Page 125 of The Business of Love Box Set 1: Books 1 - 4

PETER

T he little cabin proved to be a bigger adversary than I’d initially anticipated.

There was more than dust to contend with.

There were also critters, spiders, broken floorboards, and a leak in the ceiling that needed mending.

After seeing to most of the repairs myself, except for the floor, I managed to get in touch with the elderly couple who owned the cabin.

They explained that they hadn’t been back to the island in over six years because of their ailing health, and they admitted they had no intention of coming back.

They offered to sell the cabin to me.

That seemed like a hell of a lot more commitment than I was looking for, so I proposed a different offer that would benefit us both. I would pay a discounted rate in order to cover the out-of-pocket cost for repair materials, and I would do the labor myself.

The wife jumped at the idea. The husband was more standoffish about it and took a night to think about it. I woke to a phone call the next morning telling me to go ahead and fix what I thought needed fixing. They would even things out payment-wise as we moved forward.

I liked the manual labor.

It had been a long time since I worked with my hands and broke out in a sweat like this.

My desk job as a web developer had made my fingers soft.

The calluses I used to bear when I worked as a young man in construction had long since disappeared, as had the grease stains under my nails from working on old vehicles.

I felt like I was revisiting an old version of myself as I broke floorboards free and pulled nails out of the wood with an old hammer I found in a toolbox from the fifties.

I was working on the last corner of the bad floor, straining on a nail that didn’t want to budge, when a sharp pain flared in my left shoulder. A hiss of pain escaped me and I stumbled back, falling right on my ass, clutching my collarbone.

“Son of a bitch,” I cursed.

The pain didn’t ebb away quickly. It persisted, as if the bone was scolding me for being reckless and working harder than I should have been. Slowly, it faded from a sharp burning pain to a dull throbbing ache.

I raked my fingers through my sweat-soaked hair and got to my feet.

I needed a break.

My stomach growled and I remembered what Andy had told me about the market. The cabin was fully outfitted to cook myself dinner, so I decided to head into town, which began with me making the long walk down the dirt road from the cabin to the main street.

“Main Street” was a generous term.

It was still just a narrow road. I walked along the edge for about ten minutes before a single car passed and another fifteen before one of those tour-bus trucks came up behind me and tapped on the horn. The driver asked where I was going.

“Cruz Bay,” I called over the rumble of the engine.

He wore a straw hat and a pinstripe shirt. He waved for me to get on. “Hop in. We’ll get you where you’re going.”

I did as he said and climbed into the back of the truck and found a spot on the end so I could enjoy the scenery.

We arrived in Cruz Bay, pulled over outside a tourist shop, and got out.

I tipped the driver after he refused to accept payment for the ride and made my way down the sidewalk following hand-painted signs on pieces of wood nailed to palm-tree trunks that read “Fresh Market” above a rainbow arrow.

I found the market in the heart of town.

It was a haphazard collection of tents and tables set up on a grassy field with hardly any shade. The ocean was only fifty or so paces to the left, and a gentle breeze tugged at the collar of my linen shirt as I wandered through the tables and booths and scoped out what they had to offer.

The fruit was out of this world. I’d never seen such vibrant colors in my life, and I stopped to buy mango, coconut, papaya, and pomegranate.

I bought leafy greens and fresh fish, and by the time I had enough food to last me the next couple of days, I’d been discovered by a trio of Canadian women who were all there on vacation.

One of them, a slender and beautiful brunette, peered into my bag. “What did you buy?”

“Food,” I said lamely.

Her dark eyes swept up to meet mine and she giggled lightly. “I can see that.”

Her friend, a blonde in a highlighter-yellow bikini that was stretched to the absolute limits over her tits, nudged me with her shoulder. “You like to cook?” Her tits bounced. The fabric strained.

I kept my eyes away from her breasts, which I was sure were going to spring free of the little pieces of fabric any second. “When I feel like it, yes.”

The third girl was also blonde. Her hair was cut short and she was petite in every way, from her dainty wrists to narrow ankles. “Stop harassing him, you guys. He’s shy.”

The brunette flashed me a charming smile. “I love shy guys.”

“Umm…” I trailed off.

All three of them burst into a fit of giggles. My cheeks burned.

“Do you have any brothers?” the brunette asked.

“One,” I said.

“Is he as cute as you?” The petite blonde’s gaze swept me up and down, making me feel like one of the bright-colored fruits on display at the market.

“He’s young,” I said.

“How young?” the girls asked in unison.

“Twenty-four.”

“That’s not too young,” the short-haired girl teased. “Not for me anyway. Is he here?”

“No,” I said.

“Pity,” she pouted. The puckered lower lip disappeared within seconds, however. She stepped in really close and put her hand in the middle of my chest. Her nails were long, pointy, and banana yellow. “The five of us could’ve had some real fun. Do you like whipped cream, handsome?”

My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. I tried to speak, but all that came out of me was a pathetic unnf sound.

Pull it together, Peter. You big dumb oaf. They’re just girls!

The brunette turned to the petite blonde. “I think that’s a yes.”

