Page 135 of The Business of Love Box Set 1: Books 1 - 4

PETER

“ W atch your step,” I cautioned.

Katie’s vise grip on my hand tightened as she stepped up into the beat-up three-hundred-dollar pickup truck. She offered me an incoherent mumble, and I was pretty sure she was saying thank you . She didn’t release my hand until she had sat herself down and pushed back against the bench seat.

“Good?” I asked.

She nodded.

I closed the door behind her and hurried around to my side of the truck. After closing my door and turning the ignition over three times, it started.

Katie chewed her bottom lip and looked at me with red eyes and a pink nose. “I don’t think I can go back to the hotel like this.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

“If guests saw me coming back to the property so drunk I can hardly walk…” She trailed off and shook her head. “It wouldn’t look good for the El Cartana. My boss wouldn’t be happy. And I would be so embarrassed.”

“You can crash at my place,” I offered.

She continued chewing on her lip like she had no nerve endings there.

I reached out without thinking, cupped her chin in my hand, and gently pulled her lower lip out from between her teeth. “Careful. You’re going to make yourself bleed.”

Katie didn’t pull away from my touch. She blinked slowly. “I don’t want to intrude.”

“Intrude?” I chuckled and let my hand fall from her chin. For a moment, she leaned toward me. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was drunk or she wanted to be close to me. “You’re not intruding at all. In fact, you’re getting kind of a raw deal.”

I put the truck in reverse and pulled out of our space. There weren’t as many cars in the parking lot as I’d expected. Skip’s had been jampacked, but the parking lot wasn’t full. Everyone must have arrived in taxis or carpooled here.

“My bed is stiff as a board,” I said. “I need a new mattress for that damn thing but I can’t for the life of me figure out where to get one on this island.”

Katie struggled with her seatbelt. I reached over and clipped it in for her. She gave me a grateful smile. “I can get you one for free from the hotel.”

“What?”

She nodded earnestly. “We have plenty. Honest. My boss gives them away to people all the time. Let me pull some strings and see what I can do.” Her eyes widened. “Oh.”

I glanced over at her as I came to a stop at the exit of the parking lot. “What is it?”

“I don’t feel so good.”

“I can pull over.”

Katie clamped a hand over her mouth.

“Maybe you should just—” I started, but I never had a chance to finish the sentence.

Katie popped her seatbelt off while simultaneously opening the passenger door.

She stumbled out, practically tripping over her own feet, and made it a grand total of four steps before she leaned over and hurled aggressively into the patch of grass separating Skip’s parking lot from the hair salon next door.

“Oh God,” she groaned.

I didn’t have anything to offer her. No water. No napkins. No gum. Nothing.

“Shit,” I breathed as I got out of the truck and walked around to meet her. “Are you okay?”

Katie held up a hand to keep me at bay. “Please don’t come closer. I don’t want you to see me. Or smell the tequila. Holy hell. It’s in my nose.” She gagged, her back arched, and she promptly vomited again into the grass.

I rubbed the back of my neck and looked around. At least she had some privacy on this side of my truck. “Can I do anything?”

She shook her head and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No. But I feel better already. I’m sorry. This is so embarrassing.”

“We’ve all had nights where we drink a little too much.” I folded my arms over my chest and smirked at the memory of my worst hangover. “I went out on the fourth of July with some buddies when I was twenty-two and drank twenty-four beers and a dozen shots in a matter of three hours.”

Katie winced and clutched at her stomach. “That’s horrific. Please don’t say the word shots .”

“It was horrific. But temporary. Come on. Let’s get you back in the truck. If we have to pull over again, so be it. But at least we’ll be getting you closer to bed. Sound good?”

Katie straightened, swayed, and reached out for me. I steadied her and helped her up into the truck, and we carried on back to my cabin.

We only had to pull over one other time but Katie wasn’t sick again. I doubted the truck and the dirt roads full of potholes were helping her nausea much, so I did my best to try to minimize the jostling.

At the cabin, I helped her out and walked her up the front steps. She commented on how cute the place was and how good it smelled here. I wholeheartedly agreed. We pushed inside, and I flicked on some lamps, and Katie stood in the middle of the small space and turned in a slow circle.

“It’s small,” she said.

“Very,” I agreed, “but it’s all I need. Bedroom is through that door there. Bathroom on the right. If you need anything, help yourself. Coffee, tea, it’s all in the cupboard there above the fridge.”

Katie nodded and rubbed her arms. “Thank you, Peter.”

I tipped my head down the hall to the bedroom. “Let’s get you something else to wear, hmm? Something a little more comfortable?”

