Amanda's Guide to Love

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016

A
Kindle Scout
selection

Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.

Rock Bottom

~ ~ ~

A Woman’s Guide to Perfection

Guideline # 1

The Perfect Woman doesn’t do
one-night stands.

Rationale
: One-night stands (ONS) are always
disappointing, often hazardous, and invariably awkward.

A
word of caution
:
If you are a frequent ONSer, shut this book right now and give it to someone
who may benefit from it. You will never be a Perfect Woman.
Ever
.

Permissible
exception
: A
prolonged dry spell between boyfriends or a highly stressful life event.

Damage
control
: (a) make
sure the sex is safe, (b) make sure your person is safe, (c) leave or kick him
or her out before breakfast, (d) wash your body squeaky clean, (e) scrub the
memory of the episode from your brain.

Pitfalls
to avoid:
(a)
giving him or her your phone number, (b) telling your best friend about it, (c)
thinking that a one-night stand could ever lead to a relationship.

~ ~ ~

Amanda stared at the typed letter.
Neatly strung words zoomed in and out of focus as their meaning sank in.
Mademoiselle
Roussel . . . I regret to inform you . . . with immediate
effect
.

She swallowed hard and slipped the
letter into her purse.

Most of her colleagues would cheer
at the news. They’d rush into each other’s offices and say, “Did you hear?
Viper Tongue got the sack! Serves her right.” Some of them might send around an
e-mail invite for a celebratory drink. Others would just shrug and say good
riddance.

Would anyone feel sorry for her?
She furrowed her brow. Karine would. And maybe Paul from accounting. Perhaps
even Sylvie from marketing, unless she was on meds again and not feeling
anything at all.

But none of it really mattered.

What did matter was that the end of
the world was upon her. Her personal, localized Armageddon had arrived in an
innocent-looking envelope with the Energie NordSud logo on it.

Amanda grabbed her handbag and
marched out the door. Keeping her back as straight as she could, she strode
through the hallway, down the marble staircase, and out the main entrance.

Eyes on the gate, one foot in front
of the other.

She nodded to the security guard
and passed through the turnstile.

“Mademoiselle Roussel?” the guard
asked
,
looking at his computer screen and then
at her.

“Yes?”

“I must collect your access card.”

“I’ll come back next week to gather
my things,” she said as flatly as she could, handing him her card.

He nodded. “We’ll let you in. Just
make sure your visit is supervised by Monsieur Barre.”

“Of course.”

Amanda turned on her heel and
marched away, hoping the guard hadn’t seen her grimace. Truth was she’d rather
donate her fine glass paperweight and Bodum French press to the company than
ask Julien Barre—the bastard who’d fired her—to allow her to clean
out
her desk.

And have him breath
e
down her neck while she was doing it.

In the
métro
car, Amanda’s
eyebrows rose at the number of vacant seats before she remembered it was only
three in the afternoon—the earliest she’d left the office in four years. As the
train stations passed before her eyes, a plan formed in her mind. She’d get
home and locate her father’s Swiss Army knife. Then she’d down a few shots of
vodka, return to the office, kill Julien, and kill herself.

It sounded like an excellent plan.

Twenty minutes later, she pushed
open the door to her apartment and went straight to the minibar, praying she
hadn’t imagined the bottle of vodka hiding behind her expensive wines.

Bingo!

There it was—cold to the touch and
as real as the sharp pain in her heart.

She filled a glass with the
transparent liquid and drained it. The beverage burned her tongue. Amanda
yelled out a battle cry, jumped up and down a few times while punching the air,
and poured herself another glass. She set it on the coffee table and retrieved
a tub of chocolate ice cream from the freezer. With her glass in one hand and
the ice cream in the other, she kicked off her shoes and settled into her
creamy leather sofa—the one she’d bought on credit, like almost everything else
in her stylish little apartment.

By the time she finished her second
glass, Amanda’s diabolical plan
had begun
to
lose its appeal. Julien Barre deserved to die, for sure, but murder was a messy
business.

And suicide—even more so.

She pictured herself on the floor,
blood gushing from her punctured stomach and trickling from her mouth.

Ugh.

Besides, what if she failed to
finish Julien off? Or herself? After all, the biggest creature she’d ever
assassinated
had been
a cockroach. The act had
been so disgusting it gave her nightmares for weeks.

