Lissa- Sugar and Spice 1.6 - Final Read Free Page A

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