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She stepped back onto the deck and handed him a cold one.
“Thanks.” He nodded.
She sat down in the seat beside him and lifted up her glass of wine and took a sip. “Where’s Bree?”
“She’s staying the night at my aunt and uncle’s with her cousins.”
“Oh, that’s fun.”
“Yeah, apparently it’s a monthly thing to give the moms and dads a night off.”
“Do you have a lot of family back in Chicago?”
“No. None. My parents are both gone.”
“Sorry.” She flinched and shook her head. “I knew that.”
“You did?” He hadn’t said anything to her about his parents when they’d talked in the garage so it surprised him at first but then he realized that Gabe had probably told her. Or Adriana had. He’d noticed things got around here.
“Yeah.” Her head tilted to the side and she smiled. “I might have googled you. A little.”
Knowing that she’d looked him up made him feel all sorts of things he shouldn’t be feeling. Happy. Proud. Like he just won a world champion belt.
“A little?” he asked as he took a sip of the beer.
She lifted her hand as she raised her shoulder. “I mean, that depends on your definition of a little. If a lot is researching a doctoral thesis, then yeah, I googled you a little.”
His head fell back and he laughed. She was always saying the most unexpected things. When he looked back at her, she was staring at him like she’d seen a ghost.
He looked over his shoulder, thinking someone must be behind him and he just hadn’t heard them, but when he did, he saw that they were alone. He turned back to her. “What? What’s wrong?”
She shook her head. “I’ve never seen you smile before. Not even in photos.”
His brow furrowed. That couldn’t be true. Then he thought about all the photos that might be online. He’d never googled himself, but he figured that they were probably all from his fighting days. He didn’t really smile a lot as “The Gladiator.” So maybe it was true. Even so, that still didn’t explain her reaction.
“Is my smile that bad?” he asked, only semi joking.
Most women loved when he smiled, he’d always gotten attention for his smiles because he had two very deep dimples, but maybe she had an aversion to them.
“You have dimples. Two of them.”
Wow. He had no idea how right he’d been.
“Is that a bad thing?”
“For me it is.” She took another drink of her wine and he noticed that she sucked in a small shaky gasp as she did.
That tiny intake of breath was the tell that told him she liked his dimples. Probably a lot. She just didn’t want to like them. Good. Welcome to his club. He didn’t want to like every single thing about her, including her fucking toes, but he did. It was nice to know he wasn’t alone in his unwanted attraction.
Vivien set her glass down and asked, “What about Bree’s mom? She’s mentioned her a few times.”
Glenn normally didn’t talk about his private life. Most of the guys on his crew back home didn’t have any idea about the situation with Zoe. After he walked away from the limelight at the end of his boxing career, he’d kept things close to the vest. “She’s in Lake Tahoe for work this summer. That’s why we’re here.”
She blinked and her expression dropped. It was only for a split second, but he saw it. She recovered quickly. “Oh, you two are…I didn’t think you were together.”
“We’re not. I just came out here so Bree didn’t have to go months without seeing her.”
Something close to relief shone in Vivien’s eyes. Or at least that’s what he saw. “That’s…amazing. That you would uproot your life like that.”
