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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.
