Head Over Heels in Hawaii: The Traveling Calvert Sisters, #1

By Tori Ross

First in a new romantic comedy series by Tori Ross! Come along with the Calvert sisters as they find love and laughter far from home...

Cora Calvert is frustrated with her life and still sleeping in her childhood bunk bed. As if living with your parents isn't bad enough, Cora's job consists of measuring old women for bras instead of using her college degree in fashion design. When an opportunity for a trip to Hawaii comes about, she's all over it and can't pack fast enough. Even better, the tour is only for people in their twenties.

Cora's excitement for the tour wanes when she learns the tour company assigns seats, and she's stuck next to an arrogant jerk named Eric. Cora makes other friends and tries to ignore Eric's green eyes and verbal diarrhea as she explores the islands, but Cora's about to learn that first impressions can be very wrong.

The Traveling Calvert Sisters series is a series of shorts with 25-35k words. They can be read in any order. HEA or HFN guaranteed!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tori Ross
• Release date: Jun 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223306696

Tori Ross

Tori Ross writes romantic comedy and erotic superhero romance. When she's not writing, she runs a podcast called The Smutty Book Lady and Friends and can be seen reading any genre of books. She lives in Missouri with her family and a very high-maintenance dog.

Book preview

Head Over Heels in Hawaii

Tori Ross

Copyright © 2022 by Tori Ross

All rights reserved.

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Printed in the United States

Edited by April Pearson

Covers by Get Covers

Contents

1.Get Me Out of This Nuthouse

2.Super Pecker

3.Travel Pod

4.What Gutters?

5.Toenails and Surfboards

6.Cut it Out

7.Beer Pong Foul

8.The Flight Back

9.Dance Party

10.Bow Chicka Wah Wah

11.The Lecture

12.Sad Traveling

About Tori Ross

Get Me Out of This Nuthouse

Y ou’ll need a raincoat and rain boots! my mother, Dottie Calvert, yells up the stairs. I can tell by the sound of her voice that she’s holding the decrepit old suitcase that’s seen better days and once belonged to her own grandmother.

I’m not taking boots and a raincoat, I huff back, wrapping my hair straightener and shoving it into my bag. And I know you’re holding that damn suitcase from 1923! I’m not taking that, either. Suitcases have wheels on them now. Or didn’t they have the wheel yet when your grandmother used that old thing?

Did you at least check the weather? I don’t know if it’s the rainy season.

Mom, I’ll be fine! I say, poking my head around the door frame to see my mother at the bottom of the stairs. Her hair is wrapped in whatever gauzy stuff women of her generation used decades ago to wrap their hair, and her floral bathrobe reminds me of Blanche from The Golden Girls. Besides, if something happens to me, you have eight other children. You’ll hardly know I’m gone.

I’d miss your smart-ass mouth. None of my other children inherited the argument gene the way you did!

What a load of crap. And the only one of us you’d miss is Ryan because he’s the only boy.

That’s not true!

Oh, really? I ask, standing at the top of the steps in my own bathrobe and my long, light brown hair tucked into a twisted towel. If that’s so, then why is he the youngest? Funny how you and dad got a boy and closed the baby factory. It’s like the doctor said, ‘I see a penis. We have a penis!’ and you and dad stopped having sexy time. That’s so interesting.

Cora, don’t be crass. Come down here with your luggage so I can check it.

What the hell? I’m twenty-five.

I know, dear, but this is your first trip that hasn’t been with the family. I’ve always packed for you. Let me check.

Mother, did you ever think that’s why I’m going to Hawaii in the first place? I ask. I’ve never been anywhere by myself or even packed my own things. You do everything for us. All nine of us. You’re the only woman in the world that had nine children, three sets of which are twins, and insists on doing everything for all of us, even though we’re all adults. How you’re even still alive should be studied by science.

You’re leaving because you have it too easy? she screeches, looking at me like I’m insane. Most children leave when things get too hard.

That’s exactly why I’m going to Hawaii! I snap back before turning on my heel back to the first room on the right that I share with my sister, Peyton. Vibrations from slamming the door knock Peyton’s vintage Justin Bieber poster off the wall. Agggghhhh! I can’t believe I still live in this nuthouse.

