4. River
RIVER
I’m jostled awake by the wheels hitting the ground, and I realize that not only have we landed but I’ve been asleep for the entire flight, making me wonder just how strong those edibles are, because I rarely sleep on flights.
I rub my neck and turn my attention to Sloane immediately and notice she’s reading on her phone.
She must feel my gaze on her because she looks up at me and gives me a sweet smile. “Have a nice nap?”
“I do not remember falling asleep. I’m sorry. I hope we weren’t in the middle of a conversation?” I vaguely remember something about three kids, but I’m struggling to remember what came after that.
Fuck, I’m never this disoriented. I guess it's been a while, and I am definitely not in my twenties or even early thirties anymore.
She tilts her head to the side, and a smirk pulls at her lips. “Something about wanting to see me again, but I’m too young for you,” she tells me as we slowly taxi toward our gate.
A nervous laugh comes out of me that I wasn’t expecting because I’m rarely at a loss for words when it comes to women. Hell, anyone. And I’ve got nothing. I don’t say anything while we deplane and it isn’t until I notice her walking away from me that I decide to say something.
“Do you have someone picking you up?”
“My cousin and probably my aunt.” She nods.
“It was nice meeting you, River. Who knows, maybe we’ll cross paths again when I’m older.
” She giggles, and I mentally curse my sister-in-law for convincing me that I’m too old for a woman in her twenties, I know, very early twenties, who is clearly interested.
“What’s your last name?” I ask her, and when she raises a suspicious eyebrow at me, I immediately add, “You know mine.”
“Hunter,” she says just as we make it to the luggage carousel.
“Well, Sloane Hunter, I don’t have any luggage to grab, but I don’t want to leave you until you’re with your family—” I start when she cuts me off.
“Oh my God, I’m fine. Plus, I don’t need to explain to my family who you are because we’re never going to see each other again,” she says, and while I know I initiated that, I actually hate the thought of it now.
“Right,” I tell her.
Ask her for her number. The part of my subconscious controlled by my dick practically screams at me.
She picks up her phone without another word.
“Hi, are you guys here?” she asks whoever is on the other line.
She gives me a smile and a wave, and I realize that I’m actually being dismissed.
I’m irritated as hell that I’m still feeling the effects of the marijuana because I am normally much smoother at all of this, and under normal circumstances, I would have found a way to get her number even after I told her she was too young for me.
I begin to walk away from her, glancing over my shoulder once before walking out of the airport and toward the rideshare area.
“Uncle River!!!” I hear squealing the second I walk through the door, and then Isla is barreling toward me in what looks like her pajamas, but I’m thrown off by the bright pink tutu and tiara she's wearing with it.
I drop to one knee to greet her, and she wraps her arms around me tight and squeezes.
That familiar feeling begins to claw at me: this is what I want.
Children of my own who are always this excited to see me when I get home.
“You are up late, Isles,” I say in shock, because it was almost ten thirty and I’ve never known her to be up this late.
I straighten her slightly tilted tiara and press a kiss to her forehead.
“It’s summertime!” she says as she lets me go and begins skipping toward the kitchen like she’s got all the energy in the world and not like it’s almost two hours past her bedtime.
I follow her and see Rowan sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, his laptop open.
My brother is a lawyer at a large firm in DC, so I’m not surprised that he’s working at ten thirty on a Sunday, but I am surprised he’s not holed up in his office.
“She wanted to stay up to say hi to you,” my brother says before turning to his daughter, “which you’ve done, so now it’s time for bed.” He gives her a pointed look but she looks up at me with those puppy dog eyes I can rarely say no to and then back to her dad.
“But…”
“Isla, you have camp in the morning, remember?” Rowan says.
“Fiiiine,” she says in a way that leads me to believe she’ll be a handful in her teenage years.
“I’ll come hang out with you when you get out of camp tomorrow. How’s that?” I ask her, and she twists her mouth as if she’s deciding whether that’s a good deal or if she wants to press the idea of staying up later.
I hear footsteps running up the stairs, then the basement door swings open, and my nephew, SJ, appears. “Uncle Riv! Sup! How was training camp?”
“It was good. How was your soccer game on Saturday? I heard you scored two goals. Nice.” I give him a high five, and he preens a little, like any eleven-year-old boy who’s just been complimented on his athletic skills.
