by Lissa- Sugar
She’d been shocked that the owner had given neither her nor the staff any warning.
Lissa took a deep breath.
Right about then, she’d met Raoul.
Jesus. Raoul. Hadn’t she learned anything about names back in the days of Jefferson Beauregard the Third?
But Raoul was different.
He was—surprise, surprise—an actor, but with a difference. Good-looking? Yes. Sexy? Sure. He was also well-educated. And rich. Mega rich. They met at a party, he took her for drinks afterward and they talked. And talked. And talked. He was interested in her opinions. In the places she’d traveled as a kid, places he had also lived.
That night was followed by others. They went to dinner. They went to a movie premiere. He held her hand, kissed her goodnight.
And that was it. No moves. No sex. He respected her. She could tell.
He was giving her time to get to know him.
It was the best six weeks she’d spent since moving to the West Coast.
One night, sitting in her living room having coffee after a quiet meal she’d prepared, Raoul told her that he’d been dreaming of something for a long time.
Lissa’s heartbeat had quickened.
He’d reached for her hand.
“You won’t laugh?”
She’d assured him that she wouldn’t.
He’d drawn a deep breath.
“I want to open a restaurant.”
She remembered blinking. And saying something really brilliant like, “Huh?”
“A restaurant,” he’d said. “The best in Los Angeles. The best in Southern California.” He’d brought her hand to his lips, just as he had that first night. “And I want you to be my executive chef.”
She’d almost fainted at those words.
Sure, she’d been a sous chef at The Black Pearl. She’d been the sous chef; her responsibilities had been enormous, but executive chef…
It would make her career.
She’d be responsible for absolutely everything that happened in the kitchen, from purchases to creating dishes and planning menus. She’d be able to put her stamp on things.
People would know her name.
It was the opportunity she’d dreamed of. Tough to come by, especially for a woman, a twentysomething, good-looking woman in a town bursting at the seams with good-looking women.
Even Lissa’s agent had been worried about her looks and yes, you needed an agent if you wanted to hit the top.
“Are you serious about a career in the kitchen?” Marcia had asked. “You’re sure you won’t give up cooking if some producer offers you an acting role?”
It had been an honest question. Ninety-nine percent of the female population between the ages of nine and ninety were in La La Land because they wanted to become stars.
“I’m a chef,” Lissa had said. “That’s what I studied to be and what I intend to be.”
Now, thanks to Raoul, the dream she’d had since she’d baked a batch of pretty decent cookies at age seven had been about to come true.
He would not be her lover, he would be her partner. Well, more or less her partner. She wouldn’t have any ownership in the restaurant—he was going to call it Raoul’s—but together, they would create something grand.
Raoul asked for her input in the design of the kitchen and dining room; he shared his long-term plans for the place. In return, she shared what she knew about the best suppliers of fish, of meat, of produce. She shared with him the much-coveted names of artisans who baked breads to die for, crafted chocolates to kill for, made cheeses to send your taste buds to heaven. She contacted kitchen and wait staff that she knew, from experience, would be excellent workers. She gave him a list of influential people who’d been regular patrons at The Black Pearl so he could invite them to their big opening night.
He told her how grateful he was, that he couldn’t have even dreamed of opening a top-notch place without her help and she said no, no, that wasn’t true, except they both knew that it was.
And still, he didn’t make a move on her, but there was something in the way he looked at her that said he liked what he saw.
She liked what she saw, too.
She even had a couple of steamy dreams that starred Raoul. Nothing unusual in that; she had steamy dreams sometimes, dreams that were always better than reality.
Maybe, just maybe, this was her Marco. Her Zach. Maybe Raoul would be the guy who’d make the earth move.
There was more to it than that, though not even torture would have dragged it from her, but lately there were times she felt…
Lonely.
The world seemed full of twosomes and here she was, a onesome.
And so, Lissa did what she had never done before. She played the What if? game. She fantasized, not just about sex but about life.
About—did she dare think it? About love.
The more she thought about Raoul, the more convinced she was that he was too much a gentleman, too committed to their friendship to make the first move. She’d have to do it, nothing elaborate, maybe ask him to have a drink after closing once the restaurant had been open a couple of weeks.
Thinking back, she snorted at her stupidity.
Opening night, everything looking perfect, eighty high-profile patrons out front including two food critics trying to look inconspicuous, her staff moving in harmony, each plate leaving the kitchen looking like a painting. Towards the middle of the evening, her phone rang.
It was Raoul.
“Lissa. I’m in my office. Do you have a minute?”
She didn’t, not really. She told him that.
“We ran out of fish stock,” she said. “Nothing serious—I made more, but I hope it comes out right. I like to let my stock refrigerate overnight, but there isn’t time to do that. I tasted it and it seems OK, but—”
“Tell you what,” he said. “Bring it with you. I’ll taste it, give you a second opinion, and we can take care of a small management issue all at the same time. It won’t take long—I promise.”
So she poured some of the broth into a small bowl, told her second-in-command to hold down the fort, and she hurried to Raoul’s office, tucked into a corner of the basement.
The door was closed. She knocked.
“Come in.”
