The Naked Fisherman by Jewel E. Ann

Chapter Thirteen

Our “It Never Happened”agreement put a damper on the rest of the evening. We walked. He kissed me goodnight, but it wasn’t like the kiss in the kitchen. And that was it.

Friday morning I got a text from Fisher as I was buttering a piece of toast, freshly showered with wet hair, but dressed sans shoes and socks.

Fisher: I’m leaving early for a meeting. You can work in the office if Hailey has stuff for you or you can have the day off.

Immediate let down.

I dropped the butter knife and sprinted to the front of the house without any shoes on just as Fisher started his truck. “Stop!” I smacked my hand on his window.

He jerked his head to the side and started to roll down his window, but I opened his door instead.

“Didn’t you get my text?” He squinted.

“Yeah, but didn’t you get the memo that Rory’s coming home soon?” I stepped up, forcing him to wrap his arm around my waist to keep me from falling out of the truck as I planted my face an inch from his.

He grinned. “Your hair is still wet.”

“So?” I whispered, my gaze sliding along his face from his eyes to his full lips so close to mine. “Are you going to kiss me?”

Wetting those full lips, he lifted his right shoulder into a half shrug. “I was thinking about it.”

My foolish grin showed all my teeth. “Don’t think.”

Fisher lifted his other hand and cupped my face, ghosting his thumb along my cheek. “I never do when I’m with you.”

A soft breeze blew my wet hair into my face and his, but it didn’t stop him from kissing me.

“Now, if you don’t get out of my truck,” he said releasing my lips, “I’m going to want more.”

I giggled, kissing along his cheek as his hand moved from my waist to my butt.

“Like that book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, have you read it?”

I nodded, relishing the feel of his scruffy face against my lips. “Fisher,” I whispered at his ear, feeling brave enough to tease his earlobe like he had teased mine with his teeth, “are you saying you want my cookie?”

He laughed, threading fingers through my wet hair and bringing my lips back to his. “Your cookie.”

Kiss.

“Your muffins.”

Kiss.

I giggled against his mouth.

“I’m going to want the whole fucking bakery.”

Kiss.

I wanted his crude and dirty mouth. The kisses … I wanted all of his kisses. His laughter. And the way he looked at me like I was the bane of his existence in the most beautiful way.

“Well…” I stepped down, rubbing my lips together to relish the taste of toothpaste, coffee, and the naked fisherman “…you have work. And the bakery is closed.”

“Killjoy.” He adjusted himself. Again, it made my grin double. “Are you going to work?”

Twisting my lips, I slipped my hands into my pockets. “I figured I would. I haven’t called Hailey yet.”

“Take the day off.”

I frowned. “And do what?”

“Take a bath in my tub.”

I giggled. “I just showered.”

“Roll around in my bed naked.”

Another giggle.

Our banter felt a little wrong—the way we felt a little wrong. And that wrong felt perfectly right in that moment. I knew the upside down version of my world wouldn’t last long, so I didn’t try to fix it. I just let it be whatever it was meant to be.

A little wrong. A little right.

Just … us.

“Bye.” I took one step back, then another.

Fisher shook his head, but his smile made the bigger statement as he shut his door and put his truck into drive. I pressed my fingers to my lips and kissed them, blowing it to him. He winked and drove out of the driveway.

“Oh, naked fisherman … this is going to hurt.” I crossed my hands over my chest to comfort my heart. Who was I kidding? I knew I was already too invested in him. And even if I also knew I would have to let us end when Rory returned, it still hurt. Even if Fisher didn’t share the same emotions, I knew he would always be my first love—that really good kind of love where my brain had no say. The kind with no logical explanation. The kind that took a special place in my heart as first.

God willing, I would go on to love another. Have a family. And die in the arms of my husband. But … first would always be Fisher Mann.

* * *

Hailey wasn’t feeling well,so I went to work. I delivered lunch to the roofers.

“Thanks. You must be Reese.” A guy with black hair and a major suntan smiled at me; it made his teeth stark white.

“Yes.” I handed him the sacks of food and slipped my hands into the back pockets of my jeans.

He inspected the sacks and smiled a little. I ignored his smirk, his unspoken observation. “I’m Jeremiah. Hailey was telling me about you.” He peeled his eyes from the big sacks filled with little sacks.

Jeremiah was hot. That wasn’t really up for debate. I could see why Hailey thought I’d like him.

“Funny, she might have mentioned you to me as well.” I tried to control my grin.

“I missed her party. I heard you were there … alone.”

“Yeah, I was.”

He glanced over my shoulder. “I’d better get to eating my lunch. Bossman’s here.”

I twisted my body and squinted at the white truck and Bossman climbing out. Aviators on. He sipped something red from the straw of a big plastic cup from a convenience store.

