Chapter 4

The girls banished me from the house.

Usually, I'm in charge of running the day-to-day things and keeping everything straight. It's all part of being the one of us who stays home. However, with company coming, the girls all went on a cleaning tear, because apparently I didn't do it right.

Mimi and Geoff had originally invited us to come visit them, but the girls wanted to do it on their own terms and in a place that was familiar to them. So we invited our friends up to visit us for a long weekend once school got out. There's enough to do where we live that we could entertain the kids during the day and have some side adventures for ourselves at night.

Getting sent out of the house actually suited me fine because it let me get away from the kids and work on my hobby for some "me" time. Next to my three wives and four (soon to be eight) kids, I have two other babies.

I call the first of them "Candy"; she's a 1965 Corvette Roadster in fire-engine red with a white convertible top. Under the hood is a 350 fuel-injected small block and M21 close-ratio 4-speed manual transmission that's as smooth as silk. When I bought her, she was a little run down, but I rebuilt her from the ground up and added some modern amenities like satellite radio, GPS and seats with good lumbar support. The numbers don't match, the engine's not original and she's got a lot of miles, but that's not the point.

She drives like a dream and was built to go cruising. Candy turns heads and draws many admiring stares. At car shows, the snobbier Corvette owners—with their 400 original miles and stock engines that have been babied in a climate-controlled storage facility for the last forty years—turn up their noses, but we keep moving along. Cars are made for driving, not sitting in a garage as a show piece.

My wives are that way, too. We'd rather go out and have fun than worry what other people might say or think about us. None of them are drop-dead gorgeous, but to me, Katie, Leah and Melinda are the most beautiful women in the world. They're not as "perfect" as those magazines would have you believe, but I wouldn't trade them for anything ... Certainly not some trophy wife who only eats rice cakes and celery!

My other baby is where Candy was about four years ago. She doesn't have a name yet, but she's lean and mean. I stripped her down to the frame and have been restoring the 1970 Chevelle convertible to better-than-original condition. She's also red, but has black racing stripes and I'm fitting her out with polished chrome everywhere. When I bought her, she had an after-market 350 under the hood, but I lifted it out and dropped in a 454 LS6 for a little extra power. I am in the process of putting in a 4 speed automatic transmission with a slapstick shifter, and I think I'm going to have to beef up her rear differential to keep the frame from twisting when I drop the hammer at the drag strip.

If Candy is my cruiser, this other car is going to be my racer.

When we built the house, the girls pretty much had run of the place. I had a little bit of input, especially when it came to the building part, but just about everything inside was planned and decorated by the girls. They wanted things to be "just right". If you've built your own house with a woman, you know what I'm talking about. Now try that with three of them. Your best bet is to say, "Yes, dear" and then just do whatever it is they tell you.

However, when it came time to build the guest house, it was all me. It's a two-story building with a small living space on the upper level and a garage/workshop on the bottom floor. Since the ground around our house slopes as you go around back, there are entrances to both levels that don't involve any steps. On one side downstairs is a shop for all my tools including a woodworking bench and space large enough to work on something as big as a bookshelf or a couch. On the other side is my car garage (there is another four-car garage underneath the main house where we keep our daily drivers); I have two bays, one where I keep Candy in from the elements (I don't think her top has ever been up), and there's a shop-grade hydraulic lift in the other one.

The Chevelle was on the lift, although I only had her about four inches off the ground; high enough that I didn't have to bend over too much to work on the engine. After mowing the lawn earlier in the day, I was tinkering around, mostly just to kill time until our company arrived.

I vaguely heard the door open and close. The footsteps I recognised as Melinda's.

"Hey, sweetheart," she purred softly.

Looking up, I was presented with a most luscious sight. My wife was wearing a knee-length A-line skirt and a white button-down blouse. Her hair was pulled back, but I didn't really notice it. The top five buttons were open, and her magnificent breasts were spilling out. Those pillow-soft orbs were just barely held in place by a bra that seemed like it was ready to burst at any second.

She sauntered over to me. Her hips swayed and her breasts bounced with every step. Melinda walked around the car as I hunched over the engine block. She made sure to strut seductively and flash her shapely legs and voluptuous curves.

"Hey, yourself," I replied, fully aware that I was being seduced. Or rather, I was about to get jumped. For the record, that's not a complaint; I'm just sayin'.

"Whatcha working on?" she asked, pressing against me. I could feel her breasts on my back.

I shrugged. "Just checking the vacuum lines."