A Deal With the Devil
Read A Deal With the Devil Online
Authors: Abby Matisse
Tags: #contemporary romance novel, #General, #Romance, #Chick Lit, #Romance Novel, #Fiction, #Romantic Comedy Novel
Table of Contents
A Deal with the Devil
A Romantic Comedy
Abby Matisse
Copyright 2012 Carla Hudson. All rights reserved.
A Deal with the Devil
By Abby Matisse
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright: 2012, Carla Hudson writing as Abby Matisse
Cover Artist:
Pish Posh Design
Layout:
Stocco Book Design Services
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.
ebook ISBN - 978-0-9859612-0-6
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www.abbymatisse.com
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Chapter One
he needed a do-over. Big time.
The realization struck Amanda Wilson like a thunderbolt during hour four of what should have been a two and a half hour drive to Lake Geneva. Unfortunately, it was too late for a do-over. Also unfortunately, she was utterly and completely lost.
For the last ninety minutes, she’d driven aimlessly through the unmarked roads of backwater Wisconsin, cursing Google Maps and whacking her ill-functioning Garmin on the dashboard of the car. The fact that neither high-end GPS technology could locate the place was probably some sort of sign; a universal warning of impending disaster. As a city girl, going off the grid for a weekend alone may not be the smartest thing she’d ever done.
The car rolled to a stop.
Amanda put it in park, picked up the Google directions and studied the map for the umpteenth time in the past few hours. According to the worthless piece of paper in her hand, she had arrived. She dropped the map in her lap and looked out the passenger window, frowning at the dilapidated wood fence peeking out from under a tangled mass of weeds. She could only imagine what sort of ramshackle dwelling might sit on the other side of those trees.
She shook her head in dismay. If this was the place, she needed to turn right around and hightail it back to Chicago as fast as her Audi A4 could take her. And as soon as she got there, she needed to sit Kate down and demand an explanation, because this felt like a sick joke. And after the day she’d had—no, make that the past few months—she was in no mood to be toyed with.
This area appeared to be about the furthest thing from luxury she could imagine. Of course, if she decided to head back, finding the highway again would be no small feat. She had no earthly idea where she was and it was entirely possible she was stuck here. Permanently. A very sobering thought.
She much preferred her urban and ultra-chic West Loop neighborhood to this critter-infested, overgrown locale. Rustic, Kate had called it. Amanda’s lips curled in disgust as she surveyed her surroundings. Rustic didn’t even begin to describe it.
It was hard to imagine Kate venturing anywhere near a place like this. It looked scraggly and abandoned and downright filthy—exactly the sort of horror movie location where you ended up after you ran out of gas in the middle of the night and just before you met Freddie Krueger.
She leaned forward and peered up through the dirty windshield. In the past hour, the sky had turned an ominous shade of white—not a good sign given the weather bulletins she’d tried to ignore all week. If she was going to leave, she’d better get on it because it looked like they were about to get a winter’s worth of snow dumped on top of them.
Amanda flung the map onto the passenger seat and flopped back as she contemplated the best course of action. She needed a cocktail and an hour-long shower, not a three-hour drive back to Chicago.
She expelled a long, exaggerated sigh and turned her head. Despite the dull overcast day, a shiny piece of metal caught her eye. She sat up straight and then leaned forward, peering intently. Wait a minute. She squinted and glanced up and down the road. The mailbox! This
had
to be the place.
Amanda yanked the car in gear. In her excitement she hit the gas harder than intended, spraying a long fountain of gravel in her wake as she executed a U-turn that would make a NASCAR driver green with envy. She skidded to a stop in front of the mailbox and leaned over the passenger seat to peer at the name. Connelly.
She smacked her palms on the steering wheel. Finally.
Thank God the chichi mailbox had caught her eye. Kate’s place featured an ornate wrought iron and steel number—so different from the beat-up metal contraptions nailed haphazardly to rotted wood posts that adorned other driveways up and down the lane. As she turned into the driveway, she vowed to ignore her earlier misgivings about Freddie Krueger and going off the grid. She was here. That had to mean something.
