by Lissa- Sugar
There was a shot of them at their table. A shot of them holding hands during dinner. A shot of them outside the restaurant, she in the circle of Nick’s arm.
And, on every site, blowups of Nick kissing her as they’d been leaving the restaurant, of him kissing her as they’d waited for the valet to bring the truck.
Only the breathless headlines varied.
Nick’s Mystery Woman.
Nick’s Mystery Babe.
And, finally, on a site known for the dirt it dished: Mystery Woman in Nick Gentry’s Secret Life Identified!
There it was. Her picture. Her name.
Her heart rose into her throat.
She felt—violated. That was the only word for it. Her name, her face out there for the world to see…
It got worse. Much worse.
Side-by-side photos of her, one in her toque and chef’s coat, snapped as a publicity shot for Raoul’s, the other of her in jeans and a T-shirt in the beat-up old kitchen at the Triple G, probably taken with a long-range lens.
And the crowning touch, the headline that tied the two together.
Lissa Wilde! She couldn’t make it in Hollywood! Interview with ex-live-in, actor/restaurateur Raoul Desplaines!
The world spun. Bile rose in the back of her throat. Don’t, she told herself. Don’t throw up, don’t pass out, don’t, don’t, don’t….
“Hey!”
She jerked around. A guy had come up behind her, a quizzical smile on his face.
“Aren’t you that woman, the one who helped hide that actor?”
She spoke without thinking. “He wasn’t hiding.”
“But you’re her, right? That woman? The cook?”
A taxi pulled up beside her. Lissa grabbed for the door, flung herself into the back seat and yanked the door shut.
“Where to, Miss?”
The guy on the sidewalk was bent over, grinning like an idiot as he aimed his phone at her through the closed window.
“Anywhere,” she said desperately.
“Miss. I need an address—”
“Just start driving!”
The cabbie’s eyes met hers in the mirror. “Sure,” he said, and pulled away from the curb.
Lissa sank back in the seat. She could hear her heart pounding. An interview with Raoul? Her live-in? Why would he say that? Hell. She knew why. That old Hollywood maxim. Any publicity was good publicity.
And the way he’d twisted things. Saying she couldn’t make it in Hollywood. What would people think when they read that? Her career was already underwater…
Oh, God!
Never mind her career. What would Nicholas think? What would he say? And her family.
Lissa groaned.
Her family! Her brothers. Her sisters. Her father. They all thought she was blazing trails in the West, cooking her way towards success…
“Miss?”
“Yes.”
“Where are we going, please?”
Where? Where? To a cave, where she could hide. To Nick, so she could tell him that she wasn’t what Raoul had surely made her out to be. But there weren’t any caves in L.A. and she had no idea where Nick was or if he was all right, and how had she forgotten that what mattered right now was Nick?
“Miss?”
Lissa swallowed hard and gave the cabbie her address.
They drove into town, into the part of Hollywood where Lissa’s apartment complex was located.
“Miss?”
Lissa looked up. The cabbie’s eyes met hers in the mirror.
“You the lady they’re talking about?”
She wanted to make some clever comment about that omnipresent “they,” but she didn’t have the energy.
“No,” she said brightly, “I’m not.”
“The cook? The actor’s, ah, date?”
“I just told you—”
“Fine. OK. Then you won’t mind that crowd over there.”
Lissa looked out the window, then shrank back in her seat. A flotilla of vehicles bearing the logos of what appeared to be every TV station in the Western world was parked outside her apartment building. Reporters and photographers jammed the small courtyard.
“Keep going,” she said quickly. “Don’t even slow down!”
The driver grinned at her in the mirror. “Thought you might be her. Liza something, right?”
She didn’t answer. She was trying to figure out where to go.
Where could she go? She’d really never made any close friends in L.A. It was a town full of transients. People changed jobs, changed living arrangements, changed everything all the time.
A hotel. That was her only option.
Something affordable. Not easy in this town. But she didn’t have to worry about that, not for a few days, at least. Nick had overpaid her and refused to take the money back…
Nick! Was he OK? If the media was all over her, she could only imagine what it was doing to—
Her phone rang. Lissa gave a little a sob of relief, dug it out of her purse and put it to her ear without looking at the screen.
