by Lissa- Sugar
He couldn’t just watch his dog make an ass of himself…
He couldn’t just stand here wishing he could change places with the dog.
Try again, Gentry.
“He doesn’t like to be petted.”
Hell! He’d gone beyond stupid. The woman thought so, too. She gave a snort of laughter. Brutus, who liked laughter, woof-woofed in response. The woman looked at Nick through a tangle of her silky blond hair and the Newf’s soft black fur.
“Could have fooled me,” she said.
“He’s a—a—” A what? “He’s a trained guard dog. He has a job to do. And you’re diverting him.”
Lissa Wilde snorted again. “Do you have a job to do, sweetie?” she crooned.
Brutus moaned with pleasure. The Wilde babe clasped the dog’s ears and planted a kiss on his muzzle. The dog buried his face in the curve of her shoulder and moaned again.
Nick was painfully close to making that same sound.
“Brutus,” he said sharply, “dammit, dog, get off!”
“Brutus,” the woman crooned, “you’re a beautiful boy and it’s been lovely meeting you, but now you have to be a good dog and let me get up.”
“He won’t obey anyone but me,” Nick said.
This was far safer ground because, unfortunately, it was true.
Brutus had not had an easy life. Among other things, the nutcase who’d originally owned him had exercised his power by forcing the dog to respond only to him and, in some cases, only to code words.
Nick had worked diligently to break the habit, though not always with success.
“He won’t obey anyone but you?” Lissa Wilde said with indignation. “But that’s an awful thing to do to a dog. What if you weren’t here? Would he eat if you didn’t tell him he could?”
Until recently, no. He wouldn’t. They’d finally reached the point at which Nick didn’t have to use a code word to get the dog to eat, but Brutus would still only accept food from him.
And she was right. It was not a good thing. In fact, it had been one hell of a problem the weeks he’d been hospitalized, when the only way to get Brutus to do something as simple as eating had been to record the coded command so that the guy he’d hired to take care of the dog here at the Triple G could get him to eat.
He thought of telling her that, but why would he?
The dog was none of her business. She was a temporary blip on the horizon. And the dog was a fool for thinking otherwise.
Enough, Nick decided.
“Brutus,” he said sharply. “Up!”
The Newf shot him an Are you nuts? look and went back to total adoration of Lissa Wilde.
“Dammit, dog—”
“Brutus,” Lissa Wilde said softly, “you wonderful boy, up!”
The dog shuffled to his feet.
“That’s my good boy. Now go to that despicable man who thinks he owns you.” The dog hesitated. “Go on,” the woman said, and the dog heaved a sigh and went to Nick’s side.
The cook-who-almost-surely-was-not-a-cook-but-might-be-a-dog-trainer rose to her feet and slapped her jeans free of dust bunnies.
“That,” she told Nick coldly, “is how it’s done. You want the dog to love you, not fear you.”
Nick looked from the woman to the dog and then to the woman again.
“How did you do that?”
“I established a bond with him.”
“Yeah, but how did you…” Nick stopped in mid-sentence. His eyes narrowed. “The dog doesn’t fear me.”
“Uh huh.”
“He doesn’t, goddammit!”
“Right.”
He looked at the dog again. Brutus sat with his gaze glued to his new best friend.
“Brutus,” Nick said, “look at me.”
The dog ignored him.
“Brutus—”
Lissa Wilde put her hand on the massive black head. “He’s a lovely dog,” she said. “He deserves to be treated with kindness.”
“I have never,” Nick said through his teeth, “mistreated this dog!”
“What do you call training him only to eat only after you tell him he can?”
“I didn’t—”
“You already admitted that you did. Well, it’s cruel. And dangerous.” Her head lifted. “Only a control freak would be into stuff like that.”
He thought so, too, but this wasn’t the time to admit it.
“It can be done for the safety of the dog.”
She rolled her eyes.
Yes. But it could.
The vet had explained it—except, Brutus had never been a guard dog or a dog whose life, whose owner’s life might depend on not obeying the orders of strangers. Aside from situations as unusual as those, the vet had said, the risks of that kind of training definitely outweighed the benefits.
And then, together, he and Nick had cursed the absent control-freak shithead whose dog Brutus had once been.
“As if,” Lissa Wilde said coldly. She folded her arms over her breasts—except, damn, not quite over them. Her arms were more or less just beneath her breasts, lifting them, framing them, flaunting them. She was wearing a light jacket with the top buttons undone. He could see the rounded shape of her breasts, could imagine the sweet pucker of her nipples… “Have you heard a word I’ve said, cowboy?”
Nick jerked his head up. “What?”
The expression on her face was grim. She was obviously pissed off at him and that was fine because he was equally pissed off at her. These thoughts about her, about her body…
Absolutely, positively he’d drive to a glittery town, find a glittery bar, find himself a glittery woman. A high-priced call girl, the kind who could make a man forget that he paid for her favors, that none of what she said or did in his arms was real.
