"Yeah, I stuck to that resolution for about five seconds after Val showed up." She laughed. "Oh Ollie, don't make the same mistakes I did. If you like Mara, tell her."
"I can't." I shuffled to the window, leaning my forehead on the glass,. "She's terrified of naked people, and I kind of, uh, let her sort of believe I'm not a naturist."
Eve laughed again, much louder than before. "Honestly, Ollie, you're the cutest."
"This isn't funny, Evie."
A male voice said something in the background, but I couldn't make out the words.
"Hang on," Eve said. "Val wants to talk to you, man to man."
Oh great. The notorious playboy, the guy who used to strip naked on the soccer field when his team won a game and the guy who'd starred in his own sex tape, was about to give me advice about women. One woman. A nutcase.
A really hot nutcase.
"Ollie," Val said in his Brazilian accent that women all seemed to love, especially Eve, "I hear you have a woman problem."
"There's no problem. Everything's fine."
He chuckled. "You're infatuated with a girl who's afraid of nudity. How is that fine? I can give you advice, you know."
"Thanks, but I'm good."
"Are you sure? I do have experience in this area."
"No, man, that's okay. I can handle things with Mara."
"All right. If you're sure."
We said goodbye, and I stood there with my forehead on the glass. Movement caught my attention again, and I glanced at Mara's window.
She had pulled the curtains halfway open and now held a small pair of pink binoculars.
I lifted my head, sure I couldn't be seeing what I thought I was seeing. Mara, the anti-nudist, could not be watching the naturists with binoculars.
But she was.
Maybe she wasn't as uptight as I'd thought. If she had a naughty streak... Just thinking about that made my hard-on return. Oh fantastic. I'd be spending who-knew-how-many days around a woman who gave me the worst case of blue balls in the history of mankind.
I sat down at the desk and forced myself to concentrate on work. Accounting was pretty much the most boring thing on earth, next to watching a golf game, so I focused on that for half an hour. My stiffy softened up gradually the less I thought about Mara, distracted by the complicated accounting software, until I felt reasonably confident I wouldn't look like a total perv when I walked out of the office.
Ruth Norris cornered me when I got to the bottom of the stairs, so close to escaping the guest house that I could see the exit sign down the hall. Of course I couldn't get away without an embarrassing conversation with a seventy-ish woman who loved to razz me. In a sweet old lady way. Like she was my naughty grandma.
"Ollie," she said, hooking her arm around mine. "I've been looking for you."
"Did you need something?"
She fixed me with a grandmotherly look of concern. "Are you all right, dear? Everyone can see how much you and Mara like each other, but the poor girl is afraid of nudity."
"How do you know if we like each other? You saw her for thirty seconds and never even spoke to her."
Ruth's mouth kinked up at the corners in a sly smile. "She came out of the house while you were hiding in the office."
"She---what?"
"Mara sneaked outside to have a look, from a distance, and I met her." Ruth urged me to walk, taking us down the hall toward the exit. "She's such a lovely girl, but I'm afraid she's full of anxieties. Mara needs a good man to straighten her out."
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, like somebody had dropped a head-size boulder in there and it was tearing a hole in my gut, that I knew what Ruth would say next.