Lissa- Sugar and Spice 1.6 - Final (4 page)

The Newf looked up and gave a gentle woof. Nick sighed, reached out and scratched him behind the ear. The dog sighed, too, in ecstasy. “Stupid dog,” Nick said again, but without any heat.

What did dogs know about winners and losers?

“Nothing,” Nick said, and drank some of the bourbon-laced coffee.

Once upon a time, Nick Gentry had been a winner. The Clint Eastwood of the Twenty-First Century, some stupid blogger had called him.

How about a new title? Nick Gentry. The Drunk of the Decade.

“Don’t leave out Gimp,” Nick said, raising his mug in salute.

Hell, nobody could leave that out. Not when one of his legs was about as useless as tits on a bull.

CHAPTER TWO

O
ne good thing
about living alone.

You could pack up your things and leave on a moment’s notice.

OK. It took a little longer to get ready, but that was only because you had to spend a little time deciding what to take and what to leave behind.

Lissa took her suitcase from the closet, placed it on the bed and unzipped it. Then she opened her closet and the drawers in her dresser and narrowed her eyes.

Montana. Spring in Montana. A little cool, maybe. Sweaters. A light jacket. Jeans. T- shirts. What else? This place was a ranch. A resort for the rich. OK. Add a long skirt—she had one she’d bought at a street fair last year, denim embroidered with flowers at the waistband and hem. Where the heck was it?

There. Excellent. If she had to mingle with the guests, the skirt and a black cashmere sweater, long-sleeved, kind of low cut, would be perfect. Chefs didn’t often make appearances, but one of the things she might do at this place was institute a special buffet night.

“Excellent idea, Melissa,” she said briskly, and she added the white silk pants and black silk top she’d scooped up at a resale shop in Beverly Hills a couple of years back.

A buffet night.

Ranch-themed, of course.

A butter sculpture of a horse. She’d turned out to be surprisingly good at butter sculptures. The
pot-au-feu
. A big pot of chili. She’d make it with red wine and call it something ranchy. Cowboy Chili, maybe. Dumplings. Sourdough bread. Maybe trout. Or bass. Or whatever it was she’d vaguely heard people say they fished for in Montana. And game. There had to be game. Pheasants, wild turkey, quail, whatever. She had a recipe for pheasant with a sauce to die for. The sauce included a secret ingredient—90 percent cacao dark chocolate. Not a problem. She could order it online, have it overnighted to the ranch…

And why hadn’t she thought to ask Marcia the name of the place?

No matter. She’d find out soon enough.

She packed quickly. Her chef’s whites. Her toque. She was proud of the hat; it marked her as a professional.

So did her knives.

“You mean you have to provide your own knives when you work at a restaurant?” Emily had said when she’d found Lissa poring over a catalogue of restaurant equipment a couple of years ago when all the Wildes were home for a long Fourth of July weekend.

Lissa had looked up from a page of gorgeous Japanese carbon steel.

“Well, you don’t have to, but serious chefs always have their own knives.”

“Why?” Em had pulled a pair of imaginary pistols from an imaginary gun belt and mimed twirling them. “Is it a chef’s version of
have gun, will travel
?”

“It’s more like a doctor wanting her own stethoscope.”

“Huh. I never knew that. I’ve waitressed in New York,” Emily had said, and hurriedly added, “well, not anymore, of course, now that I’m working for an art collector, but when I did waitress, I never saw a cook with his own knives.”

“What kind of restaurant did you work in?”

“A diner.”

Lissa had grinned. “Diners have cooks, Em. Restaurants, real restaurants, have chefs. And how come I never knew you put in a stint as a waitress?”

“It was only for a couple of weeks,” Emily had replied, and she’d moved the conversation on to other things because, as it turned out, she’d worked as a waitress at more than one place and she had, in fact, never worked for an art collector.

But that was history. It had nothing to do with this situation.

Besides, Emily really hadn’t lied.

Well, she had, but it had been a white lie, and those didn’t count. You told them because you had to. You told them to keep another person from finding out that things weren’t as good as they seemed.

Dammit.

A lie was a lie was a lie. She should know, Lissa thought with a sigh, because she’d been lying to her family for months.

She paused, looked into the suitcase, did a quick check. What more should she pack? Sandals. Hey, spring was on its way, wasn’t it? A pair of heels because you never knew. Her sturdy I-can-stay-on-my-feet-all-day kitchen clogs. Sneakers, except she’d wear them instead of packing them.

