“My brother is clueless, and that Gavin dude needs to be pushed out of a window,” Morgan said once Kinsey was done.
“I can’t disagree with any of that.”
Are you sure? He fucked up, yes, but still—
Shut up, brain.
“So what will you do?” Morgan asked.
“Go home. Find another job somewhere and pay off my student loans so Meemaw doesn’t lose her house when the bill comes due. Eat enough chocolate to forget your brother.”
“There has to be something we can do,” Morgan said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Yeah, but life wasn’t fair. If it was, her mom would have stayed. People wouldn’t immediately decide after she opened her mouth that she was just a dumb Southern redneck because of her accent. And Griff would have never had the balls to make her decisions for her in the name of protecting her.
“I’ve barely worked at Archambeau for a month,” Kinsey said. “I have no history. He made up the emails. What’s the point? If I go quietly, then there’s no publicity and I have a chance to stay in the industry. If I fight this, I won’t stand a chance of getting another job in cosmetics.”
“I don’t want you to go.”
Kinsey sighed, the world coming back and sitting on the middle of her chest again. “Me either, but there’s not a way around it.”
“I can talk to Griff, fix this.”
Kinsey shook her head. Like brother, like sister—except that in her own way, Morgan was asking if it was okay instead of just assuming she knew best.
“There’s nothing to fix,” Kinsey said. “Sometimes you can love someone and it doesn’t matter because it’ll never work out. The whole thing was just a bet for him anyway. He didn’t love me, because if he had, he never would have done this.”
She’d run the scenarios. There was no happily ever after, and it hurt like getting run over by the zero-turn lawn mower. Clamping her jaw tight, she inhaled a sharp breath as she tried to keep the emotion clogging her throat from breaking free.
“I don’t believe that,” Morgan said.
“That’s because the world wouldn’t dare disappoint you.”
“If that was true, you wouldn’t be leaving,” Morgan said with a frustrated growl that reminded Kinsey more than a little of Griff. “I’m gonna throw them both out the window.”
Kinsey took her friend’s hand and squeezed it as a tear slid free. “I love you, too.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Griff
Griff’s penthouse was booby-trapped.
Everywhere he looked were reminders of Kinsey. Her towel still on the hook on the back of his bathroom door. The cast-iron skillet sitting in the middle of his island because he couldn’t stop making corn bread now. The painting they’d done on their date hanging up in his Lego room. Each one was a little pipe bomb waiting to go off. Desperate to get the fuck out of there, he packed a bag and headed out to Grandma Betty’s house.
Gable House was a few hours outside of Harbor City and had a flock of attack geese guarding it. Grandma had been almost as much good chaos as Kinsey, knowing what she wanted and then just going for it. They would have loved each other.
Sitting out on the dock overlooking the lake and the island where he, Nash, and Dixon had spent summers competing to be the ultimate Beckett cousin, Griff took another swig off the bottle he’d grabbed from Grandma’s collection.
The Old Pulteney single-malt scotch with its spicy sweetness wasn’t his first choice, but it was getting the job done. Another few hours and his brain would be too scrambled to think about Kinsey.
Maybe.
Hopefully.
If he got fucking lucky.
“Aha,” Morgan shouted, her triumphant squawk bouncing off the lake like a skipping rock. “I should have looked for you here first.”
He sank down lower in the hot-pink Adirondack chair as if he could hide from his sister, the woman who’d been his shadow pretty much since she could walk. When their parents had fought, the two of them had gone down to the wine cellar to block out as much of the screaming as possible. After Mom died, he’d found Morgan down there asleep, wrapped up in a quilt Grandma Betty had given her. Eventually, it happened so often that he kept an extra sweatshirt down there to ward off the chill while he kept guard.
“What are you doing here?” he asked after another swig of scotch.
Morgan flopped down onto the deck and swiped the bottle from him. “Stopping you from making the biggest mistake of your life.”
It was far too late for that. If only Mac had thrown that punch thirty seconds earlier, Griff never would have heard Kinsey giving the “what for” to half the gym. He wouldn’t have fallen in love at first sound. He wouldn’t be sitting here like an asshole getting drunk like his old man to block out the fact that the only way to take care of the woman he loved was to let her go.
“Did Kinsey send you?” He tried—and failed—to squash the note of hope in his voice.
“No.” Morgan took a swig off the bottle and spent the next thirty seconds coughing while waving off Griff’s attempts to whack her on the back so she could catch her breath. “She’s as stubborn as you are.”
“Not stubborn.” He snagged the bottle back. “Right.”
Morgan rolled her eyes. “Now you sound like Dad.”
“Fuck you.” That was about as far from the truth as possible. He was nothing like his dad—current lack of sobriety aside.
They stared out at the lake in silence as the sky went from blue to a reddish orange and the moon became visible. The water lapped at the shore, a constant promise of change and a reminder that life kept moving no matter what, as Grandma Betty had told them when they were little. Gable House had been a refuge for all the Beckett kids when Grandma was around, a welcome respite from the complications at home. Here, things were simple, fun, peaceful. Even now, he felt at home here like he never had at the penthouse in Harbor City.
“Do you love her?” Morgan asked as the stars started twinkling above them.
Griff took a long drink, letting the scotch burn its way down his throat, wishing like hell it was enough to drown out the hurt in his chest. “I wouldn’t have broken up with her if I didn’t.”
“You are the dumbest smart man I know,” she said as she smacked his shin.
“Love you, too.” He flicked her on the back of the head as the solar lights ringing the dock came to life, washing them in a soft glow.
“Does she know?”