She stopped the car and got out, stretching lazily as she studied the wide logs that formed the walls of the cabin. Her eyes drifted up to the stone chimney that jutted skyward from the cedar shake roof. Kate had declared the cabin ‘rustic with an urban twist.’ Whatever that meant. The exterior didn’t look too promising, but to be fair, Kate said they had focused on the interior and wouldn’t tackle the outside until next spring. Given the decrepit look of the front porch, the sooner the better.
A large, puffy snow flake drifted down and landed on her cheek, melting instantly. She looked up at the sky and two more landed on her forehead. It was starting. Amanda brushed the moisture off her face and strode toward the back of the car. After popping the lid on the trunk, she hauled her suitcases out. The larger of the two landed on the ground with a dull thud.
Good grief. How many suitcases do you need for three days alone in a cabin?
Apparently two plus one tote bag stuffed with every beauty product she owned. To be fair, what she’d done couldn’t technically be considered packing. She’d just tossed random items into a few bags without giving it much thought, which was completely out of character. Amanda was a planner and an obsessive organizer and normally when she traveled, she packed by checklist. But she had been too preoccupied to bother planning and so she’d brought one quarter of her closet and every item in her bathroom vanity.
A do-over would be pretty sweet though. She’d give anything to go back and undo the last six months. Even the past three would suffice. Too bad it wasn’t possible. The only thing she could do now was come up with a plan to crawl out from under this massive cluster of a situation. And she needed to do it soon. She only had another month or two at most before her financial house of cards would collapse around her.
A familiar lump of dread formed in her stomach at the thought. Drastic measures were called for or she’d face bankruptcy—an option she refused to consider. At least for now.
She dragged bag number one up the porch steps while trying to talk herself down. No point getting all worked up. She had three whole days to figure something out, which was plenty of time to come up with a plan.
When she got everything into the cabin, she plopped down on the larger bag, huffing and sweaty and trying to muster the strength to haul the bags upstairs. The bottle of Shiraz she’d stowed in the smaller suitcase tempted her, but she resisted. No cocktails. At least for the next hour. She needed a shower and then she planned to get busy on her strategy for resolving this mess. Cocktails could come later.
After she lugged her bags upstairs, Amanda strolled into the bathroom, laid her robe on the counter and turned on the water. Then she peeled off her uncomfortable suit—which she would have changed out of at the office had she known she’d get lost—opened the beveled glass door and stepped into the slate-tiled, multi-jet dream of a shower.
Kate hadn’t oversold it. The bathroom—and everything else in the newly redecorated cabin—looked magnificent. The place might be tiny but it absolutely oozed luxury. Not even the teensiest detail had been missed. No big surprise given her best friend’s reputation as one of Chicago’s hottest interior designers, but completely unexpected if you went by the broken down look of the exterior.
As the warm spray hit her from all sides, Amanda sighed and stood there, soaking it in. Then she reached out and twisted the temperature dial. The water grew hotter and her eyes drifted closed as delicious moist heat seeped into her stiff muscles. She relaxed into it for several minutes and then reached for the over-priced shower gel she’d bought on a whim the weekend before. It had beckoned from its fancy tabletop display at Nordstrom and practically leapt into her hands as she and Kate wandered by.
She wiped the water from her eyes and examined the label. Tahiti in a Bottle. Her mouth twisted. Its claims of instant stress relief sounded absolutely ridiculous, but she’d purchased the shower gel anyway. She always did, even though her career as a brand marketer should make her impervious to merchandising gimmicks. But when it came to beauty products, she fell for them all, finding it impossible to resist the promise of discovering magic in a bottle, a face cream, a hair conditioner or pretty much anything else. It was one of the few areas in her life where she could be considered an optimist.
As she squeezed a dollop of lavender-scented magic into her palm, the scent wafted upward. It reminded her of why she’d found the product so irresistible. Wild promises aside, the fragrance alone had been worth every penny. She drew in a long appreciative breath and sighed. Heaven.
Amanda lingered until she used every last drop of hot water, but when she stepped onto the rug, her shoulders still seemed level with her ears. She needed to chill—a tall order given her money problems—and it would take something more drastic than a few blobs of expensive bath gel.