So what if he hated those places and felt sorry for those women? A man could put aside his scruples for a night of sex. He could, anyway, because sex was obviously what he needed.
“Have you?” she repeated. “Heard a word I’ve spoken?”
It had to be sex that he needed. Why else would a woman as unpleasant as this turn him on?
“No,” Nick said coldly. “Frankly, I’ve been doing my best to tune you out.”
“Well, it’s time you tuned in. What I said was that I’d like to see my room—that is, if you’re not too busy figuring out new ways to torment dogs to point me to it.”
The woman had a mouth on her—a soft-looking mouth, which was amazing when you considered what came out of it.
“There’s half a dozen bedrooms upstairs. Take your pick.”
The glare in her eyes could have cut glass.
“Which one is yours?”
Just that quickly, he felt his body harden. Could she see what was happening to him? Shifting his weight while balancing on a crutch wasn’t easy, but he managed.
“Down the hall on the right. The one with the pine pan—”
“Don’t get your hopes up, cowboy. I don’t give a flying fig about pine paneling. I just want to be sure to choose a room as far from yours as possible.”
She was smiling. No. She was smirking. Dammit, enough was enough! Did she really think she could go on insulting him under his own roof and get away with it?
Nick took a step forward.
She didn’t move.
He took another step toward her.
Not really. What he did was hobble toward her, goddamn that leg and that crutch.
She stood her ground.
It drove him nuts.
The lady needed to be put in her place. He didn’t want her afraid of him, he just wanted… What? A reaction. A response. Something that said she knew she was on the losing end of this confrontation.
So he flashed a smile.
The smile that was his trademark.
It was a smile that had been described as all-knowing and all-powerful, as sexy as sin and dangerous as hell. It was a smile that promised everything a man could fear and a woman could want.
He flashed
it because the maybe-cook, maybe-dog trainer, maybe-starlet-wannabe and all-around champion pain in the ass who’d invaded his life had just about driven him to the edge, flashed it without thinking about the consequences beyond the immediate pleasure of seeing her crumble—
And by the time he realized what he’d done, it was too late.
Lissa Wilde’s eyes lit with recognition.
“You are him,” she said. “Nick Gentry.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a very good laugh, but it was a laugh.
“If only,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “You absolutely are Nick Gentry.”
“We did this bit already, remember?” Nick shook his head. “I told you, I’ve heard that before, but my name is Bannister.”
“It’s Gentry.” She plopped her hands on her hips. “Famous Movie Star Vanishes.”
It was one of the tabloid headlines that had haunted him after the accident. Not that anybody but a handful of people knew about the accident.
“You know how to read,” he said. “Wow. I’m impressed. Unfortunately, I am not—”
“Give me a break, will you? I’m not blind. You are Nick Gentry.”
Nick gritted his teeth. Now what? He’d taken on the Nick Bannister persona in the first hospital; his lawyer, an old friend and one of the few people he trusted, had set the ball in motion, completed it by transferring him under the Bannister name to a hospital in the States.
At first, there’d been lots of speculation, virtually all of it as improbable as the scripts from some of his movies.
He was trekking through the Himalayas, searching for his own Shangri-La.
He was holed up someplace in Mexico with a woman he’d stolen from a drug lord.
He was hiding out in Switzerland, recovering from plastic surgery gone wrong.
Then, as was its wont, the media had forgotten him.
By the time the doctors had decided he’d keep his leg—a bad joke, considering what that leg was like—by then, heading home incognito, if you could call a place he hadn’t seen in eighteen years home, had been easy.
A midnight helicopter ride, a couple of trusted bodyguards, nobody in what had once been his entourage in on the deal except for his lawyer.
Easy.
A few people had made him over the intervening months. No problem. This was ranching country. Saddle tramps and cowboys, real cowboys, didn’t give a crap if the man who employed them was a king or a killer.
As for Lissa Wilde—
A problem. The question was how best to handle it. If he kept denying who he was, she’d never leave it alone. He knew the type. She was not a woman to give up easily.
But if he admitted his identity, if he admitted it and offered her something for her silence—
Yes. That would work.
Come morning, he’d give her a check. A big one. He’d tell her that it was hers to keep as long as she kept quiet about where she’d been and what she’d seen. If money wasn’t enough, if she really was what he suspected—a girl from Smalltown, USA in search of a Hollywood career—he’d add a promise to the check.
He’d tell her that he’d be leaving here soon and if she kept her mouth shut, just as soon as he was back in L.A., he’d put her in touch with Spielberg or Scorsese or Burton.
A lie, of course.
And he’d never lied to any of the hopefuls who’d tried all the tricks of the trade to get him to wave a magic wand and kick-start their dreams. He’d had dealings with all of them over the years, from the bartender who slipped you his résumé with the check, to the cloakroom girl who tucked her card in the pocket of your coat.
But he had no compunctions about lying to this woman. She had fudged her way into his private world. She was no cook.
What she was, was clever.
Lying to her would suit him just fine.
