking. She could understand that. She was getting off to him on a regular basis in the privacy of her bedroom. Lust was simple. Lust she understood. Lust was easy to take care of.
The plan burst to life fully formed in the time between one heartbeat and the next. There was no reason why she and Griff—two fully grown adults—couldn’t get the attraction turning the air electric around them out of the way so they could go about their lives. He’d said that he’d fallen for her, but that wasn’t logical. People didn’t fall for her. They liked to fantasize about the idea of the big-boobed blonde in the bedroom, but there was more to her than double Ds, and that freaked people out. She was used to it. Plus, more than one ex had told her that her constant chatter and need to fix everything around her drove men away.
But if she and Griff got what was between them out of their systems, then he could go on and win his bet and she could get back to work at Archambeau without worrying that anyone would find out she was more than tangentially involved with Beckett Cosmetics’s head of R&D.
She nearly blurted out her proposal before remembering where she was.
Paint and Sip was a studio crowded with tables already set up with painting supplies, a canvas with a few lines drawn on it, and small plastic cups of wine. Griff was one of the few men there, but that didn’t seem to bother him. Instead, he’d just sat down on the barstool next to hers and rearranged his area so that the cup with wine of a questionable vintage and cup half filled with water to rinse his brushes were on opposite sides of his space.
Watching him get settled, the way he organized the chaos around him, was soothing and a turn-on at the same time. Then he reached over and adjusted where his paints had crossed over into her territory so that he wasn’t encroaching. By the time he folded the drying paper towel in half and then set the folded strip underneath his perfectly lined-up brushes before sitting back and crossing his muscled arms over his broad chest, Kinsey’s nipples were hard buds of arousal.