Page 74 of Unrivaled

He’d switched to drinking wine with dinner, which had the effect of making everything feel soft-edged and pleasant. The kids’ laughter drifting in from the dining room added to the ambience. Whatever they were doing involved a lot of teasing. It reminded him of him and Jess.

“Hey.” Max bumped his shoulder. “You okay?”

Without meaning to, Grady smiled. He must’ve been lost in thought again. “I’m good.” Then he frowned at the pot he was drying. “This still has potato on it.”

Max flicked dish suds at him. “I just make ’em wet. You make ’em clean.”

Grady wiped his damp face on his sleeve. “Really.”

Max grinned. “What are you gonna do about it?”

For a second, Grady considered the hose attachment to the sink. But when Max caught him looking at it, Grady upended the last of the water in the pot on his head instead.

Max squawked and reached for the dish sponge.

“Are you boys behaving in there?” Linda called from the dining room.

“No!”

A moment later she appeared in the doorway. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Children.”

Grady hid the damp dish towel he’d been scrubbing in Max’s face behind his back.

Linda rolled her eyes. “Oh, leave the dishes for now and come play a game with theotherchildren. Carly refuses to start without you, Max.”

“You gotta come and be first lobster!”

Grady raised his eyebrows.

“I’m always first lobster,” Max said loftily. He tossed the sponge back in the sink. “Come on. I’ll introduce you to the next tradition.”

In the dining room, Carly had already set up a board game on the table. Milo, Nora, and Logan sat around it, and Max gestured for Grady to sit next to him. “So, back when Logan and Nora and I were kids, Grandpa was in charge of keeping us entertained while everyone else cooked. And if you recall, Grandpa was a lobster fisherman….”

Apparently, the object of the game depended on your token. The lobster was trying to get to the sea. Everyone else—a butter pat, a lemon wedge, a trap-looking thing Max kept calling a “pot”—was trying to get to the lobster before it escaped. There were multiple paths, but you had to move your full roll in a single direction. The lobster only had to get as far as the sea, but everyone else needed an exact roll to catch the lobster. If they did, the lobster player was out and the one who’d caught him became the next lobster.

“I get to be the butter,” Carly announced. She narrowed her eyes at Grady and then selected a token and handed it to him. “Uncle Grady, you can be the lobster cracker.”

Nora stifled a laugh, and Logan cleared his throat and looked away. But Grady was torn between a sudden fascination with the redness in the apples of Max’s cheeks and his own complicated reaction.

UncleGrady. Obviously he wasn’t, but what was he going to tell her? And it would be weird for a kid to start calling an adult by their first name, right?

He wasn’t touching the significance of the lobster-cracker thing.

Fortunately, Linda chose that moment to swoop in with the wine bottle. “Who needs a refill?”

All the adults raised their glasses.

The game was raucous. Despite a few close calls—Grady had been sure it was over for Max when Logan and Milo cornered him down a dead-end path—eventually the lobster prevailed. By that time they’d finished another two bottles of wine between the seven adults, and the kids were begging Uncle Max to tuck them into bed.

“I should take Gru for his nighttime pee,” Max said regretfully.

Under the table, Gru perked up his ears and wagged his tail.

“I’ll take him,” Grady offered. Max should enjoy as much time with the kids as he could. Clearly they had a mutual admiration society going on. Besides, Grady wanted some time alone with his thoughts.

He couldn’t count the number of invitations he’d declined to his teammates’ family holidays over the years. Even before he grew fed up with the Firebirds’ management, he’d held a part of himself back from the team. Now he was starting to understand how that had impacted his life.

He barely had a relationship with most of his teammates. Plenty of the other players’ kids called other guys on the team “uncle,” but none of them had ever called Grady that. Carly was the first—the niece of the guy Grady had cheerfully remembered punching in the face not that long ago.

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