Smiling, she’d opened the door.
“Raoul. It’s crazy up there. And I know I’m being silly, worrying about this fish stock—”
The rest of what she’d intended to say caught in her throat.
Raoul was standing directly in front of her, leaning back against his desk, wearing his tux. He was as impeccably groomed as always: hair brushed back from his temples, his handsome face calm. His arms were folded over his chest.
The only jarring note was his hugely-erect penis pointing at the ceiling with urgent importance from his unzipped fly.
“Just shut the door,” he’d said, “get down on your knees, and be quick about it.”
Lissa had always been an instinctive cook. In that fateful moment, she became an instinctive compendium of rage and anguish.
But not defeat.
One quick twist of her wrist and Raoul was wearing the fish stock. Her last memory was of him jerking back, mouth open in shock, fish bones glinting on his tux…
A fish head first balancing, then sliding off his rapidly-deflating erection.
Lissa groaned, lay her head back against the couch and shut her eyes.
It was also the last memory of her career.
She hadn’t been able to land a job, a real job, since that night.
She’d been doing prep work from kitchen to kitchen, filling in for salad men and sauce men, and one hideous week, she’d even waitressed, something she hadn’t done since she’d paid her way through Le Cordon Bleu.
It was mortifying.
That whole week, she’d kept praying she wouldn’t wait on a table filled with people she knew. Waitressing was honest work, but it would have been a brutal admission of failure in a town that
revered success.
That was the same reason she’d flat out lied to her family when she’d gone home for Em’s wedding a couple of months ago.
You didn’t admit to failure if you were a Wilde.
Wildes were all successful. Incredibly successful. Jacob the rancher. Caleb the attorney. Travis the financial wizard. Her sisters were at the top of their games, too, Emily working with her husband as his VP in international construction, Jaimie holding down the CFO spot at her soon-to-be husband’s upper-echelon security firm. Her sisters-in-law, all three of them great moms, were also the best in their fields of law, management and psychology.
Add in the Wilde patriarch, four-star general John Hamilton Wilde, and failure was not an option.
When they’d asked about the fancy restaurant she was working at, she’d said that oh, she wasn’t at a restaurant anymore, she was working “on location.”
They’d figured she meant on a movie set.
Well, that was better than telling them that she was working at Grandma’s Finger-Lickin-Chicken Coop. Eight hours a day, she pulled chicken parts out of a huge box, rolled them in a batter that had the color and consistency of cement, then dumped them into a vat of bubbling lard.
It wasn’t a job; it was an extended journey through hell. She needed a kitchen again. Responsibility. Creativity. She needed to cook.
The ice-cream container in her lap tilted. She grabbed for it. Too late. It tumbled to the floor.
Amazing, how great Chunky Monkey looked in a carton and how less than appetizing it looked in a puddle on a faded rug.
Lissa shot to her feet, got a handful of paper towels from the kitchen, cleaned up the mess and dropped everything into the trash, even the chocolates.
She couldn’t live on what she earned at Grandma’s. She had car payments to meet and a car wasn’t a luxury in L.A., it was a necessity. A roof over her head was a necessity, too. So was food on the table.
So was restarting her moribund career.
Maybe she’d call her agent. She hadn’t heard from Marcia in weeks, but there had to be some kind of decent job out there, and wasn’t that what an agent was for? To get you a job? You’re developing a somewhat difficult reputation, Marcia had said the last time they’d spoken, and she’d come within a breath of telling her that it wasn’t true, that Raoul had fired her for being a prima donna, which was the rumor he’d spread, but the truth was so ugly, so humiliating…
Brring brring.
Lissa glanced at her watch. Eleven o’clock. Who’d be phoning at this hour? Not her brothers. It was one in the morning in Texas. Besides, they’d called her on Skype early this morning, singing “Happy Birthday,” telling her how much they loved her.
“Even if you’re gettin’ old,” Jake had said, and she’d laughed the way she knew they expected even though the truth was that she’d felt maybe a day short of one hundred.
She’d thanked them for their gifts. Wonderful, thoughtful gifts: an autographed copy of Joël Robuchon’s version of the Larousse Gastronomique, a first edition of Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire, a signed and framed photograph of Julia Child and Simone Beck grinning into the camera from a table at a Paris bistro.
Brring brring.
Her sisters had Skyped her next, singing “Happy Birthday” the same as her brothers had done.
“Except,” she’d told them, “you guys sing on key.”
They’d laughed and she’d thanked them for all-expenses-and-then-some weekend they’d arranged for her at, as Jaimie described it, “a super-deluxe-oh-how-amazing-you’ll-never-want-to-leave” spa just outside San Diego.
“We left the dates open,” Emily had added. “We know how busy you are.”
Busy frying chicken parts, Lissa had almost said, but hadn’t.
Even her father had phoned from wherever he was. Well, not exactly. An aide had placed the call for him. “Hold, please, for General Wilde,” an impersonal voice had intoned, and then her old man had said Hello, Lissa, how are you, happy birthday, did you get my present? and she’d said Hello, father, I’m fine and yes, I got the Tiffany’s gift certificate, thank you very much, and she figured she deserved bonus points for not telling him precisely what he could do with that certificate and all the personal warmth it brought with it.
