Sex was what it was, and she was fine with that.
What she wasn’t fine with was the BS that went with the sex.
With being involved with a guy.
Which took her straight back to the lies. Oh, the lies! I adore you, baby. I don’t ever want to be with anyone else. You are incredibly special.
That was what Rick had pretty much said to Ilsa, but he’d let her go anyway. Well, for the right reasons, sure.
Still, Ilsa had flown into the night. And Rick had moved on to deal with his life.
Lissa crammed a truffle into her mouth.
She’d been living in Los Angeles for three years. La La Land, her brothers said. Home to Gorgeous Guys, her sisters said. And both definitions were true. This was the Land of Dreams as well as the Land of Heartthrobs.
She knew that, firsthand.
She’d come here with the dream of becoming a chef. A top chef, one who could put her brand on a restaurant and make it dazzle.
She hadn’t come here to find a man, but the men were as plentiful as sand on a beach. Good-looking men. Great-looking, in fact. Who could resist the temptation?
Lissa reached for another truffle. Her stomach gave a delicate roll. Maybe it was time to stick with the Chunky Monkey.
She’d been here three years and she’d been involved with three different guys.
All hot-looking. All fun to be with. All charming.
All actors.
A synonym for dirty, rotten bastards.
“For God’s sake, Melissa,” she muttered into the silence of the room, “you are either incredibly stupid or incredibly slow.”
Truly, she was.
How long should it have taken her to figure out that if men lied, actors—actors fabricated, and even if the words meant the same thing, actors were the worst. Why wouldn’t they be? Actors lied by profession. What else would you call acting?
Acting on screen was one thing. Acting in real life was another.
In real life, if you saw an actor’s lips move, your best bet was to turn and run.
Lissa stuck the spoon into what remained of the ice cream, tucked the container into her lap and sat back.
If only she had.
But what woman could resist having a six-foot movie god like Carlos Antonioni come back to the kitchen of The Black Pearl the night the regular chef had been down with the flu to seek out her, the sous chef, lift her hand to his lips and say that he had expected to find a kitchen goddess but not Aphrodite.
“Why are you not in the movies?” Carlos had said. She’d heard the line before—men liked her looks even though she thought of herself as Typical Texas, meaning she had long legs and big boobs and was, if you liked the type, cheerleader pretty—but coming from a he
artthrob like him…
Her knees had gone weak.
He’d wined her and dined her and when he’d made his move, she’d let him. Whatever it was Em and Jaimie were experiencing, Lissa figured she’d like a try at it, too.
With a man this studly, the sex would have to be earth-shaking, wouldn’t it?
Nothing. Not even a tremor.