“Where are you going?” Nora asks curiously as she walks from the laundry room to the living room with a load of fresh laundry in her arms.
“Fishing.”
Nora starts to laugh until she sees that I’m serious.
“Fishing?”
I nod. “I can’t do anything else. But I can sure as hell sit on a pier.”
Nora stares at me for a second, then sits the laundry basket down, trailing behind me.
I pause and look at her. “Where are you going?”
She grins up at me. “Fishing. I’ve never been.”
I raise an eyebrow. “You’ve lived in Angel Bay every summer of your life and you’ve never been fishing?”
She shakes her head emphatically. “Nope. There was no one to take me. My father would rather die than bait a hook, it held no interest for my mother, and our gardener Julian liked to go alone. He did all kinds of other stuff with me, but fishing was his quiet time. So… no. I’ve never been.”
“That seems like a travesty,” I tell her as I turn back around. I eye the distance from here to the shed outside, to the edge of the pier. It seems like a hundred f**king miles with these crutches.
“Well, then. End the madness for me,” she chirps cheerfully by my side. “Actually, I’ll meet you out there. I’m going to get a suit on.”
“Take your time.”
Because it will take me a hundred years to get situated.
Fuck.
She does take her time. Because it takes me twenty minutes to hobble to the shed, find a couple of poles and a bait-box and then drag all of that stuff to the end of the pier. All while on crutches.
I feel quite accomplished as I drop it all, then sit on the edge, carefully dangling my feet over the board pier. It hurts to bend my knee, of course, but not as much as it did yesterday.
That’s progress, damn it.
I’m baiting a hook with a lure when Nora comes prancing down the pier in a pair of heels and a bikini so tiny it might as well not be there. I stifle a groan as she leans down next to me, making sure to stick her ass out as she does.
Her ass is perfectly rounded.
I look away as I cast my line.
Cold fish. Cold fish in the lake. Cold fish, cold fish.
“Want a pole?” I ask her, watching my bobber float on the surface of the water. Nora chuckles.
“Yes. Didn’t I make that clear last night?”
I roll my eyes. “Are you always like this?”
She picks up the pole next to me, fiddling with it. “Like what?”
“So. Uh. Desperate.”
She sucks in a breath and turns to me, indignation spitting from her eyes. I almost laugh.
“I’m not desperate,” she announces, sticking her nose in the air as she further tangles the line on her pole. Annoyed, she tosses it down. “That’s broken.”
I can’t help but laugh as I pick it up and untangle it for her, handing it back. “Don’t mess with that part,” I point at the line. “Hold this button down, then release it as you cast it. Like this.”
I demonstrate.
“And you’re acting desperate. A woman like you doesn’t need to beg someone to f**k her.”
My tone is probably harsher than it needed to be because I can practically see her flinch.
“I’m not desperate,” she repeats, softer this time. “I just… I know what I want. And I only have a limited time to get it. That makes me driven, not desperate.”
She thrusts her chest out and her perky tits are in my face, perfect, young and lush. My dick is rock hard by this point.
“You can do your own front,” I growl. “In fact, put your suit back on. You’re not a stripper. You don’t know if someone will show up here.”
She cocks her head and keeps her chest thrust proudly out. “No one will. It’s just you and me.”
“For now,” I tell her firmly. “But you never know. Stop acting like a bar whore and put your clothes on.”
The words come out before I can stop it, a reaction to my own frustration, to my own gut reaction at her nakedness.