“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 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.