She followed me into the bedroom and accepted one of my T-shirts. It had a scoop neck, was navy blue, and bore a logo of pine trees surrounded by pop-up canvas tents. She took it into the bathroom where she stayed for a good ten minutes. I waited until she returned in my shirt with no pants on.

It was an enormous effort not to check her out as she padded barefoot across my floor to the bed. I’d already pulled the blankets down for her.

She stood over it and frowned at me. “I can take the sofa, Peter.”

“Nonsense.”

“But—”

“Nonsense,” I said again, more firmly this time.

She smiled. “Thank you.”

I nodded at the aspirin and a glass of water I’d left on the nightstand for her to take if she wanted. “Do you need anything else?”

She shook her head. “This is perfect. You’re a lifesaver.”

I woke early. Birds chirped outside the living-room window as if mocking me as I struggled to sit up with a sharp pain in my lower back and an ache in my collarbone.

I wasn’t made for sleeping on sofas but I didn’t want Katie to know that.

I managed to extract myself from the sofa with minimal grunts and groans, and once I was on my feet, I stretched my arms over my head and straightened my spine.

It hurt like a bitch, but relief followed.

I strained my ears to see if Katie was stirring but I heard only silence down the hall. I didn’t want to make too much noise, so I held off on making coffee and opted instead to go outside and sit on the porch and kill an hour.

I thought of Katie the entire time.

The last three years of my life had been exhausting, taking care of everyone else but me, and when I’d come to this island, I swore up and down that I wouldn’t become someone else’s caretaker.

But taking care of and looking out for Katie last night hadn’t felt like a chore at all.

It didn’t cost me any energy to get her out of that bar and bring her somewhere safe to sleep it off.

In fact, it felt rewarding.

I didn’t know what that meant. I just knew I was looking forward to seeing her this morning and I hoped she didn’t feel like an absolute train wreck.

When I heard her moving around and making her way into the bathroom, I put the water on for coffee. She ran the tap in the bathroom and I knocked on the door, letting her know she could shower if she wanted to.

She took me up on it.

The knowledge that there was a beautiful naked woman in my shower made it hard to focus on anything else while I brewed coffee and went about making eggs and toast. It was too easy to picture droplets of water running down her perfect legs, over her breasts, and down her back as she massaged shampoo into her scalp—

“Peter?”

I turned sharply.

My hip hit the handle of the pan in which I was cooking the eggs.

It tilted precariously and I scrambled to save the eggs.

I singed the tips of my fingers on the edge of the pan, cursed in a supremely ungentlemanly way, shook my hand out, and tried to play it cool like I hadn’t just burnt the shit out of my fingers and nearly destroyed our breakfast.

Katie stood in the hallway wrapped up in a towel. Her eyes were a little wide, her cheeks a little pink from the hot water, and her legs were very, very bare. And tanned.

“Morning,” I said with a croak in my voice. I cleared my throat and leaned against the counter. “Morning,” I amended, sounding a bit less like a frog.

Her eyes slid from the pan to my hand. “Are you okay?”

“This? Yeah, I’m good. Definitely awake now.”

She smiled. God, she was beautiful.

Her hair was wet and way darker than it was when it was dry. Her skin looked dewy and it caught the light as she adjusted her towel.

“I don’t want to put my dress back on,” she said. “Do you mind if I borrow more of your clothes?”

Do I mind if the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met wants to lounge around with me in my clothes?

“Not at all.” I shook my head. “Let me grab you something.”

Katie waited in the doorway of my bedroom as I found her another clean T-shirt and a pair of my sweats. I left them for her to change into, and when she emerged from the bedroom in them, I looked her up and down with an approving glance.

“It’s very becoming on you,” I said.

She looked down at herself and then gave me a cheeky grin. “You might not get them back.”

“They look better on you anyway.”

She giggled and moved into the kitchen to investigate what I had going on. “Smells good.”

“How do you feel? Are you up for breakfast?”

She nodded vigorously. “Oh, hell yes.”

That was all I needed to hear. I poured us coffee and put down four slices of bread in the toaster. Minutes later, we were both sitting out on the porch, plates balanced on our thighs, coffees sitting at our feet, pigging out.

“This is delicious,” Katie said appreciatively. “The perfect cure to a hangover.”

I watched her eat and became transfixed by the way her throat moved when she swallowed and how she closed her eyes to appreciate each bite.

She was a slow, patient eater, and she took small bites—a little bit of toast with a little bit of eggs.

Every third bite was broken up with a sip of coffee.

This was a woman who knew how to appreciate the simple things in life, even though she worked in a glamorous hotel.

There was so much more I wanted to know about her.