Lissa- Sugar and Spice 1.6 - Final (20 page)

* * *

When she’d first arrived in L.A. three years ago, Lissa had stayed two nights in a moderately-priced hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard while she’d looked for an apartment.

She had the taxi take her there.

Once they arrived, she paid him, added a tip, walked briskly into the hotel lobby, waited a minute or two, and just as briskly walked out again. Her suitcase made her feel conspicuous, but it wasn’t very big and half the women in L.A., actresses and models, lugged around bags almost as big, so she decided not to worry about it, especially since there wasn’t anything she could do to hide it.

There was a chain pharmacy across the street. She went inside, bought a ball cap and a pair of big wraparound sunglasses.

Nobody paid her any attention, not even the bored gum-chewing cashier. She paid for her purchases, stepped into a corner of the store, tore the tags off, put the glasses on and tucked her hair up under the cap.

Much better.

Once outside, she took a taxi to Rodeo Drive, got out in front of Ralph Lauren’s, peered in the windows like any other shopper, did the same in front of half a dozen other shops before setting off on foot for the elegant hotel where her sisters were staying.

An elevator whisked her to their floor; a right turn took her to the door of their suite. She knocked.

“It’s me,” she said, knowing that one of them would be peering at her through the peephole. The door began opening. “And I’m just warning you both that I’m not staying.”

She said it firmly. But once the door was fully open and she was looking at the faces of her sisters, at the love and worry in their eyes, Lissa lost the composure she’d fought so hard to maintain.

Her suitcase dropped to the floor.

“Oh, Liss,” Emily said.

“Liss, sweetie,” Jaimie said.

Lissa sobbed and went straight into their arms.

* * *

Emily called room service and ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, toast and three pots of herbal tea.

“I know it’s way after breakfast time, but Mom used to make scrambled eggs and herbal tea whenever one of us wasn’t feeling so good, remember?”

“Are you talking about me? Because I’m feeling good,” Lissa said. Jaimie and Emily looked at her. “OK. Maybe not so good. But, really, I’m not very hungry.”

Her sisters said well, they were, so she could just watch them eat.

Mostly, they watched her.

The truth was, she was starved—she hadn’t had anything since those cups of tea the night before, and that felt as if it had been a century ago. So she tucked into the eggs and the bacon, spread strawberry jam on the toast, drank two cups of tea.

“Done?” Emily said.

“Yes. Thank you. That was—”

Jaimie whisked the room service tray aside.

“How did you end up in Montana?” she said.

“What went wrong between you and that actor, Raoul Something-or-Other?”

“The man’s an idiot!”

“No worse an idiot than Nick Gentry! What was he doing in the middle of nowhere?”

“Were you actually a ranch cook?”

“And if you were, why? What happened? What went wrong?”

Emily and Jaimie fell silent. Lissa looked from one of the to the other.

“No questions,” she said. “That was the deal.”

“That’s ridiculous! How can we help you if we don’t ask questions?”

Her sisters’ eyes were filled with compassion. Lissa felt her throat constrict.

“Liss. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be watching the eleven o’clock news and suddenly they flash a picture and a breathless bimbo says it’s a cell phone shot of the missing actor, Nick Gentry, and an unidentified woman at a restaurant in, I don’t know what it was called, Back of Beyond, Montana?”

Lissa flinched.

“And you see that unidentified woman and you say, that’s not an unidentified woman, that’s our sister, Melissa!”

“And then, hello, your brothers start calling and asking what in hell is going on.”

“They know?” Lissa whispered.

“Of course they know! You’re just lucky Jake’s in Spain buying horses, Caleb’s in The Hague at some kind of international-law conference, and Travis is in Germany at a finance meeting that nobody can even describe, or you’d have all three of them to deal with.”

“Marco and Zach, too,” Jaimie said. “You think it was easy to convince them we could handle this on our own?”

“Handle what? Me? You’re going to handle me?”

“We’re getting off the track,” Emily said. “We want to help you, but we can’t do that until we know what’s happening. And only you can tell us that.”

Lissa gave a deep sigh. Things were already a mess. How much worse could they get?

“OK. What do you want to know?”

“You could start by explaining what you were doing working as a cook on a ranch in the middle of nowhere,” Emily said, “especially after you told me that you’d taken a job as executive chef at a fancy resort.”

“
I
didn’t say that.
You
did.”

“Yeah. But you didn’t correct me. You didn’t say, well, actually, I’m at a ranch outside a town nobody ever heard of, cooking for a bunch of cowhands—”

“—and for their boss, an actor most people figured was dead.”“Dead, or worse.”

“It’s a long story,” Lissa said slowly. “It’ll take lots of time to tell.”

“By an amazing coincidence,” Jaimie said, “we happen to have nothing but time to spare today.”

“Lissa. We were all going crazy, worrying over you! We promised the guys we’d report back ASAP.”

Lissa looked from one sister to the other. “Report back? Am I ten years old?”

“Don’t try to change the subject! You’re in trouble.”

“And you know this because…?”

“Why else would you have taken such a crappy job? Why else would you have holed up with a man who’s been hiding from the world?”

“Is that all?” Lissa said, each word encased in ice. “I mean, why hold back? Just say what’s on your minds.”

“I just did.”

“You’re wrong. About Nick. About why I stayed at the Triple G. You’ve jumped to a whole bunch of conclusions about me, about the ranch, about him.”

“So tell us what we have wrong,” Jaimie said quietly. “And then maybe, just maybe, we can put our heads together and come up with a plan. Because you need a plan, Melissa. You absolutely need a plan.”