Same as Emily, she’d been lying as much to keep from admitting her failure as to keep her family from worrying.

Was it really so bad to let them think she’d deliberately left her job at a fancy Hollywood eatery to try her hand at movie set catering?

“No,” she said firmly.

No. It wasn’t.

The last thing she wanted was her brothers barging in with offers of money and contacts and advice, advice as if time had run backward and she was once again a teenager suffering under the scrutiny and well-meant advice of three big brothers. And she certainly didn’t want Jaimie or Emily phoning her a thousand times a day to try to cheer her up. She didn’t want pats on the back or checks in the mail or to be told what a great chef she was.

All she wanted was to find a way out of this—this disaster that she’d stumbled into. And heading up the kitchen at a fancy Montana resort was just the ticket.

Her suitcase was full. It was stuffed. She had everything she could possibly need…

No, she didn’t.

Lissa reached for the hot pink
Pleasure Pleaser
in its hot pink wrapper.

“We’re going on a trip, sweetheart,” she told it. “Won’t that be nice?”

Then she tucked the vibrator in with her panties, closed the suitcase lid and fought with the zipper until it finally closed.

A fancy dude ranch. Or an equally fancy resort. In Montana, where La La Land’s rich elite went for fun.

“Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam…”

Never mind.

They were hiring her for her
pot-au-feu
, not her singing.

And a damn good thing, too.

* * *

By one the following afternoon, singing was the last thing on Lissa’s mind.

Recipes? That was different, but she wasn’t thinking
pot-au-feu
. She was thinking Marcia the Agent smeared with honey and staked out on an anthill.

“You lied, Marcia,” Lissa said. “Dammit, you
lied
!”

Of course, Marcia wasn’t there to hear her. Nobody was.

She was standing next to a deserted runway in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere. Just her, her suitcase, an encircling set of mountains, a stretch of empty land before her, a hundred billion trillion trees behind her, a biting wind, a sky full of snow and in that sky, a rapidly vanishing dot—the plane that had brought her here.

This was a godforsaken wilderness, and if she ever saw Marcia again, she’d punch her lights out the way she should have done with Raoul, whose fault all of this was.

Never mind all that nonsense.

What mattered was the basic, simple, non-arguable fact that if there was a resort here, she’d be damned if she could see it.

The plane that had picked her up at LAX had been a sleek Learjet, shiny and bright on the outside, but not quite what she’d expected on the inside. Lots of leather, lots of plush carpeting, sure, the same as on the Wilde family jets, except here there was the feeling of things let go. The leather seats could have used a polishing. The same for the Lucite tables. Did the ranch fly guests in on this plane? Maybe the slightly worn look of things was deliberate, a way to convince people that they were leaving the glitter of Hollywood for the down and dirty reality of ranching country.

Seemed reasonable.

Still, the slight scruffiness had put her off a little.

Thankfully, there was nothing scruffy about the crew—a pilot and co-pilot who were professional if not very forthcoming.

“Excuse me,” she’d said, after her suitcase had been stowed and she’d been told to take a seat and buckle up. “What’s the name of this resort we’re flying to?”

The co-pilot, whose job it had been to escort her into the cabin, gave her a puzzled look.

“The name of the resort?”

“The ranch,” Lissa had said. “I took the job of chef late last night and I never did ask—”

“Chef?”

“Uh huh. The chef. The person in charge of the kitchen?”

“Oh. The cook. Right.”

Evidently, the down-home feel extended to titles, too.

“Right,” she’d said agreeably. “The cook. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but it was late and I never did get the resort’s name.”

“The resort,” the co-pilot said. The guy seemed to have a problem with repeating things. There was probably a name for it, but right then all Lissa had cared about was finding out the name of the place that had hired her.

“Yes. The ranch. You know. What’s it called?”

“The Triple G.”

More down-homeyness. Simple. Straightforward. Heck, why not?

Yeah. Fine. But there was such a thing as too much down-homeyness. Such a thing as where in hell was everybody? She’d asked the co-pilot as he’d helped her from the plane, but he’d pointed to the sky, said, “Snow coming. Sorry, but we’ve got to take off,” and the next thing, she was standing here, to all intents and purposes the last human being on the planet.

A golf-ball-sized knot seemed to lodge in her throat.

