Chapter 1

I looked up from my comfortable chaise lounge beside the pool, as the three bikini-clad girls burst out of the patio entrance to the house, screaming as if they were being pursued by ogres. I wasn't surprised. It was the same three girls who had been running around my back yard for years, screaming as if the world was coming to an end. It happened every summer, and it should have been as normal as the sun coming up.

But this time, as I looked up, the book I'd been reading was forgotten as my eyes took in the lush curves and bouncing breasts of my niece, Caitlin, and her two summertime friends.

Emma lived next door to me and was the first to form a bond with Caitlin when I took her in for the month of July so my sister could finish her doctoral thesis in art history. I gathered, at the time, that this process involved literally unbroken hours of final editing, and the fewer distractions there were, the better the final manuscript would be. An active, ten year old girl can be quite a distraction, so I agreed to be distracted for a month so Hannah wouldn't be.

I think there was another reason for Hannah's request. Chad, Caitlin's father, had been killed in a motorcycle accident when Caitlin was four, and she'd never had another man in her life, at least not for more than an hour at a time since then. I think maybe Hannah thought Caitlin needed a male role model in her life, and her brother, only four years older, didn't qualify. So I got the nod.

I gave more than one thought to the possibility that Hannah might also use this time out of her daughter's view to blow out her pipes, so to speak. She was a vibrant, good looking woman, and I'd always been a little amazed that some guy hadn't snapped her up in the years after Chad's tragic death. I had only mentioned that to her once, though. Her reply had been, and I quote: "Bobby, honey, I'm doing just fine. How about you keep your nose out of my sex life and I'll keep mine out of yours, okay?"

In any case, that first month Caitlin stayed with me worked out rather well. I was an intentional bachelor, which left me both the time and money to go do whatever I wanted to, within reason. I loved camping and rock climbing, among other active pursuits, and Caitlin did too. She was particularly fond of shooting, something she never got to do in California, where they lived.

And, of course, I had the pool in the back yard, which was surrounded by a tall privacy fence. Caitlin surfed whenever she could get her mother to take her, so she loved water.

Yet another thing that happened that year was that Caitlin saw Emma sitting in a tire swing next door. The constant wind every Oklahoman is familiar with kept the swing moving slightly, but otherwise Emma was just hanging there, looking a little forlorn. I would find out years later that her mother had made her turn off the computer and go outside for some fresh air.

"Who's that?" asked Caitlin, as she carried a bag of groceries from the car into the house.

"Her name is Emma. She lives next door. I get the impression she's kind of shy. You want to invite her to go swimming?"

"How old is she?"

I had forgotten how much age mattered when you're young.

"Your age," I said, cagily.

"Okay, sure," said my niece.

I was the only one on the block who had an in ground pool, so Caitlin's invitation was eagerly accepted. As it turned out, they were like peas in a pod and the next thing I knew Emma was being included in most of Caitlin's plans. At least when the Wilkinsons let her. I had one of those nodding acquaintances with the Wilkinsons. His name was Jeff, and hers was Connie. I'm an architect and run my own business, so I'm home most of the time and see the other parents who are home during the day. Connie was one of those. She was a bright, goofy woman with hair that the wind constantly blew all over the place. Why she didn't put it in a pony tail I don't know. She had huge pink eyeglasses and slightly buck teeth, but she was a nice woman and we got along well on the relatively infrequent occasions we ran into each other.

I think one reason Emma took to Caitlin so quickly was that she only had one other friend in the neighborhood, a gangly girl named Ashley, who lived two blocks away. Our neighborhood was a little light on kids their age. There were a ton of teenagers running around, but ten-year-olds were relatively rare.

So, naturally, Emma introduced Caitlin to Ashley and, within two weeks they became the three musketeers. Their kingdom was my back yard.

That first year I wasn't really prepared to host a girl that age, much less three of them, at least in terms of planning out things they might like to do. So the pool, which is big enough to swim laps in, became the babysitter, so to speak, while I got more work done than I had thought I would. I did take Caitlin to a couple of the local attractions, but mostly she hung out with her two new best friends and there was a lot of splashing and screaming in my back yard.

She had a good time, which made me kind of inordinately proud for some reason. In fact, she had such a good time that the next year she asked her mother if she could to take a vacation at Uncle Bob's again. I found out when Hannah, who was now teaching classes at UC Irvine, called me.

"Hey, I thought I'd call you and make your day," she said as an opening.

"Okay, but wait a minute. Let me get out my Red Hawk."

"What's a Red Hawk?" she asked.

"It's a .44 magnum ... you know ... Dirty Harry? Make my day?"

"Ha, ha," she said, dryly. "How about I make your day without firearms being involved?"

"We can try," I said, trying to sound skeptical. "Give it your best shot." I laughed at my own pun. She ignored it.

"Okay. It just so happens it has come to my attention that my studly brother is popular with the ladies. How about them apples?"

"Me?" I blinked. I hadn't been out with a woman in months. It's not that I don't like women. I like them just fine. But a girlfriend likes to fill up your calendar with things for the two of you to do, and pretty soon there aren't any days to lie around the house in your underwear, just drinking beer. Plus my business was still growing, and needed a lot of time. If I couldn't give a woman what she really deserved, I didn't want to have the stress of that kind of relationship.

