outside, he had to deal with fans in every corner of the room and hope for a cool breeze every now and then. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any type of breeze today, and the still air was nearly suffocating.
He glanced at his watch and took another deep breath. Because Saturdays were their busiest days, he usually kept the equipment shed open a couple hours longer than their regular schedule, but today he wasn’t in the mood. Luckily, he pretty much made up his own hours, and he could come and go as he pleased.
The main priority of his job was to rent out equipment, but for returns, they largely worked on the honor system. If the building was closed up, there was a rack to return the bikes, a pole holder for the fishing poles, and a few bins to hold everything else. He often came back from lunch to find the bins full, and the process of scanning everything back into the system and putting it all away made the unusually slow hours go by faster.
Unfortunately, the weekends were a little different than the weekdays, and hardly anyone returned anything on Saturday. That left him loads of time to think—and to sweat because there was literally no air today—and once again he silently wondered if he would ever find a mate.
He grabbed his water bottle and chugged down half before searching through the throng of people near the water. The lake was big and surrounded by sand and trees all the way around, but the amount of sand and depth of the water varied. Much of the back part of the lake was deep with only a six-foot path of sand on the shore before the trees took over, so most people didn’t explore that area unless they were hiking or kayaking.
Eventually, they planned to put in a paved walking path all the way around the water, but that project was still in the planning stages, and it was being added so walkers and bikers didn’t have to hike or off-road through the forest if they didn’t want to.
The area in front of him would always be the designated swimming area, and because of that, it was where most of the visitors congregated when the sun was high in the sky. Later in the day, when the temperatures started to cool down, most people hung out near their cabins, usually crowded around one of the communal fire pits.
Luckily, the family cabins were nowhere near the rentals, so each of his siblings could have privacy—either from the job or from each other—and quiet when they needed it.
He continued to scan the crowd, and while there were plenty of beautiful women scattered throughout the beach, none of them stood out as anything special. Adding to that was the fact that a lot of the women looked like clones of one another. He wasn’t sure why, but apparently Bear Lake was a beacon to short, skinny blonds with long hair and big, fake boobs. He wasn’t averse to blonds, but he could do without the rest.
Lael wanted someone softer, with a little bit more curves than most of the women he saw out on the beach, but even more than that, he wanted someone real. The women who came on to him every day were more cocky than confident, and he wasn’t attracted to that level of arrogance.
At least not in a stranger plying him with unwanted advances.
Fuck me!
It was depressing to think of these women as his only choices, but because he both lived and worked at the lake, it was hard to meet anyone outside of work, let alone anyone he might be interested in.
Maybe he needed to take a class, or start going into town on the weekends. The closest bar, if you could call it that, was about thirty miles away, but maybe he needed to get out and meet some of the locals. It wouldn’t be that hard—he loved talking to people—and if he could talk his oldest brother, Levi, or his sister, Lacey, into going with him, then he wouldn’t have to go alone.
His second oldest brother, Liam, would have been a terrible wingman, even before meeting Elle, but now that the two were mated, there was no separating the couple. Not that he blamed them. If Lael had a mate, he would never want to leave their cabin, either.
Levi and Lacey were both single, though, and they each claimed they had no interest in meeting anyone.