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    How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love
    How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love
    How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love

    By Riley Smith

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    About this ebook

    Anne Baits is living the life she always dreamed of. She’s in California, she owns a bookstore, she spends most of her time either reading or talking about books. She’s got a kick ass best friend named Kay who gives her all the socialization she really needs. It’s a peaceful existence that she has very little chance of screwing up, and that’s how she likes it.

    But lately, Anne Baits has been feeling down. In an attempt to turn her mood around, she dives into her favorite book, that ultimate classic of literature: Pride and Prejudice. It’s never failed to cheer her up before, but today, it’s not doing the trick. And that’s when she realizes… she needs to find her own Mr. Darcy, but she’s been looking in all the wrong places!

    Her friend Kay kindly jumps in to help her out, and what follows is a screwball adventure through LA’s hottest nightclubs, a meatloaf disaster, and a fire walk that Anne would never forget — except she can’t remember it at all. But as Anne’s schemes to find love blow up in her face (sometimes literally), and Kay’s there to clean up the mess, she might realize she never needed to go looking at all.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBryant Street Shorts
    Release dateFeb 9, 2021
    ISBN9781094413242
    Author

    Riley Smith

    N/A

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    Reviews for How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love

    4/5

    34 ratings5 reviews

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    • 2/5
      I found the premise unbelievable. There is zero chemistry between H/H. How can an allegedly intelligent woman have so little understanding of her own sexuality? And the ending is just too pat- and (spoiler alert) no one almost dies on a boat. That's totally misleading.
    • 5/5
      For such a great story, a lot of audience must read your book. You can publish your work on NovelStar Mobile App
    • 5/5
      Two devoted friends navigate the ups and downs of helping each other find the romance and love of their dreams. The story is clever, fast-paced and funny.
    • 5/5
      Super cute and funny. I liked the first person pov as well.
    • 1/5
      No









    Book preview

    How I Burnt Down My Kitchen, Almost Died on a Boat, and (Finally) Found Love - Riley Smith

    Chapter One: Dear Jane Austen, You Ruined My Life

    I have lived my life in the fruitful and passionate pursuit of clichés.

    My hair is brown and usually tied up in a messy ponytail that I want to be sleek, but it won’t listen. My eyes are… drum roll, please… brown as well, although my driver’s license is generous enough to call them hazel.

    I am of average height for a woman in the US, slightly above average weight; I absolutely refuse to replace my snacks with kale crisps, no matter what my best friend Kay insists. I don’t care if it got her into the right weight class for boxing. I don’t box anything. I unbox snack foods. Life is short and I plan on enjoying it while I’ve got it. I studied English literature at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest you have almost certainly never heard of.

    I own a secondhand bookstore. Well, ‘own’ is a flexible word. At this point, the bank owns it, and if things get any slower, a gangster loan shark will claim it. But it allows me to indulge my chief passions: pretending to work while reading and talking to people about books.

    I am pleased beyond words to own a bookstore. I absolutely love dressing how I want, working when I want, and matchmaking my few patrons with their next great literary love.

    It’s the whole non-literary love thing that was giving me trouble.

    My bookstore is called Strong Spines because I think I’m funny and I have a deep-rooted love for puns. I already had my business license and the papers drawn up before I realized this would lead people to my shop mistakenly looking for a chiropractor.

    You live, you learn, you make irrecoverable errors that affect your business’s advertising for the rest of your life.

    I was going through it, as the kids say these days. I don’t count as a kid anymore, right? I’m twenty-six, so I’m hoping I graduated to young woman at some point. When I am particularly down, I dive into none other than the ultimate classic.

    You know what I’m talking about.

    Pride and Prejudice. The perfect love story. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages of heated glances, witty banter, and easily resolved misunderstandings.

    It never fails to help me feel fantastic.

    Except, this particular Saturday afternoon, when I was sitting in my shop (as I do Monday through Saturday from eight a.m. to eight p.m., and then Sunday from twelve to five, unless I oversleep or have a stomachache), it was failing. Hard.

    In fact, it was making me feel worse.

    Because as I read Mr. Darcy’s compliments of Lizzie, and watched her rebuff him repeatedly, I realized… I’d never been complimented like that. Not that I could remember.

    I’ve dated. I have had guys tell me I had nice boobs. I even dated a guy for two years — well, one year at a time, two times. That’s a story easily summed up as: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, still shame on you, you cheating asshole.

    I have never once had a guy compliment my eyes, or write me a long message detailing his feelings, or just… anything nearly as romantic as Pride and Prejudice.

    I get it, it’s a book.

    But they’ve got to have at least a little basis in fact, right? At some point, Jane Austen must have seen or felt real-life love that looked like this. How could she write it so beautifully, so evocatively, otherwise? How could she make us all swoon for 200 years if there wasn’t some truth to it?

    I was poring over the book, trying to discern the causes. What was Miss Elizabeth Bennet doing that I wasn’t?

    The little bell on the front door rang. The place was small enough that I could see straight to the front of the shop. I loved being able to hail my customers without having to stand up from my desk.

    Kay tumbled in, her big backpack nearly knocking over my carefully arranged display of travel narratives that aren’t anything like Heart of Darkness (I have read it twice, to be sure I really hated it. And I hate it).

    She always traveled like she had all of her possessions with her, carrying everything she needed on her back. Snacks, water, notebooks, etc. She was a boxer, poet, and a paralegal saving money for law school.

    She was confident, effortlessly beautiful (I would never get plastic surgery, but God was unfair when he handed out the cheekbones), and could probably bench-press my weight.

    She walked up to me with a wave and the following greeting: Nose up, dweeb. The party’s here.

    I carefully slipped my bookmark between the pages to hold my place. Thin tassels hanging from an impressionist painting of a Parisian boulevard. I fully embrace every reader girl cliché, and as such, I daydream about Paris on an almost daily basis — you should either feel unsurprised and superior to me or love me as a kindred spirit at this point. I turned to Kay and gave her my attention.

    Kay was without a doubt the nicest person in my life. As I said hi and exchanged a few pleasantries, asking about her day at work, how school was going, etc., she pulled out a tupperware of cookies and popped them open, setting them on my desk.

    I pointed at the sign on my door and said, No food in the shop.

    Kay pointed at the cookies, rebutting, According to you, these aren’t food. They’re sugar-free and gluten-free.

    I recoiled. That basically makes them coasters.

    Kay slipped her backpack off, as comfortable in my shop as she would be in either of our apartments, and said, Try one. If you just try one, you’ll like it.

    I took one out and put it on a paper towel. I made no further moves to actually eat it, but this small compromise seemed to gratify her.

    She asked the question I had, of course, been waiting for. She always asked it when she came into the

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