If this was somebody’s idea of a bad joke—

A sudden gust of wind whipped Lissa’s hair over her face and, as it did, wet stuff hit her in the eye.

Snow. Just that fast. Snow, not the kind you saw on resort postcards. The kind that meant business. Within seconds, it began blanketing her cotton jacket.

Lissa put down her suitcase, opened her shoulder bag and took out her cell phone. Marvelous things, cell phones. They meant safety. Security. Human contact…

Mostly, they meant they were useless if you couldn’t see those miserable little bars on the home screen.

“Hello?” she said. “Hello? Hello? Hello?” Nothing. “Dammit,” she said, dumping the phone in her bag and her hands in her pockets.

Man, it was
cold
! And that snow… It was coming down like crazy. You lived in La La Land long enough, you forgot about snowstorms. This one was doing its best to obliterate everything.

Lissa’s teeth began to chatter.

She could see the headline now.
Spring thaw leads to discovery of body of woman dumb enough to fly into a place devoid of humans. No signs of life except for vultures and bears and…

Hell. Vultures and bears and…

And, what was that?

A light. A pair of lights.

“Yes!”

Headlights were slicing through the wall of snow.

And now she could see something. A speck. A blob of red. It was a car. No. A truck, bouncing toward her at breakneck speed, its engine howling like a demented beast.

Well, no.

It wasn’t howling. It was wheezing and groaning like a creature in its death throes. And it wasn’t red, it was the color of rust because, Jesus, it
was
rust. It was a pickup truck, probably older than she was.

And it was coming straight at her.

Lissa stumbled back. Felt her foot catch in something. Grass under the snow. A tree root. What did it matter? Her foot caught and she went down on her ass.

The truck skidded to a stop a couple of feet away.

The engine stopped groaning, the sound replaced by a tick-tick-tick and by the sound of its windshield wipers. Correction. Its windshield wiper. Swish, swoosh, creak. Swish, swoosh, creak.

Lissa got to her feet.

The pickup didn’t move.

The doors didn’t open.

The windows didn’t slide down.

Just that single wiper blade, sweeping across the windshield.

The cracked windshield.

A chill that had nothing to do with wind or snow or cold danced down her spine.

“Hello?” she said. The word came out a croak. “Hello?” she said again, louder and stronger.

The cold of this graceful Montana spring had soaked through her jeans. Her feet were wet and numb inside her canvas sneakers.

“Dammit,” she said, but
louder
and
stronger
were no longer useful adverbs. Old, awful movies were flashing through her head, especially the one about the demon truck with no driver at the wheel.

Wrong.

There was a driver.

She knew that because now, the door was opening. A booted foot emerged. A denim-clad leg. Then a hand. A big hand, gloved in beat-up leather. An arm. A crutch.

A crutch?

It was definitely a crutch.

The gloved hand planted it firmly in the snow. A powerful-looking arm settled over the top.

A man swung down from the cab.

Her first impression was that he was big.

Really big.

Six two, maybe six three. Broad-shouldered. Long-legged.

In other words, big.

He was dressed in denim. Jeans faded and ripped. Jacket with a tear in the elbow. Beat-up boots. An equally beat-up Stetson pulled down so low that she couldn’t see his face.

He was, in a word, scruffy. Scruffy even to her, and she’d grown up on a ranch. A real one. Cowboys, ranch hands, were not Hollywood’s idea of the cool Western hero. They were often big men. They definitely wore denim and boots and Stetsons. They worked hard; you got dirty, working hard.

But this man was, well, scruffy.

And if he and his rusted truck were the duo responsible for meeting guests at the airstrip and driving them to the resort property…

Something didn’t feel right.

Guests often flew into El Sueño. Friends of her father, the general. Of the family. Her brothers ran charity events a couple of times a year.

Guests were met at the airstrip by well-groomed cowboys driving well-cared for vehicles.

They weren’t met like this.

The wind whipped a strand of pale blond hair across Lissa’s face. She grabbed it and shoved it behind her ear. Tried to, anyway, but her fingers were almost numb with cold. All of her was. She was minutes away from turning into Frosty the Snowman, and the guy sent to meet her had yet to say a word or reach for her suitcase. All he did was stand next to the truck, lean heavily on his crutch and stare at her. At least, she assumed he was staring. She couldn’t tell because of that hat.