No way would he introduce her to anyone in L.A. How could he? He had no intention of going back there, of going back to his old life. Ever.
How could he possibly, even if he’d wanted to? But if she’d lied to get to the Triple G—and he was 99 percent sure that she had—well, one egregious lie deserved another.
The more he considered it, the more workable the plan seemed.
Yes, she’d seen that he had a problem with his leg, but so what? This was a ranch. He could have fallen off a horse. Jabbed himself on a broken fence post. Torn a ligament hauling feed bags.
Besides, once he admitted that he really was Nick Gentry, he’d be dealing with an entirely different woman. All her smug, self-righteous attitude would fall away.
His career was dead and gone; he could never make it on the screen again, but one-on-one? Hell. There wasn’t a woman on the planet who wouldn’t turn from tigress to pussy cat for Nick Gentry. Even now.
Not until they knew the truth, at any rate. Saw it firsthand.
“You can stop trying to figure out ways to convince me that I’m wrong.”
He looked up. Lissa Wilde was starting at him, her face expressionless.
Nick hesitated.
He wasn’t looking his best; he knew that. He’d given up shaving more than a couple of times a week; he’d let his hair grow so damned long that it curled over the collar of his denim jacket.
Still, his was the face that had launched an even dozen box-office hits. There was no ego in the realization, there was only the cold reality of a man who knew what had brought him to where he was.
To where he had been, once upon a time, and now was not the time to go through all of that crap again.
It was a time for dealing with the situation at hand, Nick thought, and he took off his Stetson, tossed it aside and decided he might as well play the scene for all it was worth.
“What the hell,” he said. “You’ve got me. Yes. I’m Nick Gentry. And, look, I know that changes things a little, but—”
“It changes nothing,” she said. “Except that I should tell you that I never saw a movie of yours that I liked.”
Nick felt his jaw drop.
She tossed her head, picked up her suitcase, moved briskly past him and went up the stairs. Halfway up, she stopped and looked back.
Not at him.
At the dog.
“Brutus,” she said in a gentle voice that was completely out of keeping with the reality of what she was like, “do you want to come and keep me company?”
“No,” Nick said sharply.
Too late.
The Newf gave a joyous bark and lunged for the stairs, bounded up them as if he were a puppy instead of an arthritic old man. Lissa Wilde smiled at him when he reached her side, ruffled his ears and said something soft and sweet.
Then she looked at Nick.
There was nothing soft or sweet in that look.
“Just so we have things straight, Mr. Gentry, you can stop worrying.”
“Worrying about what?”
“I don’t know why you’re hiding out in this—this place in the middle of nowhere and, frankly, I don’t care. You want to play at being a cowboy? Fine. Be my guest.”
Taken aback, Nick drew himself up.
“I am not playing at anything. This place is mine. It’s a real working ranch. And I—”
“And you are a real working cowboy. Got it. The point is, your secret’s safe with me.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, lady. There is no se—”
“Supper’s at six. I don’t do late kitchen duty. Not in a place like this, so tell your men to be on time if they expect the food to be hot.”
Say something, Nick told himself. For God’s sake, say something! This is your house. She is your guest. Hell. She’s not your guest. She’s your employee, even if it’s only for tonight, so, goddammit, say something!
Too late.
The woman and the dog turned away and climbed the remaining steps to the second story landing. The woman didn’t look back.
The dog did.
For one crazy second, Nick could have sworn the dog was smil
ing.
“Woof,” the dog said softly.
Woman and dog made a left-hand turn.
And then they were gone.
* * *
Lissa walked to the end of the hall and into the last bedroom on the left.
The dog padded in after her.
“Good boy,” she said, and dumped her suitcase on the floor.
The room was awful. Cabbage rose wallpaper. Faded carpet of an indeterminate color. Oak furniture, each piece so big she could only imagine that getting it upstairs must have meant hernias, sprained backs, and lots of cussing.
A porcelain pitcher and basin stood on one nightstand. She’d have shuddered at the sight but, thank goodness, she could make out a toilet, sink and tiny shower through a half-opened door just opposite the bed.
Not that the plumbing or what passed for décor mattered.
She was here for one night. It might well end up feeling like the longest night of her life, but one night was all it was.
Tomorrow, Nick Gentry’s pilot would fly her back to civilization. She’d chew Marcia out for not checking things out before sending her on this—this wild-goose chase and—
And, she’d be right back where she’d been all these past weeks.
Jobless and rapidly working toward also being penniless.
“Damn,” she said softly, as she sank down on the edge of the bed.
Brutus padded over and put his massive head in her lap. He gave a soft whine and Lissa stroked his head and smiled at him.
“I know,” she said. “You hate that I’m in this mess.”
The dog whined again. Lissa reached down and hugged him. He was the only one she could rely on, the only one who gave a damn.
Except, that wasn’t true.
Her family would have done more than give a damn, had they known her situation. But she had not told them, nor would she tell them. They were all so 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.