“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.”

I stare at her, at the way the sun is already flushing her cheeks, at the strange look in her eyes… vulnerable, but determined.  And I can’t help but wonder once again, why she wants me so much.

I’m not stupid.  I know I’m not lacking in female attention.  But a girl like Nora can have literally anyone she wants.  And girls like that don’t usually throw themselves at someone….because they think they’re above that.

It mystifies me.

We’re quiet for a while, surrounded by the scent of the hot wooden boards, the lake water, the sunshine.

But it doesn’t take long for Nora to get antsy, and I can see why her gardener wanted to be alone to fish.   She chatters, and I sigh.

“You know, when you talk, you scare away the fish,” I finally tell her.

She glares up at me.

“You’re not catching anything anyway.”

I sigh again.  “It takes time.  And patience.”

She falls silent for just a minute, then my mouth falls open as she unties her bikini top.

“What the hell are you doing?” I blurt as she drops her top on the pier and sits topless in the broad daylight.

“I don’t want lines,” she shrugs.  “There’s no one out here anyway.  This is a private pier.”   She turns her back to me, and thrusts a plastic bottle over her shoulder.    “Put some sunscreen on my back, would you?  It’s a curse of being a ginger, I burn easily.”

You’ve got to be f**king kidding me.

It’s the oldest trick in the book.  A chick asks you to put lotion on them at the beach in order to get attention.  

But still, I sit staring at her bare back, at the expanse of creamy white flesh facing me, and before I know it, I’m grabbing the bottle of sunscreen and dumping some in my hand.

My fingers glide over her soft skin, smoothing the lotion over her slender body, skimming over her shoulders, the friction between our skin warming my hand.  

My groin reacts to such a simple act, tightening, constricting, noticing.

Hell.

Nora turns with a smile.

“Now my front?”

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.