Amanda's Guide to Love (12 page)

“They’re OK. It doesn’t take much
to be OK compared to some of my former colleagues, especially my former boss.”

“The one who fired you?”

She nodded. “I miss my job, though.
My
real
job.”

“What do you miss most about it?”

She shrugged and began to play with
the untouched sugar cube. “Where shall I begin? I miss the strategizing and
decision making. The thrill of going on a business trip. The brainstorming
sessions. I miss some of my colleagues. Even my desk.” She sighed. “It was a
great desk. Large, trendy . . . neat.”

He covered her hand with his, a
smile crinkling his eyes. “I can see why you’d miss your desk.”

She considered pulling her hand
away. She truly did. But his palm was warm and incredibly comforting. Its touch
against the back of her hand made her want to sway toward him, melt into his
embrace, and let him do wild, passionate things to her. Things that stole the
strength from her legs and made her cry out his name.

Things that made her lose control.

She pulled her hand away. “It’s not
just my old job; I miss the company, too.”

He stared at her. “Why?”

Was he asking about the company or
the hand?

She went with the safer assumption.
“I happen to believe in its mission. ENS is a green-energy pioneer in France,
and it actually contributes to making the world a better place. And you know
what? I think it could do so much more if it were run by someone competent.”

He didn’t comment—only nodded and
picked up the Bordeaux that Amar had placed in front of him.

They sat in silence for a while,
him drinking his wine and her sipping what was left of her coffee. They didn’t
touch or even look at each other. And yet Amanda felt his nearness on an almost
mystical level. She could all but hear his thoughts.

Had she been a less rational
person, she would have concluded they’d established a telepathic connection.
But as it were, she told herself her peripheral vision was catching his
contours and her sense of smell, his pheromones.

And, boy, those pheromones were
scrumptious.

Rain drummed a steady
beat above their heads and around them. It splattered puddle water onto their
feet, muddying his fine loafers and her stylish ballerinas. This annoyed
Amanda’s inner shoe fanatic to no end . . . yet not enough to
push her to break the magic of the moment and seek shelter inside the bistro.

* * *

The Date Pact

~ ~ ~

A Woman’s Guide to Perfection

Guideline # 6

The Perfect Woman knows how to
manage her female boss.

Rationale
: There are three types of female
bosses: Mother, Prima Donna, and Fury. Mother is the woman who, depending on
her age and yours, could have been your mom or sister outside of the work
context. Prima Donna is bad news. She may be superficially friendly and sweet,
but she sees you—and everyone else with the tiniest trace of ambition—as a
rival. Fury is mad, sad, and evil.

A
word of caution
:
Consider yourself lucky if you work with the Mother type because regardless of
how demanding she is, she’s also fair, and you’ll be rewarded if you’ve been
good. So be good.

Remember
that Prima Donna wants all the attention and spotlight to herself while those
under her should be indefatigable and indistinguishable—her Dream Team. If your
boss is a Prima Donna, keep as low a profile as you can manage and look for a
transfer or another job.

Permissible
exception
: If you
enjoy being nobody, you may enjoy working under a Prima Donna. But then, you’ll
never be a Perfect Woman.

Damage
control
: If your
boss is a Fury, there’s only one sensible thing you can do. Run!

~ ~ ~

Ooh,
the bliss.

Amanda slid down the smooth enamel
surface of her sitting bathtub and brought her knees to her chest, which was
the only way to have both her chest and legs in the water at the same time. She
did miss the proper baths she used to stretch out in and enjoy at her old
place. But a sitting tub was the only way to soak in such a tiny bathroom, and
it was still better than not having the option at all.

Besides, this was
her
bathtub—the lawful property of Amanda Roussel—and not her interfering
landlady’s tub. Just for that, it was worthy of Amanda’s love.

The idea behind taking a hot bath
in mid-June was to relax her body enough to fall asleep as soon as her head hit
the pillow. And the reason she needed to instantly drop off was to avoid
fantasizing about Kes. Those fantasies were too wild, too dangerous.

Too real.

Having made love to the man, she
couldn’t tell herself his avatar was just the fruit of her imagination. She
couldn’t persuade herself Kes was a terrible lover or a pervert because he was neither
of those things. He was the exact opposite.

After Rob broke up with her,
Amanda’s sex life had been a disaster. Her first post-Rob date—financial
analyst Victor—told her over the main course in an upscale restaurant that the
importance of sex to a good relationship was vastly overrated. She agreed,
pleased to have met a man who didn’t objectify women. But then he informed her
during dessert that he hadn’t had sex in four years and wasn’t planning on
having any in the foreseeable future.

Amanda didn’t bother seeing him
again.

Her second date—tech start-up
founder Laurent—enjoyed sex, all right. He also loved food—carnally. She should
have suspected his adoration went too far when, on their first date, he plunged
his fingers into the topping of her strawberry cake and plucked a strawberry.
Slowly, he licked it and then attempted to feed it to her.

She politely declined.

Four more chaste dates prescribed
by her
Guide to Perfection
later
,
Amanda upgraded their
relationship to Stage Two: Sleeping with the Candidate. She invited Laurent
over to sample her wine collection and the delicious chocolate mousse she’d
whipped up for the occasion. They finished the sampling in bed with said mousse
smeared all over her body. She felt so sticky and upset about the quasi-certain
ruin of her expensive sheets that she didn’t enjoy a moment of his elaborate
foreplay.

But she gave him another chance.

And he blew it by turning up on her
doorstep with three bananas and a pot of honey. With a lascivious smile, he
told her he was going to put those items to a
very good
use.