And, I admit, I was relatively happy with my sex life. I didn't get to have sex with a real live woman all that often, but the rest of the time there was my hand, and my hand was really good at it. Plus it never had a headache. So I wasn't unhappy at all.

"I think you have the wrong brother," I said.

"If only," she said, with a smile in her voice. "You have no idea how many times I wished you had a bigger brother who would treat you as badly as you treated me."

"I didn't treat you badly," I scoffed.

"Says the bully," she quipped.

"I never bullied you," I objected.

"No, you spent all that energy on any boy who was interested in me."

"I had to protect you from them!" I complained. "Dad told me that was my job. You think I wanted to spend all my time worrying about you instead of going out and having fun with my friends?"

"You had plenty of fun, you jerk. You just tried to make sure I didn't."

"Are we arguing?" I asked. "Because I don't want to argue."

"Sorry. I'm just a little stressed. I didn't call to talk about that. I called to tell you that Caitlin had a really great time with you last year, and has asked me to beg you to let her come back this summer for a similar visit."

"Caitlin's the lady I'm popular with?" I laughed. "I can live with that."

"You're a strange man, Bobby. Why don't you have a woman in your life?"

"Why don't you have a man in yours?" I countered.

"I don't have time for a man," she said.

"Exactly," I agreed.

"So ... what do you think? I know you were just doing me a favor last year. You don't have to say yes."

"I had a good time too, Hannah. You have a lively and interesting daughter. She wasn't any trouble. Maybe this time I'll come up with something more fun for her to pursue than doing cannon balls off the diving board."

"Thanks. To be honest, I could use some me time."

"This is not a problem at all," I said. "Just have her call me and tell me when I need to pick her up at the airport."

And so a tradition was born. I wasn't the only one to be glad she came back for seconds. Caitlin and the other two musketeers did, indeed, have a fun-filled month, which included a trip to Six Flags over Texas. The following year we went rock climbing in the Rockies. Emma and Ashley didn't go with us on that jaunt. Rock climbing, it seemed, was a little too intimidating for their parents, who lived in a state where the highest point in the geographical area was Black Mesa, which was pretty much impossible to fall off of anywhere. Real mountains made them nervous.

But that was fine, because while Caitlin loved spending time with her two best buddies, she liked doing things with just me, too. Part of that was because she always came with a plethora of questions to ask. They weren't necessarily questions that required a man to answer, though she asked a lot about why boys did this or that thing. I think she just reveled in having an adult at her fingertips, who wouldn't tell her he was too busy to spend time with her.

She also loved to camp out, and see lots of different places. It was because of that that she asked me to drive her home that year, instead of putting her on a plane. We toured Yellowstone that year and it was great. She was a certified tree-climbing tomboy in those days. I guess you could say that I brought out the tomboy in her, and Emma and Ashley nourished the girl in her. It was a good match on all sides.

But our "jaunts", as she called them, were infrequent. We were rarely gone from home for more than three days. The rest of the time she hung out in the pool with her cohorts.

That was all fine back when they were prepubescent. They made a lot of noise, and they dashed around as if they were running from their worst nightmares, but I could still read and do lifeguard duty at the same time. They wore bikinis which, had they been on bigger, bustier girls, might have been interesting. But on these girls they were merely strips of cloth that covered the parts their mothers wanted covered. I honestly think they'd have been just as happy running around buck naked, like they probably did when they were toddlers.

It was interesting in several ways. As the years went by, I got a yearly update on how puberty was treating the musketeers. I watched those polka dotted bikini tops begin to show that there was actually something under them, and those mounds got bigger every year. The girls didn't seem to notice, though. While their bodies changed, they otherwise seemed to stay exactly the same when they gathered in the back yard to jump in the pool and play the kind of silly games that kids play everywhere.

When they were fourteen, they seemed a little shier in some ways, a little less sure of themselves, perhaps. Ashley had braces and she hated them, thinking they made her look like a robot of some kind. I told her that was nonsense and that the braces would simply help her teeth become as beautiful as the rest of her.

It was just an offhand comment ... you know ... something designed to support her self image, to help her get through a tough time. I had no idea it would have such far reaching effects on my life. In fact, I didn't even think she'd remember me saying it. After all, I was thirty, practically ancient in their minds. The only interest they had in me was that I had a swimming pool in my back yard and a niece who was fun to play with while she was in town.

Another reason it was obvious Caitlin's two friends had no interest in me was that once Caitlin and I got in the car to make the drive to the west coast, I didn't see them for the rest of the summer.

Then, the year she was fifteen, she arrived and, like magic, she was a young woman, with bulges in all the right places. I remember wondering how that could have happened in just a year. I'm sure I'd seen Ashley and Emma around. Emma lived next door and more than once I'd heard her call out "Hi, Mister Simmons," but I hadn't noticed her flowering like Caitlin had.

The first time they came to swim that year ... I noticed. They had done the same thing Caitlin had done.