“Boss,” Jeremiah said.

“Jeremiah,” Fisher said in a fairly neutral tone.

“Can I get your number from Hailey later?” Jeremiah asked me as if Fisher wasn’t hearing every word. “We could hangout this weekend if you don’t have plans. My parents have a place near Breckenridge.”

Fisher stepped right next to me. My attention shifted between the two men. I anticipated Fisher saying something, but he didn’t. Instead, he sipped his drink like a ten-year-old who just got his favorite beverage and couldn’t stop nursing it.

“I … uh … have plans already. But thanks.” I pressed my lips together so Fisher didn’t think I was flirting with Jeremiah.

“Maybe another time?”

I didn’t know how to reply, so I nodded just before Jeremiah took off with the bags of food for the crew.

“What are your plans?” Fisher asked, taking a two second break from his straw.

“What are you doing here?”

“Working.” He shrugged, taking a longer break from his drink. “What are you doing here?”

“Delivering lunch.”

“Did you bring me lunch?”

I shook my head. “I can get you lunch. What do you want?”

“You.”

On a nervous laugh, I glanced around to see if anyone heard him. “I don’t think I know what that means.”

“I think you do.” He brushed past me to the crew sitting along the side of the house in the shade, eating their lunch.

I didn’t move, mostly because I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to head back to the office or get him lunch … me … which … yeah, I had an idea of what that might have entailed. But it wasn’t on the menu. However, just thinking about it, made me feel an unfamiliar need, a foreign feeling between my legs, and the recently new wet feeling that wasn’t a bladder issue.

It had to be better than men getting untimely erections. After all, I could hide it. Still, I felt like everyone who looked at me somehow knew.

As Fisher chatted with his crew, inspected their lunches while shaking his head, I thought long and hard about the definition of sex and temptation. I tried to make a case for sex being only intercourse. That left a lot of options.

“Let’s go.” Fisher strutted toward me, sipping his red drink.

“What is that?” My nose scrunched.

“Fruit punch and iced tea.” He held it out for me.

I eyed the guys eating their lunches, making sure they weren’t watching us before I took a sip.

“Don’t do that.” Fisher grimaced, taking his drink and crossing the street toward his truck.

“Do what?” I followed him since I was parked behind him.

“Lick your lips like that.”

I chuckled. “I didn’t lick them like anything. Why?”

“Because I’ve been dealing with a fucking hard-on since you climbed into my truck this morning.”

Fisher … so uncensored.

He had no idea—or maybe he did—how much it thrilled me to know that I could slowly unravel him in that way. It made me feel powerful, yet incredibly weak at the same time because I had no clue what to do with my accidental sorcery.

“Do you need a formal apology?”

Fisher opened the door to his truck then rubbed the pads of his fingers over his mouth like he was trying to wipe off his smile before I saw it.

“Say it.” Everything I didn’t want to hear or see three weeks earlier had become my obsession, my new education, my real-world path to enlightenment. Fisher thought something, but he didn’t want to say it. He didn’t think I could handle it.

“Nothing.”

I took the four long strides to get from my driver’s door to his. With my hands on my hips, feeling way more confident than I should have been, I tipped my chin up. “Say. It.”

“It’s not for your ears.” He eyed me, pushing back with as much confidence—probably more.

“That’s code for it’s inappropriate. Since when has that stopped you before?”

On a small, controlled chuckle, he shook his head and focused on something over my shoulder, avoiding eye contact with me. “You offered an apology. I was going to say apologies were just lip service. Then I thought …” He dragged his teeth over his lower lip and met my gaze.

“You thought?”

“I thought lip service wouldn’t be the worst thing for my problem.”

It took me a few seconds … then I got it. My eyes widened, brows sliding up my forehead.

Fisher was a little extra that day.

If someone wouldn’t have coined the term oral sex, oral sex, I would have been able to make a better case for it. Why couldn’t it have just been oral or something else like … tonguing? I needed a line, a line I wouldn’t cross. And I was okay with moving the line a smidge if I could rationalize something. I couldn’t go there … not yet.

Oh the hypocrisy …

“Nothing that ends in the word sex. I just can’t.”

His eyebrows jumped, one slightly higher than the other. Fisher’s expressions were so sexy. How did I expect to not perform any act ending in the word “sex” when the man before me was the definition of sex?

“So … everything else is on the table?”

What was I missing? I knew it would come back to bite me in the backside. Still, I nodded while chewing on the corner of my bottom lip and wringing my hands together.

“Meet you at home.” He turned and climbed into his truck.

“Wait … you’re done for the day? It’s only one?”

“I am now.” He shut his door and started his truck.