“Nick?” she said breathlessly
“So,” a woman’s voice said, “it’s true!”
Just when you thought things couldn’t get worse.
Lissa cleared her throat.
“Hello, Jaimie.”
“And me,” Emily said. “It’s both of us, Melissa—and don’t you dare hang up!”
“Why would I do that?” Lissa said, and hung up.
The phone rang again. Rang and rang. She considered shutting it off, then pictured the zillion voice mails and messages her sisters would leave. And what if Nick called and she didn’t know it was him?
The sixth time the phone rang, she took the call.
“I don’t want to speak to you right now,” she said, before either of her sisters could speak.
“We’re sure you don’t,” Emily said, “but we sure as hell want to speak to you.”
“Em. I know you mean well—”
“What on earth did you think you were doing, Melissa?”
Lissa gave a gusty sigh.
“Look,” she said, “I really don’t have the time for this.”
“Telling me you were the chef at a tony spa when you were chief cook and bottle washer at a broken-down horse ranch!”
“I never said a word about a spa!”
“A ranch owned by a has-been hack!”
Lissa’s jaw tightened at the sound of her other sister’s voice.
“Hello, Jaimie,” she said coldly. “It’s nice to talk with you, too. And you’re both wrong. The ranch is not broken-down, and Nick is not a—”
Her eyes met the cabbie’s in the mirror. If he eavesdropped any harder, his ears would flap.
“You know what?” she said. “I am not going to have this conversation.”
“Yes, you are,” Jaimie said grimly.
“No, I’m not. Neither of you is saying anything sensible.”
“Where are you?” Emily said. “You’re not in your apartment. We already know that!”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“We were there. Well, not there. We didn’t stop and go in, not once we saw all those reporters.”
“Those ghouls,” Jamie said, all but hissing through her teeth.
Lissa blinked. “You mean—you mean, you’re here? In Los Angeles?”
“Where the heck else would we be when our sister is in trouble?”
“What makes you think I’m in trouble?”
“We’re clairvoyant,” Emily said dryly. “Now tell us where you are.”
“I’m in a taxi.”
“Where in a taxi?”
Lissa peered out the window, spotted a street sign and told them what it said.
“Excellent,” Jaimie said. “We’re only a few blocks away.” She named a hotel in Beverly Hills. “Do you know where it is?”
“Yes. But—”
“Melissa,” Emily said patiently, “you can’t go to your apartment and w
e’ve got the television on, so we know that your has-been actor is too busy taking care of himself to worry about taking care of you.”
“Didn’t I just tell you that he isn’t a has-been? And he did take care of me. He had me flown here.”
“Right. He sent you off into the wilderness on your own.”
Lissa’s belly knotted. That wasn’t true. Of course it wasn’t true—
Her gaze went to the mirror again. The cabbie looked away, but not soon enough. She twisted in her seat and whispered into the phone.
“OK. I’ll come to your hotel, but you have to promise not to ask me any questions. Is it a deal?”
“Write down the room number,” Jaimie said.
“It isn’t a room,” Emily said, “it’s a suite. Write it down.”
“Did you two hear what I said? No questions! Deal?”
“No questions,” Emily said. “Not a one.”
“Promise?”
“For heaven’s sake, Melissa, what are we, children? No questions! We get it. Now, how about you getting this? We’re in suite 1964. Can you remember that?”
“But don’t come straight here,” Jaimie said. “Let the cab take you to a different hotel, then grab another and take it to this one. You don’t want anybody following you.”
For a merciful couple of seconds, Lissa forgot everything but her middle sister’s newfound interest in cloak-and-dagger stuff.
“My sister,” she said, “the secret agent’s fiancée.”
“Zach isn’t a secret agent.”
“Don’t be silly! Of course he is.”
Lissa disconnected while they were still arguing and checked for messages again. There were none.
Nick, she thought, oh, Nicholas, why don’t you call?
She needed him. And surely he needed her. He had to call, and soon.
* * *
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.”
