Lissa- Sugar and Spice 1.6 - Final (7 page)

Besides, once he admitted that he really was Nick Gentry, he’d be dealing with an entirely different woman. All her smug, self-righteous attitude would fall away.

His career was dead and gone; he could never make it on the screen again, but one-on-one? Hell. There wasn’t a woman on the planet who wouldn’t turn from tigress to pussy cat for Nick Gentry. Even now.

Not until they knew the truth, at any rate. Saw it firsthand.

“You can stop trying to figure out ways to convince me that I’m wrong.”

He looked up. Lissa Wilde was starting at him, her face expressionless.

Nick hesitated.

He wasn’t looking his best; he knew that. He’d given up shaving more than a couple of times a week; he’d let his hair grow so damned long that it curled over the collar of his denim jacket.

Still, his was the face that had launched an even dozen box-office hits. There was no ego in the realization, there was only the cold reality of a man who knew what had brought him to where he was.

To where he had been, once upon a time, and now was not the time to go through all of that crap again.

It was a time for dealing with the situation at hand, Nick thought, and he took off his Stetson, tossed it aside and decided he might as well play the scene for all it was worth.

“What the hell,” he said. “You’ve got me. Yes. I’m Nick Gentry. And, look, I know that changes things a little, but—”

“It changes nothing,” she said. “Except that I should tell you that I never saw a movie of yours that I liked.”

Nick felt his jaw drop.

She tossed her head, picked up her suitcase, moved briskly past him and went up the stairs. Halfway up, she stopped and looked back.

Not at him.

At the dog.

“Brutus,” she said in a gentle voice that was completely out of keeping with the reality of what she was like, “do you want to come and keep me company?”

“No,” Nick said sharply.

Too late.

The Newf gave a joyous bark and lunged for the stairs, bounded up them as if he were a puppy instead of an arthritic old man. Lissa Wilde smiled at him when he reached her side, ruffled his ears and said something soft and sweet.

Then she looked at Nick.

There was nothing soft or sweet in that look.

“Just so we have things straight, Mr. Gentry, you can stop worrying.”

“Worrying about what?”

“I don’t know why you’re hiding out in this—this place in the middle of nowhere and, frankly, I don’t care. You want to play at being a cowboy? Fine. Be my guest.”

Taken aback, Nick drew himself up.

“I am not playing at anything. This place is mine. It’s a real working ranch. And I—”

“And you are a real working cowboy. Got it. The point is, your secret’s safe with me.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. There is no se—”

“Supper’s at six. I don’t do late kitchen duty. Not in a place like this, so tell your men to be on time if they expect the food to be hot.”

Say something,
Nick told himself.
For God’s sake, say something! This is your house. She is your guest. Hell. She’s not your guest. She’s your employee, even if it’s only for tonight, so, goddammit, say something!

Too late.

The woman and the dog turned away and climbed the remaining steps to the second story landing. The woman didn’t look back.

The dog did.

For one crazy second, Nick could have sworn the dog was smiling.

“Woof,” the dog said softly.

Woman and dog made a left-hand turn.

And then they were gone.

* * *

Lissa walked to the end of the hall and into the last bedroom on the left.

The dog padded in after her.

“Good boy,” she said, and dumped her suitcase on the floor.

The room was awful. Cabbage rose wallpaper. Faded carpet of an indeterminate color. Oak furniture, each piece so big she could only imagine that getting it upstairs must have meant hernias, sprained backs, and lots of cussing.

A porcelain pitcher and basin stood on one nightstand. She’d have shuddered at the sight but, thank goodness, she could make out a toilet, sink and tiny shower through a half-opened door just opposite the bed.

Not that the plumbing or what passed for décor mattered.

She was here for one night. It might well end up feeling like the longest night of her life, but one night was all it was.

Tomorrow, Nick Gentry’s pilot would fly her back to civilization. She’d chew Marcia out for not checking things out before sending her on this—this wild-goose chase and—

And, she’d be right back where she’d been all these past weeks.

Jobless and rapidly working toward also being penniless.

“Damn,” she said softly, as she sank down on the edge of the bed.

Brutus padded over and put his massive head in her lap. He gave a soft whine and Lissa stroked his head and smiled at him.

“I know,” she said. “You hate that I’m in this mess.”

The dog whined again. Lissa reached down and hugged him. He was the only one she could rely on, the only one who gave a damn.