The one with banana nails gave me a coy smile before letting her hand fall from my chest. “I think you’re right, Malory.”

I laughed nervously and backed up. Had my hands not been loaded down with woven shopping bags overflowing with fresh produce, I’d have held them up innocently in a desperate plea to get the girls to give me some space.

I wasn’t in the Caribbean to go to raging parties with beautiful young women or indulge in whatever fantasy they had of licking whipped cream off of each other’s taut bodies.

Although I couldn’t deny that sounded like a good way to spend an evening.

I gave my head a shake.

No, you idiot. Knowing your luck, you’d make a total ass of yourself in front of these girls. They’re looking for a frat boy, not a thirty-two-year-old with a healing collarbone. You are not their definition of a good time.

I needed an escape.

“I’m sorry, ladies. I have to—”

“Come with us back to our hotel,” the brunette, Malory, demanded.

“I can’t.”

“Don’t play hard to get,” the blonde in the dental-floss bikini purred.

“It’ll be fun! We can have some drinks and lounge by the pool.

” She paused to lean in close, almost conspiratorially, like she was telling me a secret.

Her lips grazed my earlobe as she whispered.

“And when we’re all feeling good and ready, you’ll be begging me to sit on your face while my girls here take care of you. ”

I choked on my own spit.

The three girls descended into uproarious fits of laughter that drew more than enough attention to make my cheeks burn even more furiously than they had been minutes ago.

I shook my head vigorously. “No, I’m flattered, but no. I have things to do. Food to cook. Um, yeah. You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“But there isn’t anybody else as cute as you,” Dental-Floss-Bikini whined. “Believe me. We’ve been looking.”

Why wouldn’t these women take no for an answer?

I would be in over my head with them. I suffered from self-doubt when I was alone with just one woman.

How on earth was I supposed to rise to the occasion to satisfy three who were quite obviously horny as hell?

Where would I start? What did foreplay look like with three women?

The only knowledge I had of such things were pornos, and even then, I’d found simply watching it overwhelming. It seemed like a hell of a lot of work.

And it would be sticky if whipped cream was involved.

I didn’t like sticky.

I continued backing away and hoped the women wouldn’t follow. “I have a girlfriend,” I lied.

The three of them rolled their eyes.

Banana-Nails shrugged. “So?”

“I don’t see her,” Malory added.

“Bring her with you.” Dental-Floss winked.

Jesus, they won’t quit!

I needed to be firm and direct. I gathered my composure and stopped backing away. “Fine. I don’t have a girlfriend. But I’m just not interested, all right? I’m sorry.”

The three of them looked back and forth between each other with blank expressions on their faces.

Dental-Floss gestured at the three of them with a manic hand. “You’re saying no to this? Seriously?”

“Uh, yes. Seriously.”

Malory rolled her eyes and twined her fingers around each of one of her friend’s hands. “Forget him. We don’t need him to have a good time anyway. Do we, girls?”

The three of them criticized my choice as they marched off, hips swaying, hair swishing back and forth across their backs, sandals slapping against the soles of their perfectly manicured and moisturized feet.

I stood dumbly in the middle of the market and looked around, wondering if anyone had seen or heard the exchange. If they had, nobody seemed to care. The crowds were busy seeing to their own business.

Women stopped to look at beautiful handmade shawls and pashminas hanging from hooks along the sides of tents.

They caught in the breeze and tantalized the shoppers with their shimmering thread and sparkly sequins.

The fabrics were dazzling shades of ruby red, sapphire blue, turquoise, pink, and emerald green.

As I watched, several were pulled down from hooks and purchased, and finally wrapped around the shoulders of their new owners, who looked up at their husbands for compliments.

They received them.

I smiled to myself.

That was a much more appealing situation to me than three strangers who wanted to use my body as a whipped cream dipstick.

I made my way through the remaining part of the market I hadn’t yet seen and came across a local couple with puppies for sale.

The mother dog was lying at the feet of her owner, while eight black puppies with bits of white markings all in different places played and napped within a cardboard box.

I paused, peered down into the box, and smiled.

Images of sitting on the little porch—once it was repaired, of course—outside the cabin with a canine friend lounging at my feet flooded my mind, and I liked the feeling of contentment that washed over me.

If I knew I was staying a long time or possibly indefinitely, I might have picked one up out of the box and brought it home with me.

But there was still so much up in the air and a dog was a commitment I couldn’t afford.

So I pulled myself away from the box regretfully and continued through the rest of the market, now making my way back the way I’d come to head for the road.

There, parked along the curb, I happened upon an old Ford Ranger with a rusted bumper and peeling faded blue paint. There was a cardboard sign propped up on the windshield and a price of three hundred dollars had been scrawled across the board in permanent marker.

It would make my life a hell of a lot easier to have a vehicle on the island while I was there instead of always relying on public transportation.

I found the owner sitting across the street at a coffee shop, paid him his money, and gave him a little extra to help me with the process of insuring the truck.

An hour and fifteen minutes later, I was driving myself back to my temporary homestead with bags of groceries on the passenger seat and music flowing through the speakers.

Life was good.