Neanderthal by Avery Flynn

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.

Butif 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.

Fine.

There was a lot about Griff that had her catching her breath—the way his biceps curled, the rare sighting of a half smile, how the man filled out a pair of jeans—but it was the way he made a place for everything and everyone that really got her.

Letting her plan for Operation Get Naked percolate, she hooked her feet around the legs of her barstool and took another look at what they would be painting.

She leaned in close to Griff, resting her hand on his thick thigh—for balance of course— and asked, “Were you expecting a lake scene with pine trees and a few happy little birds?”

“My money was on a sunset,” he said as he covered her hand with his much larger one.

Kinsey’s heart missed a beat or three before restarting with a vengeance. The air crackled around them, and his gaze dipped to her mouth. She didn’t mean to bite down on her lower lip, but it just sort of happened, kind of like how she’d squeezed her legs together before she gave in to the urge to slide her palm higher as she kissed him for real.

Plan? What plan? She was just winging it at this point and couldn’t stop.

A pinched-faced older woman cleared her throat and then gave a meaningful glance at the girl beside her, who had to be her maybe nine-year-old granddaughter. The girl watched them with rapt attention.

Okay, Kinsey Dalton. Time to dial it back, girl. You are in public.

She slid her hand free and turned to look at the sample of tonight’s painting project that was sitting on an easel at the front of the room. Larry, the man who owned Paint and Sip and led all the art classes, had told them he’d named it Unpack Your Feelings and said it was about the emotional addiction of online shopping and the negative impact it had on the environment. The painting showed a person buried under a huge pile of cardboard shipping boxes, one hand sticking out zombie-at-the-end-of-a-horror-movie-style against a backdrop of at least twenty delivery vans blowing diesel smoke into the sky.

A chorus of raucous giggles erupted from a group of four women who were obviously regulars.

“Sorry, Larry,” said a lady with glasses wearing a Get Nerdy With It T-shirt. “We’ll be good.”

Larry pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and smiled indulgently. “First time for everything.”

The women looked at one another and all did a sort of fair-enough shoulder shrug, then started giggling again.

“Okay, we’re gonna start off with a line of dismal gray across the middle of your canvas like so.”

An hour and a glass of wine later, Kinsey stood up and took a step back to look at her painting. No one was ever going to mistake her for an artist anytime soon, but it wasn’t half bad.

“We’re not going to hang these up, are we?” Griff asked, coming to stand next to her.

“God no,” she said with a chuckle. “I say we present them—framed—to Nash and Dixon, since they thought this date up.”

He grinned down at her. “I like that plan.”

Then he dipped his thumb in water and used it to wipe away a fleck of paint that had ended up on her cheek. His touch was gentle but firm, sending little shock waves through her that went straight to her clit. A quiet gasp escaped before she could stop it, and Griff’s lips curved in a sexy smirk that said he knew exactly what he was doing.

That wasn’t fair. So she grabbed his hand and turned his palm, placing a soft kiss right in the middle.

Then she gave him a wink and walked out the door with her ugly-ass painting and her very-good plan to have her wicked way with him later that night firmly in mind.