“Thanks! You have time to play a game before you go?” he asks in reference to his PlayStation, which he’s on for about 40 percent of his waking hours when he’s out of school.
“How about tomorrow? I’m exhausted, kid, and I have to go by the school in the morning.”
SJ nods and pounds my fist before he grabs a drink from the refrigerator and heads back downstairs.
“Eleven o’clock, Sawyer Jack,” Rowan calls down the stairs, and I don’t hear SJ say anything. “Respond so I know you heard me,” he adds, and I hear a faint okaaaay.
“Isla, bed.” Rowan interjects when he sees Isla lingering.
My guess is that she's trying to be invisible so her dad won’t notice she’s still awake, as a way to sneakily stay up later.
She huffs and hugs me before she begins padding out of the room.
“Bedtime has been a nightmare lately,” Rowan says.
“She never wants to go to bed, and when we finally get her to her room, she requests at least four books or all of a sudden needs a snack and a glass of water.” He chuckles.
“Getting her back on a schedule when school starts is going to be the death of me.”
“Right, like Ellie isn’t going to handle it for you,” I joke as I open their refrigerator and begin pulling out the pot roast she made for dinner.
“Your food is on a plate in the microwave,” Rowan explains, and I should have known better. Ellie got this house together within days of working here, and there’s rarely anything out of place.
“Oh, great. Where is Ellie anyway?” I ask as I begin heating the food she’d left out for me.
“Taking a shower. So was there actually a reason you stayed the whole weekend?” he asks as he closes his laptop with a knowing look on his face.
“No. There wasn’t.” I contemplate not telling him about Jordan or Sloane because there’s nothing to tell.
On the other hand, I’ve told Rowan practically every thought that’s ever crossed my brain since I was ten years old, so I blurt out, “There was a woman at the bar last night that I went home with… not important really, but there was a woman on my flight, though.”
“Oh?” He gets up to grab a beer from the refrigerator, and when he holds one up for me, I shake my head.
“No, I think I’m still high from the gummies she gave me.” I chuckle, and Rowan shakes his head and gives me a look of mock scolding before letting out a laugh.
“Which girl? The one from the plane?”
“Obviously.”
“Not obvious since you’ve mentioned two girls in the past twenty-four hours,” he says as he drops back into his chair at the table. “Didn’t our mother ever teach you not to take drugs from strangers?”
I take a seat across from him and immediately begin eating. “Nope. They were only helicopter parents with you. I’m the true second child stereotype.” I raise my glass of water to him before taking a bite of a carrot.
He shakes his head. “It all makes so much sense.”
“Do you want to know about the girl from the plane or not?”
“Not really, but you’re going to tell me anyway, so go on,” he says sarcastically, but I hear the curiosity in his tone.
“She was beautiful and funny and charming and just fucking cool, but she was twenty-one, so all I could hear in my ear was you and your annoying fiancée scolding me about not screwing around anymore with girls in their twenties. Which, by the way, makes you”—I point at him with my fork—“a fucking hypocrite because Ellie is barely a breath over that.”
“Alright,” he says with a slightly more aggressive tone than he’s had since I got here, “it’s mighty bold of you to call Ellie annoying as you’re eating the food she made for you.”
“You know I love her,” I say through a mouthful of food. “And not in the ‘I wanted to ask her out first’ way.”
He glares at me, and although I never acted on it, Rowan hates hearing that I met his fiancée first and briefly considered asking her out. “I will kill you.”
“And leave the kids orphans when you go to jail for murder? You wouldn’t,” I joke.
“You’re being fucking annoying. Get to the story.
” He nods at me. “And by the way, I could not care less about the ages of the women you date. The problem is always their maturity level. If they had half the sense that Elianna has, it wouldn’t be a problem.
Also, for the record, I was actively trying not to be attracted to my children’s nanny. ”
I shoot him a look that I hope lets him know that I’m not buying whatever he’s selling.
“Were you? I don’t remember it going down like that at all.
” I put my hands up to prevent us from going even more off topic with this trip down memory lane.
“But back to Sloane. She’s moving here to start college at Towson.
Her parents are wildlife research scientists, and she’s been traveling around with them for most of her life until now. ”
“Wow. Sounds like she’s lived a pretty cool life. So what happened?”