Have you noticed how a girl who is fifteen these days, looks an awful lot like a girl who was eighteen in the forties and fifties? They grow up fast. It sounds silly, but if you've ever raised tomatoes, there's a point where the fruit has turned red, and you can't tell just by looking whether it's fully ripe, or not quite. It was kind of like that, looking at them. They looked like a women, but of course I knew they were just teenagers.

They had always been fun to watch. Maybe a tiny bit of that was a male, watching females, but I didn't think of them as sexual beings. Not until that year, anyway. When a girl has real hips, and real breasts, and lips that are full, somehow, and look kissable, you can't help but wonder what happens when they go on dates.

Assuming they were allowed to date. I had no idea about that.

Another thing that happened when I saw her for the first time that year was that I remembered Hannah calling me to ask if Caitlin could come back that second summer. My sister had complained that I cramped her style when we were teenagers. And I had. It had been intentional, and not just because our father had asked me to "keep an eye on her." Hannah was the first adolescent girl I'd ever seen naked. It had been an accident. I'd walked into the bathroom to pee while she was drying off after taking a shower. She'd been so shocked she froze, and I got a good look.

After that, the idea of any of the guys she knew getting to see that just made my blood boil. It wasn't that I wanted her to become a nun. It was just that none of those guys deserved a girl like her.

The year Caitlin was fifteen, I had a few flashbacks to those days when her mother had been the same age. Caitlin didn't ask if she could date any of the guys Emma and Ashley knew, but I'd have said no if she had. In any case, it didn't come up. Ashley and Emma never talked about boys while I was around.

The next year, when she was sixteen, she looked even better. And an odd thing happened. Just as she had matured into a more beautiful, sexy, desirable young woman, my fantasies about her matured too. That was the first time that I wished I could accidentally walk in on Caitlin, like I had walked in on her mother all those years ago. I didn't, of course. I just thought about it. And yes, I admit I thought about it while I masturbated. So sue me.

That year, she came back from being somewhere with the other two musketeers and, when she walked in, I happened to be cleaning my Rock Island 1911 pistol.

"You have a lot of guns," she commented.

"Yeah," I said, holding the barrel up to the window and peering through it so I could see if it was clean inside.

"How come?" she asked.

"It's fun to shoot," I said. "Plus I'd like to be able to protect myself if I ever need to."

"Everybody back home says that anybody who owns a gun is a paranoid wacko."

"Do you think I'm a paranoid wacko?" I asked, putting the gun back together.

"Of course not," she said. "Can I hold it?"

She had shot my .22 rifle dozens of times, but I hadn't put a pistol in her hand yet. I taught her how to lock the slide back and how to determine it was empty of ammunition. When I explained the slide release, she pressed it and the slide snapped forward.

"It's heavy," she said, pointing it at the couch.

"That helps absorb the recoil of the round going off."

"Can I shoot it?"

"You might turn into a gun nut," I kidded.

"Are you a gun nut?"

"I suppose I am," I said. "At least that's what your surfer friends would probably call me."

"Then being a gun nut can't be as bad as they say. I'm willing to take my chances." She grinned.

So I took her to the range. I didn't start her with the .45. I put a Ruger Mark III in her hands and, after half an hour of instruction, she started shooting better groups than I did. An hour later we'd worked our way through my nine mil and a Taurus chambered in forty caliber, and the Rock Island was singing its song as if it had fallen in love with the girl holding it.

That's the kind of girl Caitlin was.

Have you ever gone on You Tube and seen those silly videos of girls shooting guns? They're supposed to be sexy, but they're usually not. I've broken them down into two types. The first is the girl who shouldn't have a gun in her hands, no matter how she's dressed. She doesn't know what she's doing and all I see when she's flailing away with her eyes closed is a dangerous situation. But the second type are the women who do know what's in their hands and how to use it. Why they pose in bikinis to do it is beyond me, but there's a difference between these women and type one. It's hard to describe. They are focused, for one thing, with all their attention on working the tool in their hands. Their stance is right, so they're not wobbling around. They lean into the recoil. It's just a thing of beauty.

And the type-two women really do look a little sexy.

Caitlin wasn't wearing a bikini, but she looked sexy as all get out, wearing a ball cap with her pony tail through the hole above the adjusting strap in the back.

Quite suddenly, I wished she was naked, even though those are the stupidest videos of all out there.

And yes, I know, she was only sixteen, but like I said earlier, you couldn't tell it by looking. On that day she looked like she should be in college, instead of finishing up high school.

Which brings us to this year. As a seventeen-year-old, she presented an image that I knew meant I was in trouble. She was bouncy, and sultry and sexy. She knew me well enough that she was comfortable with me under almost any circumstances. As an example, I'll just say that, as a ten year old, her PJs consisted of a long T shirt with panties on underneath. That hadn't changed, and she was just as comfortable being around Uncle Bob that way now as she was then. Except that now, under that T shirt, was a beautiful, full grown woman, rather than a cute little girl.

And her friends were right there with her. All of them had the lush curves of young women ready for being mated with.

Chapter 2 »