Brring brring.
Where had she left her cell phone? It was right where it should have been, in the rear pocket of her jeans. She grabbed it and glanced at the screen.
Talk about coincidences…
“Marcia,” she said brightly, “you must be telepathic! I was just thinking about you.”
“Haven’t heard from you in a while,” her agent said briskly.
“I know. Well, the last time we spoke—”
“Listen, I know it’s late, but I have something for you and I need a quick yes or no.”
Lissa sat up straight. “Something good?”
“You want some blunt advice, toots? You’re not in any position to be asking me questions like that.”
“Meaning this isn’t something good?”
“Meaning, how about if I ask the questions? Did you ever do any real cooking?”
“What are you talking about?”
“See, you’re approaching this the wrong way. What’s with the attitude? It gets you in trouble all the time. Mouthing off to Raoul What’s-His-Face like you did—”
Mouthing off was precisely what she had not done, Lissa almost said, but it was too late for the truth.
“Never mind. It’s all water under the bridge. Just answer the question. Can you do everyday stuff? Forget the edible flowers, the sprigs of rosemary, the goat cheese tarts.”
“I have never done a goat cheese tart in my—”
“Lissa. Answer the question. Can you do roasts? Stew? Stuff like that.”
Recipes danced through Lissa’s head. Poulet rôti aux herbes. Pot-au-feu.
“You still there?”
“Yes,” Lissa said quickly, “of course I can.” She cleared her throat. She could feel hope rising within her, but she wasn’t going let it get to her until she knew more. “What are we talking about here? An American-style restaurant?”
“American food. Exactly.”
“Upscale, right? Because, you know—”
“Because you attended Le Cordon Bleu. Trust me. I know. The thing is, this place needs a cook who can do things with locally-produced ingredients.”
Oh God! Lissa felt her pulse beat quicken. Alice Waters. Wolfgang Puck. Tom Colicchio.
“Can you do that? Cook natural?”
“Absolutely!”
“OK. Fine. I’ll tell them you’ll take the job.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like what? They need a cook. You need a job. Put ’em both together—”
“No tryout? No interview?”
“They need a cook, fast. You need a job, fast. You wanna waste time with nonsense?”
Like most good agents, Marcia knew how to get to the point. It was just that this was so far from Lissa’s past experiences…
In the exalted world of haute cuisine, meaning meals that cost what some people paid in rent, you met the restaurant’s owner or his rep, you sat for an interview, talked food, talked finances and recipes and customer tastes and management expectations. Then you cooked a meal for the owners, perhaps for a small, exclusive group of steady patrons.
“I need an answer. Yes? No? What’s it gonna be?”
Lissa rolled her bottom lip between her teeth.
“What about money? Contract terms?”
“Month-to-month contract.”
“Month-to-month? That’s not standard. I don’t usually—” She didn’t usually go jobless, either, Lissa reminded herself. “OK. I guess they want to be sure they’re hiring the right person. See, that’s why an interview would be—”
“I’m waiting. You in or out?”
A long breath. “What are they paying?”
Marcia snapped out a number. It was a decent on
e.
“Lissa? I’m still waiting.”
“Yeah. OK. I guess that’s the good thing about working month to month. We can renegotiate at the end of thirty days. What about bennies?”
“Standard stuff. Medical. Dental. Sundays off.”
“They’re closed Sundays?”
“You could say that. One other weekday, you’ll work it out with the boss. Two weeks of vacation after six months if you last that long. Plus room and board.”
“Huh?”
Marcia gave a gusty sigh. “Didn’t I mention? This is a ranch.”
“A what?”
“A ranch. Horses. Cows. Whatever the fuck wanders around on a ranch.” There was a tiny pause. “In Montana.”
“Forget that. I’m not—”
“It’s a big place. Several thousand acres. You grew up in ranching country, right?”
Lissa had grown up on El Sueño, a ranch the size of a small nation that had belonged to Wildes for generations, and she’d left it as soon as she could because ranching and ranches were definitely not her thing.
“I did. And I don’t like—”
“Nobody’s asking you to ride the range.”
Lissa chewed on her lip again. “What is this place? A dude ranch? A resort?”
“Listen, I don’t have time for Twenty Questions. I got to get back to these people. I promised them an answer tonight.”
Lissa had never been to Montana, but she knew a lot about it. Montana was the western state where the mega-rich played at being ranchers. They bought enormous spreads of land, spent fortunes duding them up, visited once in a blue moon and pretended they were cowboys.
And they entertained.
Hollywood glitterati. Directors. Producers. People who could afford to play at being John Wayne for a long weekend. That explained the question about basic cooking. She’d be expected to provide supposedly down-home meals that were actually elegant ones in disguise, and she’d have the pleasure of using mint and haricots verts and kale straight from the garden, eggs fresh from the henhouse.
Best of all, she could make contacts, maybe even connect with guests who’d be so taken with the idea of basic elegance that they’d want to fund a restaurant— and that would be what she’d call it, Basic Elegance…