Fine. No killing.

But then what? She couldn’t just
sit here and do nothing—she was a fighter. Amanda clenched her fists and willed
her vodka-soaked gray matter to hatch up a plan B. As soon as her brain
obliged, she stomped to the bedroom and dug her crimson femme fatale lipstick
from her makeup case. S
he s
hov
ed
her most elegant evening gown, a tee
,
and a pair of panties into an overnight bag
and
rushed out of her apartment.

Plan B was insane, but it was
carnage-free.

A few meters down the street,
Amanda withdrew as much cash as the ATM would give her, and hailed a cab.

“Where to,
madame
?” the
driver asked as she slumped into the backseat.

“Gare Saint-Lazare, please.” She
pulled out her phone and added on an impulse, “I’m going to Deauville.”

“A beach weekend?” He smiled into
the mirror.

“Nope. A night of gambling at the casino,”
she said
,
flashing him her brightest smile.

The driver’s eyebrows shot up
before he returned his gaze to the road. He didn’t offer a comment.

Amanda sat back and tapped
“blackjack
rules” into the search engine on her phone.

She had three hours to
master the game.

* * *

By the time Amanda stepped into her
hotel room, it was getting dark. She switched on the lights and surveyed her
room.

Nice
.

It had better be, considering the
price she was paying for it. Royal Barrière was one of the town’s best hotels,
as grand and expensive as its name suggested. Was this reasonable? Certainly
not. But tonight wasn’t about reasonable. It was about winning big.

Besides, the thought of staying in
a seedy hotel gave her goose bumps. She was no longer a discount-eligible,
backpack-carrying student. She was twenty-eight—too old for seedy hotels. And,
thankfully, not yet broke enough. Mind you, if everything went according to
plan tonight, she wouldn’t be broke at all.

The plan was simple, as all genius
ideas
were
: exploit her beginner’s luck.

Amanda was a gambling virgin, so
new she still had her price tags. She’d never set foot in a casino or tried a
slot machine. She’d never even played cards with friends.

Seeing as she had no friends.

She shook her head, brushing that
thought away.

I do have friends.
A whole bunch of them
—
because four counted as a bunch, right? And it was
four more than she’d had ten years ago in her fat-padded, acne-decorated teens.
Thank God, those days were gone. Now she was as slim, peach-skinned
,
and honey-blonde as the next self-respecting
Parisian
it girl
. And, most importantly, she’d become the
picture-perfect young lady her mother could parade in front of her friends.

As for Amanda’s own friends, there
was Karine, the PA from work who qualified thanks to the number of bitching
sessions they’d shared over the years. Then there was Jeanne, a bartender, and
Jeanne’s fiancé, Mat
,
both of whom happened to
be best friends with Amanda’s ex. And finally, Patrick, business partner
of
said ex.

Amanda frowned at the annoying
realization that three of her four friends were the legacy of her ex-boyfriend
Rob.

Note to self: diversify my social
circle.

She donned her strappy
gown and refreshed her makeup. Then she grabbed her Chanel purse with her ID,
cash
,
and the cocktail voucher the concierge
had given her and headed to the famed Deauville Casino that adjoined her hotel.

Ten minutes into the game, Amanda
began to suspect that her two-hour crash course on the train might have been
insufficient. But it didn’t matter because her beginner’s luck should kick in
any moment now.

She surveyed the players at her
table to divert her mind from worrying.

What a motley crew!

Across from her sat an elderly
Spanish couple. They wore matching T-shirts and smiled simultaneously
,
flashing their dentures. Next to them, two forty-something
British women spoke to each other in an incomprehensible English dialect. A
middle-aged Frenchman with greasy hair and darting eyes sat beside them.
Amanda’s neighbor to the left was a surgically enhanced bimbo of unknown
provenance doused with a nauseating perfume and clad in a dress that was three
sizes too small.

But the most remarkable person at
the table was Amanda’s neighbor to the right
,
whom she’d nicknamed Obsidian Eyes. In his late twenties, tall, swarthy, well
built, and well dressed, the man was easy on the eyes. He wore a faux casual
linen suit and played with the easy confidence of someone who knew what he was
doing.