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Glenn Maguire.
That name kept repeating over and over again in her head. She was sure if she googled perfect human specimen, he would be the first result.
When she’d seen him across the street, she’d known he was an Adonis of a human being. But that was before she’d seen the way he walked in and filled the room with a sense of authority that had her lady parts tingling, but he also had a daughter. A daughter who was sweet and smart and who Viv could easily fall head over heels in love with.
So that meant he was off-limits.
No kids. That was her rule, and she had it for a reason.
Viv sighed. It was just her luck that the first man she would feel anything for would be someone who she couldn’t get jiggy with.
Trying to shake off the image of perfection that was Glenn Maguire she drove into the parking lot of Golden Years Senior Living. As much as she knew that Nonna hadn’t wanted to move there, she was relieved that she’d finally relented. Viv had worried about Nonna living on her own and had been encouraging her to make the move for years, but the woman was more stubborn than a mule.
As she pulled into a parking space right in front of the building, she heard the notification ding indicating she had a message. She grabbed her phone and saw that it was an email from the DNA Detective. It was a service that scoured genealogy sites to help people find family members and also solve cold cases.
Viv was using it to try and track down her deadbeat dad. She really hoped that her father didn’t turn out to be a psycho, murdering, rapist. That would seriously be a bummer
She checked the email and unfortunately the search had come back with no matches. It was another dead end. Viv felt herself deflate like a balloon that was kissed by a cactus.
For the past couple of years Viv had been on a mission to find the sperm donor who had fathered herself and her three sisters before abandoning her mother with four daughters under the age of six. She wasn’t doing it with any hope of some sort of magical reunion or twisted idea that they were going to be some big happy family.
Fuck that.
She wanted answers. Answers that she couldn’t get from her mother since she’d died when Viv was fifteen years old. Thankfully, her oldest sister Grace had been eighteen at the time, so the sisters hadn’t been split up.
But what if that hadn’t been the case. What if they’d been split up and had to go into foster care? Would their sperm donor have even cared?
Why had he left?
Why hadn’t he come back?
Had he even checked up on them?
Did he care that they’d all grown up to be successful, independent women?
He’d already missed one daughter’s wedding; would he have wanted to be there to walk Ava down the aisle? Oh well. That opportunity was gone. Forever.
Both Grace and Audrey were engaged. Would he want to walk them down the aisle?
If, by some miracle, someone liked it so much they put a ring on it, would he want to walk to Viv down the aisle?
These were answers only the man himself could give her. But unfortunately, she couldn’t find the bastard.
None of her sisters had ever shown any interest in finding their father, so this was a mission that Viv had taken on alone. She’d scoured the internet, spending hours on social media, and even dating sites searching for Mason Wells.
She’d tracked down ten men so far who she’d been able to mark off as not being her father. She’d wanted so badly to be able to find him before Ava’s wedding but that hadn’t happened. She had two months to find the man before Audrey’s wedding.
Taking a deep breath, she pushed down her disappointment and told herself to suck it up, Buttercup. Tonight was not about her or her sad love life and absentee father. Nonna had lived in the house that she was selling for over sixty years. It was more than just a home; her late husband had built it. Viv knew that her letting it go was going to be massively difficult.
She got out of her Jeep, and took a deep, cleansing breath before heading inside. When the automatic doors opened the air conditioning blew over her face and she saw Cindy Brown seated behind the counter. The last time Viv had seen Cindy her hair had been curly and fell just to her shoulders, today it was short, and slicked down around her head. She looked exactly like Angela Bassett when she cuts off her hair in Waiting to Exhale, one of Viv’s favorite movies.
“Hey, gorgeous!” Viv greeted her.
Cindy was yet another Hope Falls resident who had been the lucky target of cupid’s arrow. She’d reunited with her high school sweetheart at their twenty-fifth high school reunion and the two have been in a bliss bubble ever since. Nonna had a not-so-secret crush on Cindy’s betrothed Davis Brown because he was the spitting image of Denzel Washington.
Cindy perked up as Viv approached the counter. “I heard there is some new Maguire meat in town and he stopped by Brewed.”