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“Aunt Rosalie, I have no interest in meeting anyone. Or dating anyone.” He normally wouldn’t interrupt his aunt when she was speaking, but he knew that he needed to nip this in the bud. If not, she would want to play matchmaker. And that was the last thing he needed.
“What?!” Her arms flew in the air. “You can’t have friends?”
This was another reason staying with his aunt and uncle for the summer wouldn’t be a good idea. If he did, he’d be having this conversation every night.
“I have enough friends.” Glenn checked his phone and saw that it was past Bree’s bedtime. “Let’s go, peanut. Bath time!”
He stood and his aunt followed. “You know, after you put her down you could go out to JT’s maybe. I told Eric to stop by after work and see if you wanted to go grab a beer.”
He shook his head. The woman was nothing if not persistent. “Aunt Rosalie, since when are you so invested in my love life?”
“Since she thinks if you meet someone here, you’ll stay in Hope Falls,” his cousin Eric said as he walked out onto the deck.
“Oh what? You think you have me figured out?” Aunt Rosalie stood and faced her son who gave her a look that Glenn was sure he might have used in his job as the chief of police but there was no way it was going to work on his aunt. The sight was actually a little comical. Eric was his height, six foot four. Aunt Rosalie insisted that she was five foot, but in reality, she was four foot ten on a good day. Seeing her face off, or he guessed chest off with him was hilarious. “What’s wrong with wanting to have all my family together?!”
Glenn was tempted to tell his aunt that she didn’t need to play cupid to get him to consider staying in town, but he didn’t want to give her false hope. The idea of staying was so new, he had to do a lot more thinking on it.
Eric bent down and kissed his mom on the top of her head. “Nothing is wrong with that.”
“Good boy.” She reached up and patted his cousin’s cheek before heading inside as she shouted, “Sean did you change the sheets in the downstairs room?”
As his aunt retreated back inside Eric smiled and pulled Glenn into a one-armed man hug. “Hey man! Good to see you!”
“You, too.”
Eric and Glenn had always been close. Well, as close as two cousins could be that lived two thousand miles apart. They’d spent limited time together growing up but were both the same age and had had similar interests.
“How’s Lily?” Glenn had only met Eric’s wife a few times, but he liked her a lot. She was a professional choreographer who definitely seemed to keep his cousin on his toes.
“Good. She’s teaching a senior’s dance class tonight.”
“Can I have ten more minutes, Daddy, please?” Bree pleaded as she ran up on the deck.
“Not tonight, Peanut. It’s late. Bath time. Say hi to your Uncle Eric.”
Bree sighed and her shoulders slumped. “Hi, Uncle Eric.”
“Hi, Bree.” Eric imitated his daughter’s posture and defeated tone which made Bree giggle.
“Raincheck on that drink?” Eric asked, clearly he’d overheard enough of the conversation to know that Glenn didn’t want to go to JT’s tonight.
“Yeah, man. I’m beat.”
He’d spent the last four days driving across the country with a six-year-old. All he wanted to do was get Bree to bed and crash.
Eric nodded then walked down the steps of the deck to say hi to his nieces who were still jumping on the trampoline.
Glenn picked Bree up and when she wrapped her arms around his neck, he savored the moment. He knew that his days of carrying her were numbered. As she liked to remind him often, she was six now. He figured this carrying thing would last one more year, two if he was lucky.
After she took a quick bath and got dressed, she sat on the floor between Glenn’s legs so he could brush out her hair and put it in a braid to sleep in. She knew the routine and had her iPad on her lap watching a movie. Bree had her mother’s thick locks and he’d found that it was a time saver to braid it otherwise it was a knotted mess in the morning. And knots, even with a good detangler, equaled tears. Tears were never a good thing, but in the morning when they were rushing to get out the door, they were a disaster.
As he began threading his fingers in her hair Bree asked, “Can we go to the coffee shop tomorrow?”
“I can get you a lemonade from the store,” he responded, even though he didn’t think the drink was why his daughter was asking to go.
“It was strawberry lemonade and I want to go to see Viv again.”
His daughter had not stopped talking about Viv since they left Brewed Awakenings. His daughter repeated again and again that she was so pretty. So nice. So funny. And that she looked exactly like her favorite movie princess, Giselle. The problem was, she looked like one of Glenn’s favorite movie characters too. But she wasn’t a princess. She was a rabbit. Jessica Rabbit. As embarrassed as he was to admit it, the red dress cartoon siren had been his first crush.
