But that was the catch. “He doesn’t love me.”
Meemaw straight-up cackled. “Are you sure about that?”
Sure, he’d said it once, but that was in the heat of the moment, and he’d never mentioned it since. All he’d done was let her touch his Legos—not a euphemism—cook for her, drop what he had going on to see her, taken her dancing even though she was horrible, and made her feel like she was the only person in the world. And he listened to her. Really listened. Asked questions like her answers were the most important thing he’d hear that day, too.
She gulped as the truth smacked her right in the jaw harder than that guy who’d knocked Griff on his ass when they’d met. “Shit.”
“Watch your mouth, young lady,” Meemaw said with more than a little bit of warning in her tone, “but yes, shit.”
She sat straight up, her heart racing as possible ways this could work out ran through her head at light speed. “I can’t believe I missed that.”
“No one’s a genius about everything. Not even you, sugar,” Meemaw said with a wink. “Now you’ve got to figure out what you’re gonna do about it. Do you love him?”
Kinsey nodded, too excited and panicked and oh-my-God-what-happens-next freaked out to use actual words.
“You’ll figure it out; you always do,” her grandma said. “Love you.”
She was still processing all of what Meemaw said ten minutes after they’d ended the call when the doorbell rang. No doubt Morgan must have forgotten her keys when she’d run out of the penthouse so fast.
The last person Kinsey expected to see was the duo outside the door when she flung it open: Leigh, looking every inch the CEO of a cosmetics company, and Billie, with her always present iPad, stylus at the ready, stood in the hall.
“Hi there,” Leigh said. “I’m so sorry for just arriving on your doorstep without notice.”
“What she means,” Billie said with a grin, “is that you didn’t think you could get away from us that easily, did you?”
Kinsey pressed a hand to her belly, which had flipped, flopped, and sank down to her toes. “I know how it looks, but there’s no way I would have sold secrets.”
“Honey, we know,” Billie said with an eyeroll. “Gavin’s sitting in a dingy room talking to a detective as we speak. How delicious is that?”
Leigh looked like she could barely hold in a triumphant “hell yeah,” but she managed to keep it together. “Could we come inside? We have a lot to discuss, including the fact that I expect to see you back in the lab tomorrow. We have a lot of work to do before launching Le Chardonneret.”
Chapter Forty-Eight
Griff
There was no other explanation than that the Beckett DNA had ridiculous ideas written into it. First, the bizarre Last Man Standing bet, and now the completely random cringe ideas for how to show Kinsey that he was a reformed Neanderthal.
“I’ve got it.” Nash stopped pacing across the living room and turned to face the attendees of the emergency Beckett family meeting. “Bring her to an Ice Knights game and then propose while you’re both being shown on the Jumbotron.”
Griff let his head thunk against the wall he was leaning on. And to think he’d asked everyone here to help because he’d thought his ideas to win Kinsey back were bad. At this rate, she was going to be back in Virginia before he even got a sliver of a plan put together.
“You shouldn’t be left alone unsupervised,” Morgan said.
Nash flipped her off. “Market research shows that women love dramatic results.”
“Yeah,” Morgan shot back. “From their moisturizer, not their personal life.”
“She’s right—that was a shit idea, Nash,” Dixon said.
“Well, what’s your plan?” Nash asked.
Dixon straightened up on the couch, a confident smile on his face. “She didn’t run screaming when you showed her your Lego room, right?”
Yeah, considering she’d given him the blow job of a lifetime in the Lego room, the only screaming had been from him in his head as he came.
“I’ll take your silence as a no,” Dixon said, waiting until Griff nodded in the affirmative to go on. “What you need to do is build a Lego sculpture of her and present it as a token of your love.”
Everyone in the room was silent as they all stared slack-jawed at Dixon.
Fucking A, Griff was so screwed. Why in the hell had he called together these knuckleheads? Oh yeah, because he was even worse at it than they were. Hell, maybe Kinsey really should stay away from his ass.
“And you’re the one running the billion-dollar cosmetics company?” Morgan asked, the question so rhetorical that if she were to text it, it wouldn’t have a question mark at the end.
“What?” Dixon shrugged. “It’s unique and meaningful.”
Morgan crossed her arms and stared down at Dixon on the couch, a mix of disappointment and disgust on her face. “So you’re gonna do that for Fiona’s next birthday gift?”
The tips of Dixon’s ears went red. “We don’t have that kind of relationship connection to Legos.”
“And you’re not entirely an idiot,” Griff said.
“That too,” Dixon agreed.
After that, the only sound was Nash’s footsteps on the hardwood floor as he paced from one end of the living room to the other. It sounded like a countdown to Griff, each step another tick of the clock marking the moments until it was too late.
Morgan let out an exhausted sigh and looked from Nash to Dixon to Griff. “You three do realize that Kinsey is just across the hall, right?”
Griff nodded. “Yeah.”
“And the best way to fix this is to actually talk to her. You know, communicate? With words?” Morgan sounded like a woman who had been trapped in a car with small children for twelve hours and was at her breaking point. “That’s when you tell her what needs to be said.” She held up a finger, shockingly not the middle one. “First, that you love her.” Another finger. “Second, that you fucked it all up and are sincerely sorry.” Now she raised her middle finger. “Third, that you want to spend the rest of your life with her maybe making little makeup scientist babies.”
“I’m quitting,” Griff said, the words coming out even faster than he could think them up.
Morgan’s face dropped and she flopped down, defeated, onto the couch next to Dixon. “Just like that? You’re not even going to try to fix things with Kinsey?”