Lissa- Sugar and Spice (The Wilde Sisters 3)
Page 30
“Don’t get your hopes up, cowboy. I don’t give a flying fig about pine paneling. I just want to be sure to choose a room as far from yours as possible.”
She was smiling. No. She was smirking. Dammit, enough was enough! Did she really think she could go on insulting him under his own roof and get away with it?
Nick took a step forward.
She didn’t move.
He took another step toward her.
Not really. What he did was hobble toward her, goddamn that leg and that crutch.
She stood her ground.
It drove him nuts.
The lady needed to be put in her place. He didn’t want her afraid of him, he just wanted… What? A reaction. A response. Something that said she knew she was on the losing end of this confrontation.
So he flashed a smile.
The smile that was his trademark.
It was a smile that had been described as all-knowing and all-powerful, as sexy as sin and dangerous as hell. It was a smile that promised everything a man could fear and a woman could want.
He flashed
it because the maybe-cook, maybe-dog trainer, maybe-starlet-wannabe and all-around champion pain in the ass who’d invaded his life had just about driven him to the edge, flashed it without thinking about the consequences beyond the immediate pleasure of seeing her crumble—
And by the time he realized what he’d done, it was too late.
Lissa Wilde’s eyes lit with recognition.
“You are him,” she said. “Nick Gentry.”
He laughed. It wasn’t a very good laugh, but it was a laugh.
“If only,” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “You absolutely are Nick Gentry.”
“We did this bit already, remember?” Nick shook his head. “I told you, I’ve heard that before, but my name is Bannister.”
“It’s Gentry.” She plopped her hands on her hips. “Famous Movie Star Vanishes.”
It was one of the tabloid headlines that had haunted him after the accident. Not that anybody but a handful of people knew about the accident.
“You know how to read,” he said. “Wow. I’m impressed. Unfortunately, I am not—”
“Give me a break, will you? I’m not blind. You are Nick Gentry.”
Nick gritted his teeth. Now what? He’d taken on the Nick Bannister persona in the first hospital; his lawyer, an old friend and one of the few people he trusted, had set the ball in motion, completed it by transferring him under the Bannister name to a hospital in the States.
At first, there’d been lots of speculation, virtually all of it as improbable as the scripts from some of his movies.
He was trekking through the Himalayas, searching for his own Shangri-La.
He was holed up someplace in Mexico with a woman he’d stolen from a drug lord.
He was hiding out in Switzerland, recovering from plastic surgery gone wrong.