Except, that wasn’t true.

Her family would have done more than give a damn, had they known her situation. But she had not told them, nor would she tell them. They were all so successful: her three brilliant brothers, her two brilliant sisters, her powerful father.

They’d all have wanted to help her if they knew what a mess she’d made of things, but she couldn’t let them know about it. For one thing, she’d started off with her career looking so good…

And then, when it had begun to sink a little, she’d hidden it from them.

You came from a long line of winners, you certainly didn’t want to spoil the score by showing that you were a loser.

Lissa fell back on the bed.

Wildes were always successful. Always. They didn’t make mistakes, they didn’t make bad judgment calls, they didn’t screw up their lives.

She was the only one.

The useless one.

And now she’d made matters worse, not asking Marcia the right questions, not doing what her lawyer brother, Caleb, would surely have called due diligence before blithely, blindly boarding a plane and heading out to Nowhereland.

It was all Nick Gentry’s fault.

He’d lured her here with promises of a job that didn’t exist, with talk of a resort where she could make her culinary skills the talk of the West.

Lissa rolled onto her belly.

Except, he hadn’t done any of those things. It was Marcia’s fault, but Gentry behaved as if it were hers.

What was he doing all the way up here? Running a ranch? It seemed as if he were, but how come? He was an actor. A talented actor.

She’d lied when she’d said that she hadn’t liked any of his movies.

The truth was, she’d liked them all. He had an amazing ability to make the most removed characters accessible.

And, why not admit it, he was gorgeous.

Tall. Lean. Tightly muscled. A face like a Greek god’s, but with touches that humanized him: a bump in his nose, a small scar high on his cheekbone, another on his square jaw. She’d figured the scars might be phony—she knew a little about Hollywood makeup after all this time in La La Land—but now she knew that they were real.

What she’d never figured was that he’d be so unpleasant.

Well, actually, she hadn’t figured on that because she’d never thought about him as anything other than an actor, but here he was, up close and personal, and he was about as pleasant as a Texas longhorn with a burr under its tail.

Was he just another walking, talking ego? Or was it, maybe, because he was hurting?

That limp. The crutch. He was in pain—she could see it etched into the lines that radiated out from those amazing eyes. Something had happened to him, but what?

All she knew was what the rest of Hollywood knew.

Nick Gentry had been making a movie halfway around the world and then, wham, he’d disappeared.

Filming had stopped. And the industry had buzzed with rumors.

He’d been fired, he’d quit, he’d gone into rehab for—your choice—booze or drugs. He’d come down with a rare illness. He’d run off with a woman. He was in Nepal, searching for The Truth.

The speculation had dragged on for weeks. Then, gradually, it had faded away until, finally, his name was no longer mentioned.

Gentry had dropped below the radar.

Except he hadn’t.

He was here, in the back end of nowhere on a ranch that was as far from being a duded-up guest lodge as the chicken place she’d worked at was from
Per Se
. She’d come all this way for a job that, it turned out, didn’t exist, only to find herself faced with a Greek god who needed a shave and probably a haircut, who snarled and snapped and was a downright miserable, mean-tempered SOB.

Brutus whined.

Lisa looked at him. He was sitting beside the bed, head cocked, watching her with interest.

“What?” she said. The dog whined again. Lissa reached out and petted his big head. “Well, he is. Mean. Just look how he treats you.”

The dog got to his feet and gave a soft woof. He put his front paws on the bed.

“You want to come up?” Another woof. “Well, come on. Come on, sweetheart. You’re more than welcome to—”

The big dog heaved himself onto the bed. At least, he tried. But he couldn’t quite make it. She could hear his hind claws scrabbling against the rug.

“I’ll help you,” Lissa said.

She grabbed him around his middle. Between the two of them, he finally ended up on the mattress beside her.

“Poor baby,” Lissa said softly. “You’re an old man, aren’t you?”

Old. And sweet. And even if he’d been trained to some kind of idiotic command procedure, you could see that Gentry was good to the dog.

Lissa had put in time volunteering at animal shelters in almost every city where she’d lived and worked; sadly, she’d become good at identifying abused animals pretty quickly, and it was obvious that Gentry had not abused Brutus, that—despite what she’d said—the dog wasn’t the least bit afraid of him.

Back to Gentry again. The man was a mystery.

Not a likable mystery.

Lissa sighed. Why would he be likable? To her, anyway?

