Sunlight bouncing off the sunny yellow walls glared on Dree’s face and stabbed her eyes, so she squeezed them more tightly shut.
The DJ from the night before at the Buddha Bar had crammed the nightclub’s enormous speakers inside Dree’s skull and turned up the pulsing bass to full volume.
Her shoulders were sore.
So were her boobs.
Not to mention between her legs.
She might have a hangover, too, but that guy, “Augustine,” had been amazing in bed. She had been well and truly fucked. Last night was exactly the sort of thing that she’d needed to draw a bright line in the sand between her old life and her new one. She’d needed a fantastic night with a gorgeous, gorgeous man whom she’d never see again.
She was never going to see him again, right?
He had left during the night, right?
Dree held her breath, and despite her hangover, she squinted and rolled over, hoping like hell that he had done as she’d asked and taken off during the night.
The other side of the bed was empty. The sheets were rumpled, and the pillow lay askew.
Oh, thank goodness. Dree did not need to explain herself to anyone in the light of day just then. Her life was a godawful mess. Putting it back together was going to take a hell of a lot of work, and she didn’t need some hanger-on bugging her for ass while she was trying to deal with it.
Besides, she had a “Bucket List” to attend to. She had a hundred more things she wanted to experience in Paris before she caught that plane in four more days.
She swung her legs around and hopped down to the floor, smiling a little at the edge of the bed.
Her legs wobbled as she tried to walk. Man, Augustine had gone at her so hard last night that she might have sprained something. She should have stretched before a marathon like that. Her muscles had locked up so tightly when she’d come that second time that tears had leaked out of her eyes and she’d thought she might get a migraine.
It had been spectacular.
Augustine had been spectacular, and as a part of a last, hedonistic few days before she changed her life, he had been perfect.
She could limp around Paris and do the next couple of things on her napkin-based bucket list with a grin on her face.
The plan had been one night, and then he would leave.
She was not going to feel bad about it.
Even if she kind of wanted to see him again, hear him talk again, and lick his hard, hot skin again.
But no. That was not the plan.
She would stick to the plan.
She stumbled to the kitchen area and chugged a glass of water straight out of the tap, then another. Dehydration was the enemy. Getting over a hangover migraine required water.
Back in nursing school, she and her friends had given each other the ultimate cure for a hangover: eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen, a liter of lactated Ringer’s saline solution delivered intravenously, and ten minutes of breathing pure oxygen. In half an hour, that would entirely cure even the worst hangover.
Damn, she really needed an IV and some O2 just then.
A can of coffee grounds stood beside the coffee maker, and she thanked St. Augustine and all the other saints that the B and B had supplied her with coffee. Last night, after she’d gotten off the plane, ridden the subway, and found her room, she’d just kind of dumped everything and thrown on her one good dress to go to the Buddha Bar in a fit of blind rage and despair.
Packets of sugar lay on the counter beside the coffee pot, so she dumped three of them into a cup and added coffee to it. No milk, but she wasn’t picky.
Maybe that’s what Dree’s problem was.
Maybe she should be pickier.
Or at least a whole lot less gullible.
At the thought of just how damn gullible she was, another horrible possibility occurred to Dree.
Shock slammed her, and her heartbeat battered her temples.
She grabbed her purse, frantically praying that even though she’d been hopelessly stupid and naïve, maybe she’d escaped the consequences this time.
Probably not. Probably not.
She opened her purse and shook it hard.
Her wallet fell out with a heavy plop on the kitchen counter. She scrambled while opening it anyway, and a wad of pastel-colored euros scattered on the white Formica. She spread the bills out, frantically counting them, but it looked like all her one hundred fifty-two euros were still there.
Her heart was still slamming in her chest, and she braced her arms on the counter and gulped air with relief.
How stupid was she for picking up some guy, bringing him back to her hotel room, and then passing out drunk while he was there? He could have stolen all her money—which was everything she had left in the world—and walked out while she’d slept it off.
With her luck, she was surprised he hadn’t stolen all her money and her clothes and left her literally naked without a shirt on her back.
But she was okay.
She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
No more trusting people with her money or her heart.
And today, her goal was to figure out how to put her life back together and go on. She was going to live a whole new kind of life, one where she was smart and had adventures and didn’t get taken advantage of.
Yep, today was the first day of the rest of her life, and she was a whole new person starting it. From now on, Dree was the kind of woman who would travel to Paris by herself or fuck a gorgeous man if she wanted to.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do.
She even had a napkin that mapped out her new life.
Dree picked up the cocktail napkin from the countertop and smoothed it out to look at what was written there.
A threesome.
A foursome with three guys.
A gang bang.
Three distinct feminine handwriting styles filled the fragile paper, forming a list of adventures. Some of the writing was her own, and some belonged to the two women she’d met at the Buddha Bar when she’d first gotten there. They’d insisted that Dree join them for supper and drinks so adamantly that Dree had suspected they were planning to dine and dash and stick her with the bill, but they hadn’t.
