Her?
Nope.
Not even in a month of Sundays was she gonna be that, but that didn’t mean his words didn’t hit like a linebacker on college football Saturday. After everything that Morgan had said about her big brother, Kinsey had pictured someone who wouldn’t be like the others. Who wouldn’t take one look at her, clock the blond hair, her age, her gender, and the fact that she was a woman who believed that lipstick and mascara really could make her day better, and then place her on the not-to-be-taken-seriously shelf.
Still, if there was one thing Kinsey had learned from her meemaw, killing them with kindness still meant they’d end up dead.
Kinsey batted her fake eyelashes and curled her lips into her best sugar-I’m-gonna-poison-your-sweet-tea smile. “Well, I guess I’ll just have to prove you wrong.”
People just loved to underestimate her. Let them. She was about to go all Southern Fried Elle Woods on Harbor City. Griff Beckett was about to find out how not a disaster she could be.
Chapter Six
Griff
Griff had never been so happy to be knocked on his ass.
His jaw ached. His ears were ringing. He’d have to listen to Mac brag about this for months while Eggsy bitched about it for a millennium.
Worth it.
He’d just met the woman he was going to marry.
The realization had hit him harder than Mac’s punch the second he’d heard her set everyone in the gym straight. It was an unexplainable feeling, a sense of surety so deep, so right that it had wound its way into his DNA. This was it. Bam! There might as well have been a beam of light shining down from heaven and a full-on orchestra playing the “Bridal Chorus.” When he’d glanced at her and taken in the electricity in her intelligent eyes, he knew he was a total goner.
Fuck Nash’s stupid Last Man Standing bet.
He was halfway through mentally rearranging his closet so she’d have more than enough room for all her clothes when he caught the murder gleaming in Kinsey’s eyes.
He stopped. Rolled back a few minutes. Replayed. And… Fuck, he never wished he was a man good with his words more than right now.
But he’d already opened his mouth, fucking himself over into oblivion, judging by the look on Kinsey’s face that said she’d already mapped out where his spleen was and had a rusty spoon at the ready.
That was okay. He could outthink a problem like her plotting his death.
“I didn’t mean it.” At least not like it came out.
“Really?” She scoffed. “Or is it that you didn’t mean to say it out loud?” She crossed her arms. “I graduated at the top of my class.”
“I know.” He’d done a quick check on her after Morgan had mentioned Kinsey was moving to Harbor City to work for the Evil Empire. He couldn’t be too careful where his baby sister was concerned.
“My doctoral adviser said mine was the most put-together defense he’d ever seen.”
“I’m aware.” He’d talked to Dr. Pearson himself. Okay, Pearson had talked; Griff had grunted.
“I am not a disaster,” Kinsey said, her voice shaking by the time the last word was out.
“I agree,” he said as he pulled off his boxing gloves.
Her blue eyes were the exact same color as their bestselling All Night Moisturizer serum. This was where Aunt Celeste would have told him the universe was speaking to him. He wouldn’t have believed her—at least not before.
As soon as he took off his headgear, he noticed the difference again. The quiet. The absolute stillness inside his head—not emptiness, but stillness. It was like all the constant buzz of ideas and thoughts and energy that was the reason why he only slept four hours a night and kept up a million and one hobbies had mellowed into a low-level thrum instead of bouncing around his brain like balls in a plastic ball pit.
And it was all because of her.
His brain was still running ninety miles an hour—but only in one direction. Toward this woman. God, he’d fucked this up. How could he convince her he was even worth a second chance—and not use words to do it? How could he beg her to keep talking? The more she talked, the more his mind was able to block out everything else as he focused on her logic, the flow of her arguments, the swiftness of her sharp conclusions. It was the sexiest thing in the world.
Kinsey shot him a syrupy smile he didn’t buy for an instant. “Glad to hear it.”
But she didn’t believe it. There was no missing that.
He gave a grunt of a reply because his brain was working overtime trying to find a way out of this mess he’d made of things. He’d fucked up. That was 100 percent clear. What he’d meant was that he had absolutely no clue how to get someone to fall in love with him; he was a lost cause at speaking to women, let alone charming them.
Now, in addition to his natural grunty ineptitude, he had to figure out how to get Kinsey to stop eyeballing him as if she was going to fillet him and feed him inch by inch to a hammerhead shark.
Morgan, unfortunately, chose that second to stop her usual pick-a-fight moment with Eggsy and turned her attention to him. Sandwiching his face between her two hands, she turned his head from one side to the other while looking up at him.
“How many of me are you seeing?” his sister asked.
“Too many,” he grumbled, mind still working through his plan to win over Kinsey, who really was beyond out of his league, if he was being honest.
Morgan rolled her eyes and dropped her hands. “You’re being your usual super-talkative self, so you must be okay.”
“I’m fine.” Well, he would be as soon as he got home to his whiteboard and could start mapping out the details of his plan. He loved his little sister, but she was a giant pain in his ass, and there was no way she was done giving him shit yet.
“Kinsey, meet my oh-so-talkative brother, Griff,” Morgan said as she lounged against the ropes. “Griff, meet Kinsey. She’s staying with me until she finds a place she likes. Can you believe she was gonna live in an apartment with a toilet in the kitchen? I told her, real estate in Harbor City is a cutthroat game—she cannot get stuck in a situation where she has to go with the first acceptable place she finds in her price range.”
He grunted, mind already spitting out ideas on how he could help her find the perfect place. That could get him in her good graces. If she liked her job—even if it was for the wrong cosmetics company—and liked the city, she’d be more open to staying here once they got married…if he could figure out how to talk to her, of course.
Was he getting too creepy?
Moving too fast?
Sure, they’d barely said two words, but as Aunt Celeste always said, when a person knew, they knew. Then she’d launch into the story of meeting Nash’s dad. Five minutes of casual conversation on the train, and they hadn’t separated since. Of course, five minutes of conversation with Griff was usually four minutes and thirty seconds too much, but for the first time in his life, he finally understood what his aunt had felt.