Free Lissa- Sugar and Spice 1.6 - Final Page A

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