This place wasn’t what she’d expected. But she wasn’t what he’d expected. That should have made them even, she thought as she looped her arm around the Newf, but Gentry had taken things too far.

He refused to believe that she was a chef.

What did he think she was, then? What was it he’d accused her of being? Some blond ditz hoping for stardom?

The dog blew out a noisy sigh. His head dropped to his paws.

“Really,” Lissa told him, “your Mr. Gentry started the whole thing by not believing that I am a cook.”

Which was, she supposed, a kind of compliment.

Not the ditz part. The part about his assuming she was a wannabe actress. Didn’t that mean he thought she looked more like an actress than a cook? No, wait. All it meant was that he was foolish enough to think women chefs were unattractive. Idiot. Still, it was a kind of back-handed compliment if you figured it meant that he thought she was, well, attractive.

Brutus yawned again. So did Lissa.

Not that she wanted him to think that. Why would she care what he thought about her looks? Just because a man who spent his time surrounded by beautiful women would see her as attractive…

Brutus’s big brown eyes blinked once. Twice. Then they shut. Lisa yawned.

“A fine idea,” she told him.

It was mid-afternoon and she’d been up since dawn She had plenty of time for a nap, then a shower, then a trip to the kitchen to discover, no doubt, cans of beans and chili and boxes of mac and cheese and—and—

Her lashes drooped.

Seconds later, she and Brutus were both snoring.

CHAPTER FIVE

M
ontana was one
of those places that drove meteorologists crazy.

One of the wranglers his father had employed when Nick was a kid used to sit in a rocker on the bunkhouse porch in the early evening, his hands busy with a pocket knife and a piece of wood, his rheumy eyes fixed on the mountains. He was an unending source of fascination for Nick, mostly because the old guy could whittle a stick into damn near anything, but also because he chewed tobacco and unerringly spat into an old tin can between offering bits of homegrown philosophy.

One of the favorites had been that old saw about changeable weather.

“If’n you don’t like the weather in these parts,” he’d say between chews and spits, “jes’ wait a while and it’ll change while you’re lookin’ at it.”

Nick, seven or eight at the time, had been amazed at what he’d thought was the brilliance of the remark. It had taken years before he’d realized that the statement was true of lots of places though time and travel had taught him that up here, in the high mountains, the weather really could change in the blink of an eye.

This day had dawned cold and clear, but it had devolved quickly when gathering clouds had brought snow and wind.

By now, the weather was close to blizzard conditions.

Seated at his desk in what had been his old man’s office, Nick looked out the window at a thick wall of steadily falling white flakes.

Visibility was close to zero. The temperature had to be close to that, too. Thankfully, it was warm inside.

The house was old and creaky, sure, but the walls were sound. Nick had, during his Hollywood days, bought enough houses to make him something of an expert on what real estate agents liked to call the bones of a house.

This one had good bones.

Fireplaces in the living room, the dining room, the kitchen, the office and the master bedroom. Beamed ceilings. Hardwood floors. Big windows that gave expansive views of the forest and mountains.

Sometimes he thought it was too bad his father had let the place deteriorate.

Mostly, he didn’t care.

He had, when he was a kid.

Back then, his father had talked about restoring the place to what it had once been, but he’d lost interest in everything after Nick’s mother died. What had once been a profitable if not prosperous ranch had slowly fallen apart.

Nick was bringing it back out of necessity. The house would have fallen down without some repairs. Besides, when it came time to put it on the market, who would want to buy a disaster?

So far, he’d put money into only the most vital repairs. A new roof. A new heating system. A new well. The place still looked like shit—peeling paint inside almost all the rooms, soot-stained ceilings wherever there were fireplaces, antiquated plumbing and furniture that he suspected might even be turned down by Goodwill—but the thick walls and foundation were as sound as when his who-knew-which great-grandfather had built the place in the 1840s.

It had been a four-room cabin back then.

As a boy, Nick had found it fascinating to think of the generations of Gentrys who had put so much work into the Triple G, adding outbuildings and line shacks, and expanding the original four rooms to twelve. But by time he left, the only part of the house’s history that fascinated him was trying to figure out why all those Gentrys had spent time and sweat on the place instead of packing their bags and walking away.

He’d done that once and he could hardly wait to do it again.

This was not home; it had not been home for most of his life. He had no feelings of nostalgia for the land or the house, only relief that he could stay tucked away here while he tried to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.

