“Oh give me a home where the buffalo roam…”
Never mind.
They were hiring her for her pot-au-feu, not her singing.
And a damn good thing, too.
* * *
By one the following afternoon, singing was the last thing on Lissa’s mind.
Recipes? That was different, but she wasn’t thinking pot-au-feu. She was thinking Marcia the Agent smeared with honey and staked out on an anthill.
“You lied, Marcia,” Lissa said. “Dammit, you lied!”
Of course, Marcia wasn’t there to hear her. Nobody was.
She was standing next to a deserted runway in the absolute middle of absolutely nowhere. Just her, her suitcase, an encircling set of mountains, a stretch of empty land before her, a hundred billion trillion trees behind her, a biting wind, a sky full of snow and in that sky, a rapidly vanishing dot—the plane that had brought her here.
This was a godforsaken wilderness, and if she ever saw Marcia again, she’d punch her lights out the way she should have done with Raoul, whose fault all of this was.
Never mind all that nonsense.
What mattered was the basic, simple, non-arguable fact that if there was a resort here, she’d be damned if she could see it.
The plane that had picked her up at LAX had been a sleek Learjet, shiny and bright on the outside, but not quite what she’d expe
cted on the inside. Lots of leather, lots of plush carpeting, sure, the same as on the Wilde family jets, except here there was the feeling of things let go. The leather seats could have used a polishing. The same for the Lucite tables. Did the ranch fly guests in on this plane? Maybe the slightly worn look of things was deliberate, a way to convince people that they were leaving the glitter of Hollywood for the down and dirty reality of ranching country.
Seemed reasonable.
Still, the slight scruffiness had put her off a little.
Thankfully, there was nothing scruffy about the crew—a pilot and co-pilot who were professional if not very forthcoming.
“Excuse me,” she’d said, after her suitcase had been stowed and she’d been told to take a seat and buckle up. “What’s the name of this resort we’re flying to?”
The co-pilot, whose job it had been to escort her into the cabin, gave her a puzzled look.
“The name of the resort?”
“The ranch,” Lissa had said. “I took the job of chef late last night and I never did ask—”
“Chef?”
“Uh huh. The chef. The person in charge of the kitchen?”
“Oh. The cook. Right.”
Evidently, the down-home feel extended to titles, too.
“Right,” she’d said agreeably. “The cook. And I know it sounds ridiculous, but it was late and I never did get the resort’s name.”
“The resort,” the co-pilot said. The guy seemed to have a problem with repeating things. There was probably a name for it, but right then all Lissa had cared about was finding out the name of the place that had hired her.
“Yes. The ranch. You know. What’s it called?”
“The Triple G.”