She kicked him out.

Her third date, Fabrice, was a
schoolteacher. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have considered a man
with such a low income potential, but she was traumatized. And desperate.

Fabrice showed good promise in the
beginning. He had a reassuringly conservative relationship with food and didn’t
commit a single gaffe
in
any of the five pre-sex dates. Better
still, Fabrice wore unusually elegant shoes for someone on a teacher’s salary.

A couple of weeks into Stage Two,
he invited her to his parents’ house—where he still lived—and showed her his
BDSM playroom in the attic.

“Seriously?” Amanda did her best to
hide her disappointment behind a sneer. “Did I ever say or do anything that
made you think I was into this sort of stuff?”

“But . . . I thought . . .
I spotted a copy of
Fifty Shades
on your bookshelves, and I thought . . .”

She let out a heavy sigh. “I also
own a copy of
Twilight
. It doesn’t mean I want to be bitten by a
vampire.”

He looked down at his feet.

“You should’ve done some market
research first,” she admonished, “before you bought all this . . .
equipment.”

“I did!” His expression was both
hurt and defiant. “I read several articles in men’s magazines. They all said
the same thing: women can’t resist a man like Christian Grey.”

“Poor fellow, you don’t get it, do
you?” Amanda breathed as much pity as she could into her tone—she wasn’t going
to let on how disappointed and betrayed she was feeling. “What women find
irresistible about Christian Grey are his billions, not his whips and paddles.
If he were a schoolteacher with a playroom in his parents’ attic, how do you
think they’d react to him?”

He jutted out his chin but didn’t
answer.

“Well,
I
think they’d call
him a disgusting pervert and wouldn’t want to touch him with a ten-foot pole.”
She spun around and marched out the door, not bothering to say good-bye.

What was wrong with men these days?
Why couldn’t they just make love to a woman without using crutches and
contraptions?

She’d enjoyed
9
½
Weeks
as much as the next cultivated
person. But even the most tasteful things Mickey Rourke did to Kim Basinger on-screen
would be messy and off-putting in the real world. Especially in Amanda’s world,
where discomfort extinguished desire and ridicule blew it to pieces.

After Fabrice, she went out with a
couple of high-profile businessmen whose lovemaking turned out to be every bit
as self-centered as their conversation.

And after that, it was just her and
Faceless Man.

Until that mind-blowing weekend in
Deauville.

Now, Kes was a different matter.
She couldn’t think of anything he’d done in bed—or in the beach cabin they’d
borrowed—that she hadn’t liked. In fact, with respect to most of the things he
did, the word
like
was too mild to describe her reaction.
Take
pleasure
would be a more adequate expression.
Savor
would be an even
better fit. As for what he’d done to her with his clever tongue,
relish
might begin to convey how she’d felt.

Amanda’s right hand went to rest on
her tummy and then slid lower, settling between her legs. Her treacherous mind blocked
out the inconvenient fact that the very reason she was taking a bath was to
avoid doing what she was about to do now. She threw her head back, closed her
eyes . . . and felt someone—or something—staring at her.

She sat up and tensed.

It was a spider. A big, black,
disgusting creature sat across from her on the edge of the tub. It was close
enough for her to discern each of its eight legs.

Had there been another human within
earshot, she would’ve screamed. But seeing as there was none, she didn’t. She
just froze.

So did the spider.

Right. OK.
She could handle this. All she
needed was an object that was sufficiently heavy and broad to squash the
critter. Amanda pictured herself picking up one of her pumps and hitting the
spider with it.

Yuck
. She’d have to clean its revolting
remains from the sole of her shoe afterward, and
that
was more than she
could handle.

The alternative was to finish her
bath, lock herself up in her bedroom, and hope that the spider would go away by
dawn the same way it had come in. And if it was still there, well, she’d have
to get over her squeamishness and sacrifice one of her least favorite shoes.

She glowered at the mini-monster.
“Stop staring, you perv, and turn around.”

The spider shifted its position.

Amanda rolled her eyes and
scrambled to rinse the soap off her body. She stepped out of the bathtub,
grabbed the towel, and rushed into her bedroom. As she dried herself in there,
a memory began to take shape in the back of her mind.

A happy memory.

It was a book, or more precisely, a
series of beautifully illustrated books called
Christophe’s Adventures in
the Enchanted Forest.
She hadn’t given them a thought in two decades, but
she still remembered most of the stories and the pictures that accompanied
them.

Amanda must have been five or six
at the time of her Christophe mania, and she insisted that her dad read to her
from those books every night. She just couldn’t get enough of Christophe . . .
who happened to be a little spider. Christophe was funny and curious. He was,
as a matter of fact, her best friend for at least a year until she finally
acquired her first nonfictional buddy, Magalie.

Wasn’t it ironic that she should
remember Christophe when she was considering the least disgusting method of
eliminating the spider in her bathroom? The real-life thing was a lot less cute
than her book hero, and it couldn’t sing or dance. Even if it
had
turned
around when she told it to stop staring.

Which was, of course, a mere
coincidence.

Hmm, did spiders have brains?

Amanda pulled on her pj’s and
slipped between her crispy Egyptian cotton sheets. To her surprise, instead of
going over her day, she said a clumsy prayer that her voyeuristic bath crasher
move its little ass and vacate her apartment during the night. As she addressed
the universe, she felt her ears flame with embarrassment. Was she getting
sentimental? Was she praying for an arachnid because of her trip down memory
lane?