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“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.”
