Big Max cleared his throat.
Right. They had an audience. At least they hadn’t made a sex bet this time.
“We should get back to setting up,” Linda said pointedly as she nudged her husband to get up from the table.
Grady stood too, ears suddenly burning. “I’ll clean up in here.”
Max mouthed,Coward, but he was still grinning. Grady didn’t take it personally. He was too busy plotting out his next moves.
He just needed to figure out where Jess got that stupid hat.
AS MUCHas Grady was coming to appreciate Max’s family, their cooking, and their zany traditions, he did have limits, and he hit them about four that afternoon.
“How many uncles do you have, again?” Grady asked out of the side of his mouth after he shook hands with yet another forty-to-eighty-year-old man.
Max adjusted his Trophy Boyfriend hat and shrugged. “I don’t know. I lost count.”
Grady honestly couldn’t tell if he was joking. Maybe he could make everyone wear name tags for the wedding? Was that gauche? Could they make a flow chart? He didn’t want to be rude.
He probably had to ask Max to marry him first, make a flow chart second.
For the time being, he escaped to walk Gru. It was an excuse to take a breather from the enjoyable but exhausting pastime of verbal wrestling with Max’s family. Of course, Gru was exhausted too, from wrangling the kids and attempting to eat from everyone’s plate, so they mostly ended up walking around the nearby dog park and then flopping over in a sunny spot, where Gru rolled in the grass and Grady provided belly rubs.
“How do you feel about having a stepdad?” Grady asked. He’d read it was important to talk to the kids about these things before it became a done deal.
Gru nosed hopefully at the pocket where Grady had stashed a handful of treats and then, when that didn’t work, licked Grady’s chin.
Grady took that as endorsement. He ruffled Gru’s ears and dug out a treat. “Thanks, buddy. Means a lot.”
IF MAXhad been low-key worried that a summer of Lockharts would prove too much for Grady, those worries died on his birthday, when Grady spent half an hour under a shady tree entertaining Max’s great-aunt. She was the original Max, though her legal name was Mildred. She’d worked as a bookkeeper for Max’s grandfather’s lobster-fishing business, but her passion, apart from travel, was local politics—she’d served as mayor and in the provincial parliament.
Some of Max’s more distant relatives whispered that his grandfather had named his son Max in order to try to coax Maxine to abandon her globetrotting and settle down with a nice man and raise a family. Max was pretty sure Grandpa Henry thought Great-Aunt Max was the bee’s knees and named his son after her as an honorific.
But it was pretty funny that they’d resorted to calling Max’s dad Big Max to differentiate. Great-Aunt Max was over six feet tall herself. Or she had been before osteoporosis set in.
Max wandered over with three plates of cake and pressed a kiss to his great-aunt’s cheek. “I hope you’re not terrorizing my boyfriend.”
Maxine aimed a weak kick at him from her lawn chair and shook her head. “Now what could I possibly do to him that you haven’t done already?”
Grady didn’t even blush, so obviously he’d already developed an immunity to Lockhart family shenanigans. It made Max feel all warm and fuzzy. He planted a kiss on Grady too—a much longer and less chaste one—and then handed him his plate. “Probably not much.” He eyed Grady’s chair and determined it couldn’t take both their weight, so he sat in the grass with his back against Grady’s knee. “Are you getting along?”
Grady took his cue to card his fingers through Max’s hair and then picked up his fork. “Like a house on fire.”
“I didn’t know you had such good taste,” Maxine said.
I don’t—I just got lucky.But Max wasn’t going to pump Grady’s tires onhisbirthday. “Careful, he might just be buttering you up to get your lobster bisque recipe.”
Maxine laughed, but Grady sat up straight so fast Max almost lost his cake. “That’syourrecipe?”
So, yeah, Grady fit right in, and Max was more in love with him than ever. He just still hadn’t figured out what to do about it, or at least,howto do about it.
He should’ve just gotten them both toasted in Vegas and suggested they elope. Grady got very mushy when he drank. He would’ve gone for it. Hindsight and all that.
The rational adult thing to do would be to talk to Grady about it.So hey, where do you see this relationship going in five years?Except, like, hell was Max waiting five years to put a ring on that. He needed to lock it down before Grady came to his senses.
Just not so soon that Grady said,I don’t know, this is kind of sudden, instead of the desiredyes.
Max had to hand it to Grady—on the surface of things, he took to playing the role of Boyfriend Being Introduced to Family like a Lab to water. But after a few hours it wore on him and he’d escape for a break to decompress or meditate or whatever he was really doing when he pretended to be walking Gru. Max didn’t hold it against him. His family could be a lot, and to say Grady wasn’t used to it didn’t exactly cover the enormous truth ofhe has one living relative of his own.
