I limp to the window and watch her.
She’s unconcerned that someone will see her. She simply doesn’t care as she puts on her show for me.
And it’s for me. I know that.
Nora isn’t the kind of girl to strut outside nude in the daylight for any other reason than a means to her end. For whatever reason, she’s made it her goal to get me this summer.
I don’t know why.
But suddenly, it feels good.
It feels fucking good to be pursued like this, after being the one who was on the giving end of unrequited affection for so long.
She wants me.
Through the glass, Nora’s eyes meet mine and holds my gaze. She swims on her belly for a while, her eyes just above the surface of the water, never looking away from my own.
She splashes and kicks at me, flipping onto her back.
Her tits bob above the water, her nipples pointed to the sun.
My dick twitches again.
And then when she’s finally done showing off for me, she emerges from the water, dripping wet and bathed in sunlight.
She’s sexy as hell.
And she knows it.
She strides back across the lawn, watching me every step of the way. She climbs the back steps, crosses the kitchen, and pauses in front of me, dripping on my feet.
“I’m cold,” she murmurs into my ear, leaning up on her tiptoes. She is. Her cold skin grazes against me, bleeding through my shirt, as her tits press into my chest. Her nipples are hard enough to cut glass and my hands ache to slide along her skin, over her hips, down to where I’d grip her ass and…
I grit my teeth.
“Then you should get dressed,” I tell her calmly, bending to pick up the towel she’d discarded earlier and handing it to her. I make no move to touch her, regardless of how much my traitorous fingers want to slip in between her legs and…
I grit my teeth again.
She sees my jaw flex and grins victoriously.
She knows that she won the game she was playing… that she made me want her.
I don’t bother telling her that I wanted her already.
Instead, I just meet her gaze and hold it, until she steps back and walks away.
This time, instead of staring at her bare ass, I focus on the black words tattooed on her shoulder blade. I saw them earlier, but I was too distracted to read them, even though they make me curious.
Nora isn’t the type of girl I would’ve figured for a tattoo.
She’s refined, buttoned-up, classy.
But even still, she has black words tattooed on her shoulder blade, with a small elegant anchor. Fluctuat nec mergitur.
It’s Latin. What does it mean?
I pull my phone out of my pocket and punch the words into a search engine.
A result is immediately returned.
She is tossed by the waves, but she does not sink.
It has meaning. It’s symbolic. The ink is stark black and the tattoo looks new.
It’s a reminder to her… to stay strong. To be resolute. To never sink no matter what.
My eyes narrow as I remember the text on her phone.
I want your word. And I want you to keep it.
I know where you are.
Something happened to her. Something she doesn’t want to talk about, something that she’s scared of, something that involves this William person.
I’ve seen the fear in her eyes a couple of different times, but she always covers it up.
I’ve seen that kind of fear before, in the eyes of women in Afghanistan. In the eyes of women who had been beaten and abused and raped.
My stomach clenches at the memory, but also for Nora.
Someone has hurt her.
But that someone won’t do it again, not while she’s here on my watch.
Of that, I am certain.
Resolutely, I make my way back out to the living room and drop into the chair by the windows. I wait while Nora gets dressed, and ponder our situation the whole time.
We’re like two prize fighters, circling around a ring, each waiting for the other one to pounce.
We’ve both got secrets that we don’t want the other to know.
It’s kind of ironic.
Nora finally emerges, clad in a t-shirt with no bra and short shorts. Her nipples poke through the thin material and the corners of her mouth twitch.
She knows exactly what she’s wearing.
I smile at her.
“How was your swim?”
She smiles back.
Thrust and parry.
“It was refreshing. How was watching?”
I hold her gaze and smile again.
“It was refreshing.”
Her grin widens.
“I forgot to get breakfast stuff for tomorrow. What would you like?”
You.
“Eggs,” I suggest.
She nods. “Wise choice. I think I can manage eggs.”
She grabs her purse.
I lift an eye-brow and glance at her chest again, at the way her bare tits strain against the t-shirt and her nipples poke against the fabric.
“Don’t you want to put on a bra?”
I somehow manage to keep my voice level.
She grins angelically and leans down to whisper in my ear, her tits pressed against my shoulder.
“No. I want you thinking about my nipples while I’m gone. They taste like honey.”
Jesus.
With that, she saunters away.
I swallow hard.
Cold fish. Cold fish. Cold fish.
Cold.
Fucking.
Dead.
Fish.
Somehow, I doubt that even the thoughts of cold dead fish are going to help me this summer.
Chapter Seven
Brand
There’s nothing to do out here but stew in the idea that I’m trapped in Angel Bay. There’s barely a cell signal, I can’t get around and I can’t drive yet.
Perfect.
Oh, and add to that that the girl who is sharing my cottage wants to have strings-free sex with me and for some reason, I turned her down.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m just going to blame it on the pain pills. They’ve addled my brain.
With a groan, I push myself out of the chair I’m in and hobble toward the door, my crutches scraping on the floor.
“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 fucking 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 fuck 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 fucking 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.
Her face falls and her eyes shutter closed, she’s expressionless now, sullen as she reaches for her top.
“I didn’t realize I was so offensive,” she mutters. “I’m sorry. I’ll just leave you alone out here.”
She stalks away and I can hear her heels clicking on the pier with every step she takes, as she gets further and further away.
I feel awful for crushing her. And I did crush her. I saw it in her eyes before she guarded them. I saw it in the way her shoulders fell, the way she sucked in her breath at my words.
I don’t know why I said what I said… except that I want her to find her dignity.
I know, somehow I know, that this isn’t really Nora. Nora Greene