Frustration at my life eats at me the way it has for months now. I moved back home after college with the sad realization that life doesn’t always work out the way that I plan. I earned a degree in fashion design and thought I’d take the world by storm after college by designing clothes for someone like Tom Ford. If you’d told me during college that I’d be back living under my parents’ roof and sharing a room with a sibling, I’d have punched you in the face for your blasphemy.

My twin sister, Clara, had the good sense to get a degree in something useful and got a job right out of school as an editor at a New York publishing firm. The closest job I could find in my chosen field is a job in the local department store lingerie section where my mother still buys her underwear. Hence, I’m damned to share a room with my younger sister that smells like chili after she comes home from work at Chili Shack every night.

Of the nine children in our family, five of us still live in our childhood home. At least it’s not as cramped as it was when we were children. Back then, we had to triple up in a room. Sometime around the time my oldest sibling, Samantha, hit the age where she learned about sex, we all begged our parents to stop sharing a bed. I guess we thought that keeping our parents apart at night could stop the relentless pace at which my mother seemed to shoot children out of her vagina. Ryan and Regina were born the next year, so we all thought that the reproduction stopped because a boy had been born. In reality, Mom had probably tired of the clown car vagina jokes.

I continue to pack my bag, lamenting the fact that my mother still does everything for me. What twenty-five-year-old woman has never packed for herself? I need to get out of here, see the world, and learn to actually be more independent. Since moving home, I’ve felt stifled in the way that only adult children forced to still sleep in their childhood bunk bed could possibly feel.

I add socks, my green bikini, my toiletry bag, and my eBook reader with a diagonal crack in the left-hand corner of the screen. I’ve downloaded several cozy mysteries and romance books for the flight and the week-long tour of the islands, and I smile at the idea of uninterrupted reading time on the tour. The device has seen better days, but I can’t afford a new one. Well, I probably could have bought a new one before the cost of this trip came up.

The tour itself sounds magical, and that’s part of the reason I dropped everything to go. It’s a six-day tour around Hawaii. The itinerary on the tour company’s website shows waterfalls, a surfing lesson, a visit to Turtle Town for snorkeling or diving, a Jeep trek, and a farm-to-table meal on the last day. It sounds like a dream come true for a woman from Illinois, and I can’t keep my body still or a thought in my head. To make it even better, the tour is only for people in their twenties. No crying babies. No elderly people holding up the excursions with their walkers that always have tennis balls on the bottom of the poles.

Basically, it’s going to be a tour of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. God, what would it be like to meet someone for a vacation fling or even drink in a bar that I haven’t been visiting since before I was old enough to drink? What would it be like to actually have sex again? It’s not like I can bring a guy home to Dottie and Charlie Calvert watching TV in the living room and explain to them that I’m just going to pop some random guy up to my bunk bed for a quick shag.

Just the thought of a man in my bed makes me swallow a load of saliva forming in my mouth. I’ve become a spinster who drools at the mere thought of getting laid.

I lucked out even getting to go on the darn tour. My friend from the lingerie department called me a few days ago, crying so hard that I couldn’t understand her. Apparently, she’d received the trip to Hawaii as a graduation trip and had come down with a case of chickenpox. Who even gets that nowadays?

Between hiccupping sobs and words that sounded like, My mother is antivax, and I find this out now? I was able to deduce that Ginger couldn’t go on her trip, and it was too late to get a refund. Ginger’s mother was amenable to me paying half of the trip price so she could recoup some of the cost to send Ginger somewhere else after she had recovered, and I was happy to get a trip to Hawaii for so cheap.

I was able to book a last-minute airfare deal on a budget carrier without it breaking the bank. Sure, it ate up my entire savings account, and I had to borrow pocket money from Mom and Dad. But they didn’t mind. I’ve always paid them back when I’ve borrowed money, and my parents saw no reason to think they aren’t going to see their money again.

Heaving a sigh of relief that I’m finally doing something to move my life in an adventurous direction, I throw an old college sweatshirt on top of my zipped carry-on bag so that I can quickly grab it before the flight tomorrow.

I love my family, but I can’t run away from them fast enough.

--

Wow, that plane came really close to the road, Peyton says, looking out of the window of our old station wagon as Dottie turns into the departure area and pulls into what looked like the last available spot. The runway’s awfully close.

Why did you even come, Peyton? I ask. Are you just going to marvel at the planes coming in and taking off like you’ve never been to an airport? God, you’re such a hillbilly.

"Well, Einstein, I’ve never been to