They were right.

She needed a plan.

A way to move forward. To restore the professional reputation she’d permitted Raoul to destroy months ago and now to destroy again. To stand up to the wild dogs circling around her.

To tell Nick that she loved him, that she would stand with him as he made his way through this, to be with him whatever he intended to do next, whether it involved running the Triple G or making another movie.

“Liss?”

She nodded. Inhaled. Exhaled. And said, “It’s a long story, guys, and it begins at a place called
Raoul’s
. A restaurant in Beverly Hills that I didn’t tell you about because I wanted it to be a surprise…”

Actually, the story began before that. With Carlos. And with Jack. And then, finally, with Raoul.

She told them what a breath of fresh air he’d been. How she’d come to like him. Respect him.

“Trust him,” she said. “That was the real big thing. I’d trusted Jack and Carlos, and that trust had been thrown in my face, and now here was Raoul, gorgeous, successful, honorable, incredibly honorable.”

She told them about the offer he’d made her, the chance of a lifetime—planning an upscale restaurant, developing its menu, becoming its executive chef.

She watched her sisters’ faces light with pleasure, then darken with puzzlement over what they’d read in the interview with Raoul.

“But how—”

Lissa held up her hand.

She took them through opening day. Took them to opening night. The excitement, the diners, the food critics.

Raoul’s demand.

Their delight turned to shock. To horror. To rage. And then she told them about the fish stock. About Raoul’s penis. About the fish head.

There was a second of stunned silence.

“Oh…my…God,” Jaimie said, and she threw back her head and howled.

Emily roared with laughter. “A fish head,” she gasped, “a fish head!”

Even Lissa giggled.

“It was,” she said, “a very small fish.”

That set them off again.

Jaimie finally wiped her eyes, went to the wet bar and brought back three miniature bottles of pinot grigio.

“To hell with glasses,” she said, handing them around.

They unscrewed the caps and clinked bottles.

“To Raoul’s penis,” said Emily. “Here’s hoping the fish stock rotted it off.”

The Wilde sisters tilted the bottles to their lips and emptied them in a few long swallows. There were a couple of errant giggles. Then Jaimie cleared her throat.

“The bastard.”

“Believe me, I called him more than that.”

“And you were out of a job.”

Lissa nodded. “Not just that job. I was out of consideration for any good job.”

“Didn’t you tell people what had happened?”

“I was upset. And humiliated. That scene… I can laugh at it now, but I couldn’t, not then. The entire thing was horrible. What he’d done to me, how I’d let him play me for such a fool…”

“You mean, you kept quiet?”

“Yes. By the time I tried to speak up, Raoul had destroyed my reputation. He said that I’d collapsed under pressure, that I’d walked out in the middle of the dinner service. By the time I tried to tell someone the truth, she just gave me this look, you know, a that’s-a-truly-pathetic-story look, and I knew it was all over.”

“And after that?”

“After that, I took any restaurant job I could find.”

“You should have called us,” Emily said indignantly. “Any of us. All of us.”

“Right. Just the way you called when you were broke and desperate in New York.”

Emily flushed. “Point made.”

“And then you saw an ad for a job at that ranch?”

“My agent called me about it. I thought it was for a chef’s position at one of those pricey spas. I flew up and when I realized what the job really was, I was pissed off.”

“I’ll bet,” Jaimie said grimly.

“I wasn’t going to stay. But a huge snowstorm blew in and I was stuck, so I made a couple of meals. Well, I was there, wasn’t I?” she said, skipping over the part where she and Nick had despised each other, the part where she’d agreed to trade a cooked meal for room and board.

“But the snow stopped, eventually.”

“Uh huh.”

“And?”

“And—and, things changed.”

“You discovered your real career was in feeding a bunch of grimy cowboys?”

“They weren’t grimy! And no, I didn’t decide that was what I wanted to do with my life. But…”

“But?”

“But—” She looked at her sisters. “But,” she said softly, “I got to know Nick.”

“Know him?” Jaimie said.

Lissa flushed. “Nick wasn’t hiding. He was healing.”

“So he claims,” Emily said. “We haven’t paid attention. Something about a stunt gone wrong?”

Lissa hesitated, but there was no longer any reason to keep Nick’s secret. She told her sisters what had happened, how seriously Nick had been injured, not only physically but emotionally.

“That must have been rough,” Jaimie said softly.

“It was. But he’s strong. He got through it. And I—”

“And you?”

“And I—I began to care for him.”

“Holy crap, Melissa! You’re in love with him!”

“No!”

“Don’t give me that BS! You’re in love with the man.”

“Maybe,” Lissa said softly.

“What about him? Is he in love with you?”

“For God’s sakes, James, what is this? An interrogation?”

“Meaning, you don’t know if he loves you or not.”

“Meaning, I don’t want to have this conversation.”

“Dammit, Melissa—”

“What has he told you?” Emily said. “About what’s going on now.”

“I haven’t—I haven’t spoken with him since early this morning.”

“Meaning?” Jaimie demanded.

“Don’t look at me like that. He’s busy. Incredibly busy.”

“So let’s get this straight. He sent you away—”

“He had to deal with the media!”

“And he hasn’t called you.”

“No.”

Jaimie’s eyes narrowed. “How about calling him?”

Lissa stared at her sister. How about that, indeed? Between worrying about Nick and checking for calls from him and then discovering that her name and lies about her were plastered everywhere, she’d missed the obvious.