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 heavyplopon 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 hehadn’tstolen 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.
