Neanderthal by Avery Flynn
Chapter Fourteen
Kinsey
The next morning, Kinsey was holding it together by the power of caffeine—thanks to Morgan’s fancy coffee machine that made a double espresso from dark beans that smelled like heaven with the push of a button—and the adrenaline rush that came with her first day on the job.
God knew, she wasn’t benefitting from the kind of refreshment that came from eight hours of uninterrupted snoozing. Nope. Her brain had been going as fast as Uncle Herbert that time the police had found him at his moonshine still—at least according to family legend—and every thought had centered around Griff Beckett. Okay, a few of them had been her wondering what in the hell she’d done by agreeing to date him, but really, wasn’t that about him, too? If so, then yes, every one of her two-in-the-morning, panic-dosed-with-giddy-excitement thoughts had been about the hot guy living on the other side of her bedroom wall.
She’d wondered what he wore—if anything—to bed. Her money was on slouchy and soft sleep pants. The kind that were covered in constellations or other cosmic scenes. No socks, though. No one with that amount of body muscle got cold feet in the middle of the night.
She’d thought about how he slept. On top of the covers? With the comforter pulled up to his chin? Two hands pressed together in prayer position under his cheek? Around one a.m., she’d settled on spread-eagle with his arms and legs flung wide in total starfish mode.
And in the morning? He’d eat half a dozen eggs—scrambled—whole-grain toast, four slices of turkey bacon, and a raspberry smoothie the size of her head that he made with Greek yogurt and a dollop of honey for extra sweetness.
Yep, that was the ultra-productive way she’d spent the night before her first day at a new job—her dream job—in the research lab at Archambeau Cosmetics. So when she rushed down the hall to the elevator, she might look completely put together in what she assumed was chic city wear—hair pulled back in a low ponytail, black shirt buttoned up to the neck, tailored black slacks, and cute black kitten heels—but her insides were a jumble of ill-fitting, clashing neon clown clothes topped off with a bleached brassy mullet.
As she waited for the elevator doors to close, she glanced down at the street map on her phone, double-checking that she’d memorized the order of the rights and lefts correctly. She was reconfirming for the eight millionth time that yes, she had it right—did that uncertain, first-day-of-school feeling ever go away?—when he walked in.
The elevator definitely wasn’t big enough for the two of them. Well, okay, fine, the physical dimensions were sufficient, but the mental ones after the night she’d had were teeny-tiny-size. So what did she do to combat that? She put on her brightest, I’m-totally-comfortable-and-everything-is-perfect smile (it was the one she had learned early on to cover her nerves) and turned to face him as the doors closed.
“Good morning!” she said, her voice booming in the small space.
Aaaaand that was a billion on the a-little-much scale, what with the fact that her volume was way too loud and the amount of sunshine in her tone diabetic-coma-inducing. What was wrong with her? She was never like this. She was the calm one. The boring one. The stands-in-the-corner-and-silently-corrects-people’s-grammar one. No, it wasn’t a nice thing, but she’d learned to live with herself about it, and she kept her thoughts on “your” and “you’re” to herself because Meemaw had raised her better than to embarrass people or hurt their feelings on purpose.
Credit to Griff, he didn’t wince at her loudness—resting grump face for the win. “You’re a morning person.”
“And an afternoon person and evening person and a night person,” she blathered on, unable to shut up for some reason. “Basically, until my head hits the pillow and I crash, I’m your person.” Heat beat her cheeks the moment the words were out of her mouth and her brain caught up. “Well, not yours, but you know what I mean.”
One side of his mouth almost curled upward. “Got it.”
She clamped her lips closed before she could say anything else. Really, this was just not acceptable. Sure, she was Southern—which meant she was friendly and hospitable and okay, fine, chatty—but she didn’t usually do this verbal-vomit thing. The truth was, she usually couldn’t because at the first “y’all” people had already started to judge—something that was going to happen anyway, but why add to it? She’d learned that lesson the hard way. There was nothing like going to college before being old enough to get a driver’s license to bring that lesson home. They all went out to frat parties, road-tripped to concerts, and drunk-dined at the local diners before crawling back to their beds. She’d stayed in the attic room of her meemaw’s best friend, who’d given her a ten p.m. curfew and had activated the three-sixty-five tracking app on Kinsey’s phone. Miss Eunice was nice and she made a mean potato salad, but it wasn’t the college experience Kinsey had dreamed about as a naive and overly optimistic fifteen-year-old.
