Neanderthal by Avery Flynn

Chapter Nine

Kinsey

By the time Kinsey and Morgan got back home—well, Kinsey’s temporary home until she could find one with an actual functioning bathroom not next to the oven—Kinsey had had all the Griff she wanted.

Liar.

The know-it-all voice in her head could just hush its mouth already.

So what if she’d enjoyed sitting across from him at brunch. It was a one-time-only meal. And he had big hands. If she would have ordered the colossal bacon, egg, and cheese bagel, she would have had to cut it in half or double fist it while Griff practically looked like he was eating those tiny little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Okay, so that was an exaggeration, but his hands were big, with long, thick fingers.

The man could definitely palm a gallon of milk.

It was distracting.

It put thoughts she had no business thinking in her head.

It was exactly the type of information she did not need to have about a man who labeled her a disaster the first time he’d set eyes on her—which was exactly why she’d forgotten all about him the second they’d walked out of the restaurant. Okay, definitely during the Uber across town to Morgan’s place. All right, fine, she was still thinking about him even during the tour of Morgan’s amazing apartment that took up half the top floor of the Hilltop Building and had amazing views of the harbor from every window they’d passed by so far.

She followed Morgan down the hall on the opposite side of the living room from Morgan’s room.

“So this,” Morgan said as she opened the door and walked through, “is your room.”

Okay. Now this zapped thoughts of Griff and his tattoos and his big hands and his shy grin right out of her head.

This wasn’t a room. It was a suite, complete with sitting area, separate bedroom, and a bathroom with a tub that had a view of the harbor. It. Was. Stunning.

“Morgan, I can’t stay here for free.” Meemaw had not raised her to take advantage of her friends.

“Why not? It’s just sitting empty otherwise,” Morgan said with a shrug. “Anyway, when Todd gets a free weekend, you’ll want to be able to have your couple space without me crowding in on you.”

Kinsey’s gut twisted up tighter than the thick braids Meemaw used to tie her hair into as a kid that could withstand a whole day of running around like a hoyden without a single strand coming loose. By the time she’d taken them out at the end of the day, her scalp had pulsed with relief. Eight-year-olds weren’t meant to have hair pulled back so hard it looked like they’d had a face-lift—any more than friends who opened up their hearts and their homes didn’t deserve to be lied to.

“Morgan, I have to tell you something.”

“Oh, this sounds juicy.” She clapped her hands together with glee and sat down on the black velvet love seat. “Tell me everything.”

Time to rip off the Band-Aid and just do it.

One.

Two.

Three.

“I’m not engaged.”

Morgan ran her hand over the smooth velvet as she nodded in agreement. “Right, it’s a pre-engagement situation.”

“No.” Kinsey sat down on the other end of the love seat, her guilt sparking like a live wire and making her entire body tense up with pain. “Todd doesn’t exist. I made him up.”

Morgan’s eyes went wide, then widened up some more when she let out a gasp. “Why?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time?” Damn, saying that out loud had her cringing. What in the fuck had she done?

Taking a deep breath, she tried to get her mind straight and to list out some of the eighty million factors that had gone into her decision to fabricate Todd. “When I walk into a lab, I’m already working at a disadvantage when it comes to being taken seriously. I’m a woman in a male-dominated field. People take one look at me and decide at first glance that I’ve got to be lost. I’m younger than everyone else there. I’ve got this whole blond-bumpkin thing going on with how I look and my accent.”

She let out a shaky breath. She’d never said any of this out loud before—not only because she was ashamed but also because even though she was smart enough to graduate at the top of her college class, she hadn’t been able to find a solution to changing the way other people thought about her.

“No one takes me seriously. I can’t control any of that. Added to that, at my last internship, one of the guys kept hitting on me, and so I made up Todd. And just like that, not going to lie, all the men in the lab started paying more attention to what I had to say more than what I wore to work that day.”

As soon as she’d put on the ring, the number of overt and covert leering glances in the lab had been cut down by at least 60 percent. Her stress levels had gone down. Her productivity had increased because she could just walk into the lab and work. Just. Work.

“How long have you been”—Morgan put air quotes around the word—“‘with’ Todd?”

Kinsey wanted to disappear into the dark cushions of the couch. “Only a year, but when I interviewed for the job with Archambeau, I realized that one of the R&D scientists here knew someone there. Long story short, those two started talking, and news of my fiancé made it up to Harbor City, and I can’t just come out and admit that I made him up or I’ll look like a total dumb-ass—which, for the record, I am.”

Morgan’s eyes went wide. “Oh my God, Kinsey!”

“I know,” she groaned, dropping her head with embarrassment, heat eating its way up from her chest until her cheeks blazed. “I don’t just bust out and tell people about him. They see the ring. They make more assumptions—this time ones I’m pointing them to. It’s only if there are direct questions that I say anything about it.”

Morgan scooted closer on the love seat and threw her arms around Kinsey’s shoulders. “That’s a long way to say you’re lying because you couldn’t see any other option.”

