by Lissa- Sugar
“Lissa? I’m waiting. You in or not?”
“What about staff?”
“What about it? You’ll work that out with the owner.”
Lissa drew a long, steadying breath.
“OK. I’m in. Just tell me where to be and when.”
“They’ll send a plane for you. Seven tomorrow morning, at LAX.”
“I’ll take my car. I’ll need wheels once I’m there, Marcia.”
“It’s a sixteen-hour drive.”
“But—”
“I’ll have them add a car to that list of bennies. You good with that?”
A decent salary. A roof over her head. A car. A chance to establish herself. And no more I-adore-myself actors littering her life.
“Yes. I’m fine with it. Where at LAX?”
Marcia told her. Gave her the details. And then, just before she hung up, she said something completely out of character.
She said, “Good luck.”
* * *
The phone at the Triple G Ranch rang at the same time the wheezing grandfather clock in the hall struck half past eleven.
Nick Gentry, sprawled on his belly on an ancient leather sofa, groaned in his sleep, felt blindly for a throw pillow and jammed it over his head.
The phone and the clock pealed again.
“Goddammit,” Nick snarled, rolled over—and landed on the floor.
He cursed again at the sharp pain that radiated through his leg. It’ll get better, the physical therapists said. Yeah. Right. Maybe in a century or two.
Where the fuck was he? He opened one eye, saw the moose head hanging on the wall, the glassy-eyed grizzly pawing the air in the corner, the mounted bass that had to have been on steroids doing its eternal swim beside the moose, and groaned again.
He was in the den at the Triple G.
Jesus, how he hated this place!
A big wet tongue slobbered across his face.
Nick shoved aside the big-as-a-pony black Newfoundland that went with the tongue. He struggled up on his ass, then felt in the pockets of his jeans, his quilted vest, his plaid wool shirt, and finally found the phone.
“This better be good,” he said as he put it to his ear.
“It’s Marcia Lowry, Mr. Bannister.”
The dog licked at him again. Nick grabbed the huge muzzle and moved it aside.
“Who?”
“Marcia Lowry. The agent. From Cooks Unlimited?”
Nick closed his eyes, then blinked them open. What he’d meant was, who was Mr. Bannister? For a minute there, he’d forgotten the name he’d used when he’d phoned Cooks Unlimited. Hell, he’d more or less forgotten he’d phoned Cooks Unlimited to start with.
“Yeah. Right. So, you have somebody for me?”
“I do, Mr. Bannister. In accordance with your instructions, I told her your plane would pick her up at LAX tomorrow.”
Nick grabbed a crutch and staggered to his feet. Bad move; it made his head feel as if it might explode, never mind what it did to his leg.
“What’s with the ‘she’ business, Lowry? I told you, I wanted a man. This isn’t a place for a woman.”
“I made several calls on your behalf, sir. I’m afraid this was the best I could do on such short notice. If you’d contacted me sooner or if you could just give me another week—”
“I have half a dozen men to feed here. I gave you the same notice my last cook gave me.”
“I understand that, Mr. Bannister. And you have to understand that the only person who showed any interest in this job was Ms. Wilde.”
Nick found his way to the kitchen, hobbling, bumping against things in the dark, the Newf damn near plastered to his side.
Coffee. He needed coffee, black and strong.
The coffeepot was empty.
He tucked the phone between his shoulder and his ear—that was one of the things he hated about cell phones, how tough it was to tuck the fuckers between your shoulder and your ear and what in Christ was he supposed to do with the crutch? It took a few seconds before he managed to juggle the crutch, the phone and the kettle, but finally he turned on the water and filled it.
“She knows we’re in the mountains?”
“She knows you’re in Montana, sir, of course.”
“She knows she’ll be cooking for a bunch of misfits?”
“She is a trained and experienced chef, Mr. Bannister.”
“I need a cook, not a chef.” Nick plugged in the kettle and reached for the coffee canister. The Newf nosed his thigh and Nick sighed, dug his hand into a tin of dog biscuits that stood on the counter and held one out.
Slurp.
The biscuit vanished into a wet, eager maw.
“She’s up for this job?”
“She is.”
“Why?”
“Why what, sir?”
“You said she’s a chef. So why does she want to work here?”
“She needs a new position.”
“Meaning what? Nobody else will hire her?”
“Meaning, sir, you need a cook and Lissa Wilde needs employment.”
Nick started to measure out the coffee, thought the hell with it and dumped the coffee into the Chemex straight from the canister. The pot was the one affectation he’d held on to, the one link he still maintained between the man he’d been and—let’s be blunt, Gentry—the cripple he’d become.
“Bravely spoken,” he said. “But I’m telling you right now, if this Liza Wile doesn’t work out, I’m going to drag your sorry ass up here and hand you a frying pan and a spatula.”
“It’s Lissa, sir. Lissa Wilde. W-i-l-d-e.” Marcia made a sound that might have been a chuckle. “And, believe me, Mr. Bannister, with all due respect, I’d sooner labor in the fires of hell than go to the ass-end of nowhere and cook for a bunch of cowboys.”
Nick laughed. The sound was rusty, but he hadn’t been doing much laughing lately.
“I told her you’d provide her with an automobile.”
“Do I sound like a car dealer?”
“You sound like a man who needs a cook. I thought we’d already established that. Sir.”
Nick ran his hand through his hair. What the hell. There were half a dozen vehicles parked around the ranch. Giving the new cook the keys to one of them wouldn’t be a problem.
“Yeah. Right. OK, Lowry. I’m gonna hope this works out.”
“The same here. Good night, Mr. Bannister.”
Nick disconnected. The kettle gave a thin whistle and he picked it up and poured boiling water into the Chemex.
The last cook had simply up and left two days ago.
“This ain’t no ranch,” he’d said, “it’s a hellhole. And you is one nasty son of a bitch to work for, Gentry.”
“Thanks for the compliment,” Nick had said, “and the name is Bannister.”
“The hell it is, but frankly I don’t give a crap what you call yourself. I ain’t workin’ for you no more. I’d rather go to Billings and put in time at a McD’s.”
Nick looked for a clean mug and found none. No problem. He grabbed one from the sink, gave it a quick rinse, then depressed the plunger on the Chemex.
The woman flying in tomorrow had to be desperate for job. That was pretty obvious. Well, he was desperate for a cook. If she could fry eggs and grill steaks, they were halfway to success.
He’d been away from this part of the country for years, but he’d grown up here. Cooks who worked this kind of itinerant life tended to be old or ugly or drunks, or maybe all three.
Nick poured the coffee, jammed the crutch under his arm, picked up the mug and somehow made it back to his office. The night’s bottle of bourbon was on a lamp table. He put the mug on the table, picked up the bottle and added a hefty slug to his coffee.
This Liza or Lisa or Lissa Wilde could be homely enough to scare small children. She could be old enough to have mothered Methuselah. What she couldn’t be was a drunk because one drunk per falling-down ranch was enough.
And wasn’t that a
laugh?
Nick sank onto the sofa. The Newf sank down at his feet and laid his massive head on Nick’s foot.
“You’re a stupid dog,” Nick said, “you know that? Hanging around me. You’d be better off picking on some other sucker.”
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
One 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 expe
cted 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.