The elevator continued downward along with her hope that her experience at Archambeau would be different from college or grad school or getting her doctorate. It stopped every few floors to let folks on until she and Griff were tucked in tight together in the corner. He glanced down at her phone, which still had the street map on it, her walking path denoted by a bright-blue line.
“You’re walking?” he asked, the low pitch of his voice ruffling the feathers of those birds in her stomach that liked to take flight around him.
“That was my plan,” she said, sounding more confident than she felt. Left for two blocks, then right for three, and a quick left across the street to Archambeau’s famed Onyx Caramello double doors that bathed the lobby in a golden glow. “It’s only about fifteen minutes.”
He looked down at her shoes, his mouth scrunching up as he took in the barely there heel as if it were a six-inch stiletto. “Want a ride?”
“I don’t want to put you out of the way,” she said, adding some steel to her sweetness because she did not need to be taken care of.
He shifted his gaze from her face to the back of the guy’s head in front of them. “It’s not.”
Yeah, that was a tale taller than the water tower back home. Beckett Cosmetics’s offices and research laboratory were twenty blocks in the opposite direction.
“I appreciate the offer,” she said, dropping her phone into her bag. She’d memorized the route. She could do this without any new-to-the-city blunders. “But Harbor City is my town now, so I have to learn to navigate it.”
He nodded. “Fair enough.”
They followed the stream of people walking off the elevator, their strides matching even though he was a good foot taller than she was, which meant he’d probably slowed down for her, or her imagination was just finding patterns where none existed. They walked out of the building and into the bright sunshine of a spring morning that reflected off the windows on the modern skyscrapers lining the street for blocks and blocks. Main Street back home it was not.
She fished her sunglasses out of her handbag and put them on, hoping the shades and the determined tilt of her chin helped her blend in with the throngs of locals speed-walking to work.
“Have a great day,” she said before turning left and heading out on her way like the heroine in a movie about to take the city by storm alone and without help.
She made it three long—for her—strides before Griff fell into step beside her.
“I thought you were driving to work,” she said.
“Changed my mind,” he said, holding out his arm, bent at the elbow, so she could hold onto his forearm as she navigated the heel-destroying iron grate embedded in the sidewalk.
Had he changed his mind from her being a disaster to being a damsel in distress? He better not have. They’d come to an agreement last night. She was coming to his rescue by being his Last Man Standing date. She was the knight, and he was the princess.
Unable to let it go, she pressed him. “Why did you decide to walk?”
The only answer she got was a shrug as he matched her stride for stride for five and a half city blocks with enough iron grates in them to make the walk more of an obstacle course. It had been a short trip, but her heart was thumping against her ribs as if she’d just run a marathon, which had to be first-day jitters and definitely not because of the man standing silently next to her, because if it wasn’t, then she really was in trouble.
She stopped in front of the distinctive golden stone doors and inhaled a deep breath through her nose. It didn’t help. Her nerves were jangling and rattling like a handful of wrenches in a metal toolbox getting bounced around in the back of the truck going down a gravel road dotted with potholes.
“Leigh’s tough but fair, and she’s gathered a great team—I’d hire them all away if I could get them to agree to leave.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at the sidewalk, the tips of his ears going cherry. “They’re lucky to have you.”
It took a second from his half-mumbled words to sink in, and then all the words in the world got clogged in her throat. She bit the inside of her cheek to buy the time for everything to sort itself out enough to find the manners Meemaw had drilled into her. “Thank you.”
He glanced up, his gaze locked on hers, rock steady. “It’s true.”
Spirits a little lighter than they’d been the first time she’d looked at the Archambeau doors, Kinsey gave in to impulse and leaned up so she could wrap her arms around Griff in a quick hug. Well, she’d meant it to be quick. Once she got there, her cheek against his shoulder as he stood there as frozen as the bag of peas that were in the back of Meemaw’s fridge in case of an emergency burn, she realized she’d made a mistake. A thank-you squeeze from her was obviously the last thing he’d wanted.
Shit on a shingle.
Embarrassment ate its way up from the base of her throat and had her blazing in the spring sun. She couldn’t let go fast enough.
“So, um, I’ll just go in now.” She yanked the door open, no longer stressed about walking inside but instead seeing it as the escape hatch it was. “Bye. See you tonight for dinner.”
The last she saw of Griff Beckett was him standing there in his perfectly tailored navy-blue suit, a bright tattoo peeking out from under the cuff of his crisp white shirt, confusion forming a deep V between his bright-blue eyes as what seemed like half of Harbor City walked around him, hurrying to get to work.
Oh God. Hadn’t Nash told him their first date was tonight?