“Ugh.” Kinsey didn’t deserve her friend’s understanding. “I’m an asshole.”

“News flash, a woman not being taken seriously by the patriarchy is not, well, breaking news.” She gave Kinsey’s shoulders a squeeze. “You aren’t hurting anyone with this. It’s just—”

“Weird?” Kinsey finished for her. “Lame? Ridiculous?”

“Not at all, but watching my brother glare at your ring all brunch is even funnier now,” Morgan said through her giggles.

“Oh, that’s not what he was glaring at,” Kinsey denied. She knew exactly what had upset Griff. “We ran into each other near the bathrooms, and I called him a caveman.”

Morgan’s eyebrows shot into her hairline before she burst into another round of laughter. “You. Did. Not.” She grabbed her side as she tried to get her laughing under control. “Oh my God, you can live here as long as you want rent-free for that. My brother is amazing, but his grunting gets on everyone’s nerves after a while.”

Now Kinsey felt bad. She actually liked his short answers. “It wasn’t because of how little he talks. I mean, that was kind of great. It was—”

“You actually liked his powerful response to my asking whether he was interested in going to a play next month? I mean, ‘intriguing’?” Morgan rolled her eyes. “I still don’t know if I should buy us tickets or not. So frustrating!”

But beneath the frustration, Kinsey could see Morgan absolutely adored her brother. So she commiserated. “Yeah, I can see how that response could be a pain. But he seems like the kind of guy to know how to say no, so I took his response as an enthusiastic yes. A caveman yes, if you will.”

She winked at Morgan, and they both laughed.

But Kinsey sobered then. “I think we need to find a way to lose Todd before the lie grows more here, you know? I want this to be your forever home in Harbor City, and that’s hard to do when you’re worried about getting caught in a lie, I’d bet.”

She wasn’t wrong. It was all of that and Kinsey knew it, had known it. “I just need to get established in my new job and prove to them that I belong there, and then Todd and I can break up or something.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Morgan said, giving her a final squeeze.

“So you don’t hate me for being a giant fake?”

Morgan shook her head. “Nah.”

“And you won’t spill the beans?” The cosmetics industry was big, but people talked. “I mean, I’m not asking you to lie, just not to say anything. I need a few months to get settled, and then I promise, Todd and my relationship will meet an untimely demise.”

“I can agree to that, but I am gonna need a favor.”

Relief flooded through Kinsey, and her shoulders sank down from up by her ears. “Anything.”

“Come to dinner with me tonight at my cousin Dixon’s place.”

“Sure.” That was easy. “You don’t think he’ll mind?”

“I think Fiona will be thrilled to have another pair of X chromosomes there.”

“But why do you want me there?”

“Because then Griff won’t start hollering at me about Eggsy.”

Kinsey cocked her head. Her brain worked pretty quickly, but she couldn’t make the connection. “I don’t see how I can stop that.”

“He’s so chatty around you that he won’t have time to chew me out for yelling at his trainer.” Morgan bounded up from the love seat and did a hip-shaking happy dance as she made her way toward the bedroom door. “This will be perfect. I’ll owe you forever.”

Then she was out the door and down the hall before Kinsey got a chance to ask a single question about dress code, what she should bring, or anything else. Truth be told, she was stuck on Griff being “chatty” around her. That had to be sarcasm, since the man basically just grunted at her with a few short sentences for variety. There was no other explanation.

A few hours and every single box she’d brought with her unpacked and broken down ready for recycling, Kinsey followed Morgan out the front door of her apartment and stopped dead. There, directly across the hall, standing in the open doorway of his apartment was Griff.

“You live here, too?” The no-shit-Sherlock question was out of her mouth before her brain could catch up.

“Well, technically he owns this whole floor,” Morgan said. She crossed to the elevator. “That door at the end of the hall by your room? It connects the apartments together just in case we ever decide to sell it as one giant penthouse. Don’t worry, we keep it locked on both sides.”

Yeah, safety wasn’t what Kinsey’s brain was getting caught on about the door to Griff’s place being right next to her room. Her bedroom. Nope. That was way down the line right after about a billion dirty thoughts about Griff’s tattoos, his muscles, the way his voice would sound when he told her all the things he wanted to do with her as he kissed his way—

Kinsey Anne Dalton!

A quiet beep sounded, and the elevator doors opened up. Morgan stepped inside, but meanwhile Kinsey was still standing in front of the closed door of her new temporary home and her feet were refusing to work. She took a deep breath as discreetly as possible and did her best to pull herself back together when she felt as out of place as salt in the sugar bowl.

Oh God, what had she done?

She was living next door to temptation, and that was just as bad as living in the shitty apartment with the toilet in the kitchen—well, almost. Either way, she felt like a woman who was going to be caught out in the open with her drawers down.

“You ready?” he asked, holding the door to the open elevator for her.

No. She most definitely was not ready for whatever was coming next.