And he’d have plenty of time to do it. The house still needed work. Plaster. Paint. Floors. Ceilings. And furniture. Yeah, it needed the whole treatment.

So did his leg, he thought, grimacing as he massaged the muscles in his thigh.

The difference was that the house would respond well to some new touches.

His leg was a lost cause.

Use it, the therapist said. Accept it, the orthopedist who might as well have been a shrink said. And the real shrink that he’d agreed to see, only once, had put it more bluntly. Stop thinking about how this happened, he said, and get on with your life.

Sure, Nick thought. No problem there, right?

As if in mournful agreement, a gust of wind howled through the surrounding aspens like hungry wolves.

It was going to be a bad night.

At least he didn’t have to worry about his crew. All six had made it back to the bunkhouse; his foreman had phoned to tell him they were OK.

“We’ll hang in here until supper,” Ace had said. “The boys can hardly wait to see what that new cook you hired serves up.”

Neither could he.

The last cook had specialized in chili. Nick had come to hate the stuff and his boys had grown to despise it, but the meals served up by Gus, a younger guy who’d been doing most of the cooking the past week, made even chili look good.

That was one of the reasons Nick had been so desperate to get a replacement, and fast.

There was just so much anybody could take of what might have been beef fried in fat until it had the taste and texture of leather.

“Dammit,” he said, and he tossed aside his pen, tilted back his chair and folded his arms over his chest.

God only knew what Lissa Wilde would call a meal.

Assuming he bought into her being a chef, it might be something like
t
ê
te de veau
Cordon Bleu
, a delicacy he’d had on his first movie-star trip to France. Nick had grown up eating beef, but the memory of that particular dish still made him shudder.

His best hope was that she was a cook of sorts, that she’d worked at roadside diners while she made her way west to Hollywood. If so, she’d be able to peer into the kitchen’s huge pantry and freezer and put together a meal that would at least fill the bellies of hard-working, hard-living men.

His frown deepened.

Yeah, but he wasn’t counting on it.

For starters, he really didn’t know what was in the pantry or freezer. Cooky and then Gus had been dealing with that, not him.

Besides, no matter what the Wilde babe said, he couldn’t imagine her having any familiarity with a skillet and a stove. It wasn’t the way she was dressed. Her clothes were not attention-getters. Neither was her hair or makeup, assuming she even had makeup on, and he wasn’t positive that she did.

It was her manner.

Her attitude.

That who-do-you-think-you-are thing. That—what was the word? That hauteur. She was the lady of the manor; he was a peasant.

The duchess, looking down her nose at a lesser mortal.

Nick snorted.

Her, a cook?

“Right,” he muttered. And he was the count of Monte Cristo.

She hadn’t even checked out the kitchen. Wouldn’t a real cook want to see what she was going to be working with?

Not that there was all that much to check out.

The kitchen was pretty much the same as it had been when he was growing up, meaning it was probably also the same as it had been for decades before that. A huge room with a cranky six-burner gas stove, a freezer chest big enough to hold the butchered and packaged parts of a couple of deer and, with luck, even an occasional moose, a refrigerator that clanked and groaned like a creature in pain, all of that offset by a battered pine worktable made by some forgotten Gentry a century or so ago.

His old man had never made any changes to the kitchen or anything else, not after Mary Gentry died.

“What we got here is just fine,” Latham would growl if anybody was dumb enough to suggest something might be improved.

If the place had been going downhill back then, it had been racing to the bottom since Nick had taken off twelve years ago.

He’d tried to help, sending increasing amounts of money to his old man as his earnings went from good to substantial to incredible. But he’d never returned home; how could he possibly have known that his father had let the place fall into such bad shape? The conditions of virtually everything had come as a shock when he’d come back a year ago for Latham’s funeral.

The second shock had been discovering that Latham had cashed all the checks Nick had sent, put the money into a separate account at the bank and not spent a penny of it.

“Bullheaded old SOB,” Nick had growled to John Carter, his father’s attorney.

“Takes one to know one,” the normally laconic Carter had muttered.

Nick had thought about arguing the point, but what for? He and his father had parted when Nick turned eighteen.

That had changed only the physical distance between them. From his wife’s death on, Latham, always a taciturn man, had pretty much ignored his son. He’d made sure Nick was clothed, fed and schooled; beyond that, he’d paid little attention to him.