On the napkin they’d written:
Fuck a man against a wall in an alley.
An incredible night on the beach by the sea.
Ménage a whole bunch.
Dree laughed. God, she’d almost done it. She’d had so much tequila to drink last night that a gang bang had seemed like a good idea.
Instead, she’d had:
A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
She’d done it.
She’d done one item on the list.
Dree hunted through her duffel bag lying on the floor, which held three changes of workout clothes that needed washing, some random make-up products, her hospital ID badge, a set of clean scrubs, a curling iron with an American-style plug that wouldn’t work in France, and a cheap ballpoint with Good Samaritan Hospital stamped on the side.
Dree uncapped the pen and carefully drew a line through the item A one-night stand with a beautiful man who you’ll never see again.
One item down, about fifty to go.
She perused the rest of them idly because not all of them were sexual in nature.
Do fun and wonderful things.
Dance in a parade on the Champs-Élysées.
—London, Amsterdam, Monaco, and Nepal.
The countries were a list of places she should visit or, ideally, live for a while.
Dree couldn’t even imagine going to or living in those places, but maybe.
Maybe today she would make a plan so that it would be possible.
It was funny how losing everything had opened her up to new possibilities like living in London or Amsterdam, maybe.
She continued reading down the list.
Buy a beautiful Hermès scarf.
Buy a Coach purse.
Eat at these restaurants: Le Cinq, Le 39V, Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée.
See the Louvre.
Dree sighed. Those would have to wait for her next trip to Paris. Those few euros in her wallet had to last her the whole trip. She needed to eat and, if she wanted to see the rest of Paris, buy Métro tickets to get there. She hadn’t realized that Francis had booked their FlyBNB room quite so far from the middle of the city.
She wished she could have done some of those things, though.
She drank enough coffee to feel human, brushed her teeth, and stepped in the tiny corner shower.
One of the complimentary soaps had been unwrapped and was lying in the soap dish, and it was clean. One of the room’s pink towels was damp where it hung over the towel bar.
Augustine must have taken a shower before he left, which she certainly didn’t begrudge him. That incredible body of his must require maintenance.
She only wished she’d gotten a good look at the huge tattoo covering his broad back before he’d left last night.
Or the one on his arm. That one seemed intricate.
Dree scrubbed herself raw and used some of the shampoo in the tiny bottle to wash her hair, which flipped around her head while she lathered it. She’d never had short hair before. If she’d had enough money, she should have had somebody even it out after her hasty chop job with surgical scissors right before she’d fled from the hospital to the airport. She pulled on an oversized gym tee shirt that, upon sniffing, didn’t need washing too badly.
When she got out of the bathroom, her phone was ringing an odd, octave-scaling ring.
That was weird. Dree didn’t even have cell service in Europe. She’d tried to get her phone to work when she’d been in the airport, but it had just roamed and refused to connect.
When she picked it up, the screen said the call was coming through one of her social media accounts, TalkBook, not her phone. At the top of the screen, the Wi-Fi symbol was lit up.
Oh, she was getting Wi-Fi access in the FlyBNB room, not real cellular service.
Her thumb tapped the circle before she noticed the name on the TalkBook account was Francis Senft.
Oh no, but she’d already accepted his call.
“Where the fuck are you?” Francis yelled through the phone, and his face resolved into a screaming red blob of anger. “You used the airplane ticket! I was trying to get a refund or claim the travel insurance for those tickets, and you goddamn used one!”
“It was in my name,” she said, her voice choking up because it always did when she was ashamed.
“I was trying to get the money for them because I goddamn need the money!”
This wasn’t the Francis she’d known and loved for eleven months. Yesterday, he’d turned into this crazy guy demanding money. “I paid for them,” she said. “I could use one if I wanted to.”
“No, you couldn’t, you dumb bitch! I needed that money!”
He was so different. Dree didn’t even recognize this guy who wore Francis’s face and was screaming at her. Tears spilled over her eyelids and traced hot wetness down her face.
She didn’t know what new-Dree would do in this situation yet. She just knew that old-Dree would apologize to him and figure out some way to give him more than she should because everyone else was more important than she was.
The instinct to apologize gathered in her throat, so she hung up the phone and turned it off.
Just as the phone powered down, it started to ring that odd chime, and Francis’s name reappeared.
The phone died with a sad squawk.
And someone knocked on her door.
Oh, God.
Had Francis used the other plane ticket and come to Paris to find her? He had made the hotel reservations with her credit card. If he was in Paris, he would know where she was.
She crept to the door, stood on her tiptoes, and peered through the fish-eye lens.
Augustine stood outside in the hallway, holding flowers, two large paper cups, and a pink box. He was just as frickin’ beautiful as she remembered, though he was wearing a white dress shirt and khaki pants.
She cranked the two locks that worked and flipped the door open. “Augustine, you’re not supposed to come back. I’m never supposed to see you again. That was the rule.”
He stared at her and said, “I promised to take you shopping for a new coat. Why are you crying?”