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

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,