After Nick was on his own, their only contact had been an occasional telephone call.

If Carter wanted to lay that off on Nick, use it as an excuse for why his client had let the Triple G move toward compete ruin, so be it.

And, Nick thought as he brought his chair forward and folded his hands on the desk, what did any of that matter now? His father was gone; the Triple G was his, and the only thing he was interested in was getting it ready for sale.

This was hardly a place of happy memories. Why treat it as if it were? Nothing that had happened to him in the years since he’d left Montana had changed his mind about ranches and ranching and the Triple G.

His fans would not have believed it, of course. His agent, his manager, the directors he’d worked with had all helped him cultivate the image of a hard-nosed loner, a modern-day cowboy adrift in a danger-laden urban landscape.

It sold a lot of tickets. And attracted a lot of women.

Nick’s mouth thinned.

But not anymore.

The accident had changed everything.

He had no interest in women.

Really?
his hormones said.

Nick scowled. He supposed he ought to be grateful that he’d had his first boner in months. A sign he was healing physically; it damn well had nothing to do with Lissa Wilde.

As for his attitude toward the ranch…the accident had changed that, too. Not that he’d suddenly developed warm feelings for it. No way. It was just that when it came time to leave the hospital, he’d had a place to go, a place that hardly anybody would ever associate with the Nick Gentry who owned a house in Malibu, a penthouse in Manhattan, a beachfront hideaway on Maui.

That made the ranch the perfect place to dig in until he got his life sorted out.

And, goddammit, why was that important now?

He had a storm to ride out, men and animals to worry about, and where in hell was his cook? His for-one-night-only cook and Christ knew if she could manage even that.

As if in response, the ancient grandfather clock in the corner wheezed out the time.

Five-fifteen.

Dinner, the Wilde babe had said, would be at six. Really? She was going to get into the kitchen, find what its freezer and pantry held, put together a meal for a bunch of hungry men in forty-five minutes?

He raised his eyes to the ceiling.

Far as he could tell, she wasn’t even on the move yet.

He’d have heard her. Or maybe not. One thing about old houses. The walls, the floors were made of the thickest tight-grained lumber a rustic sawmill could turn out. And if she’d gone for the room he figured, the one at the ass-end of the hall, he probably wouldn’t hear her stomping around up there at all.

Ten to one that was precisely the room she’d chosen.

The one farthest from his.

Nick rolled back his chair, automatically started to put his feet up on the desk and caught his breath at the sharp pain that radiated from his hip straight down to his ankle. Goddamned bones. And muscles. And tendons. And who knew what else. He’d broken or torn virtually everything that had once made his left leg usable.

He had titanium rods and steel pins and plastic in it now.

“Superman,” one of the therapists had joked.

Right. He was a fucking superman, except last time he’d checked, the Man of Steel had not limped, had not needed to hobble around on a crutch, had not been reduced, at the beginning, to getting up in the middle of the night to swallow one of a dozen different pills to quiet the pain that tormented him.

“You can start getting around with a cane soon,” the last physical therapist he’d seen had told him.

“What the hell’s the difference?” Nick had snarled. “And I don’t need advice from you.”

A cane. Crutches. What the fuck
was
the difference? He was a cripple, and it was a damn good thing his temporary guest had taken a room nowhere near his.

The last thing he needed was to have a woman hear him moan, not in the throes of pleasure but in agony.

Still, this was his house. Why had he left the choice of a room to her? He should have told her which to take. And yes, it damned well pissed him off that she’d make a selection based on its distance from his.

Did she think he’d try to seduce her if she slept one wall away?

Nick snorted.

The lady had a high-flown opinion of herself. She’d turned him on, sure, but that at this point, so would a store mannequin.

And that attitude.

Was it him she didn’t like? Or was it men in particular? She wasn’t a lez; the vibes she gave off were pure female.

Maybe what she needed was a man.

The bra-burners would kill him for such a thought, but he’d been around. He knew it was true. He knew that beautiful women—because, OK, the truth was that the Wilde babe was beautiful—sometimes needed reminding that they were women. Not goddesses. Not untouchables. Not royalty.

Just women, made for pleasure.

He could make her remember that.

Sweet-talk her until that la-di-da expression became a smile. Ease into her space. Not too close. Just a little. Just enough so he could gaze into her eyes. Make some skin-to-skin contact. A brush of his hand on hers, maybe; a stroke of his finger along her lips.