Lissa- Sugar and Spice (The Wilde Sisters 3)

The truth was, she’d liked them all. He had an amazing ability to make the most removed characters accessible.

And, why not admit it, he was gorgeous.

Tall. Lean. Tightly muscled. A face like a Greek god’s, but with touches that humanized him: a bump in his nose, a small scar high on his cheekbone, another on his square jaw. She’d figured the scars might be phony—she knew a little about Hollywood makeup after all this time in La La Land—but now she knew that they were real.

What she’d never figured was that he’d be so unpleasant.

Well, actually, she hadn’t figured on that because she’d never thought about him as anything other than an actor, but here he was, up close and personal, and he was about as pleasant as a Texas longhorn with a burr under its tail.

Was he just another walking, talking ego? Or was it, maybe, because he was hurting?

That limp. The crutch. He was in pain—she could see it etched into the lines that radiated out from those amazing eyes. Something had happened to him, but what?

All she knew was what the rest of Hollywood knew.

Nick Gentry had been making a movie halfway around the world and then, wham, he’d disappeared.

Filming had stopped. And the industry had buzzed with rumors.

He’d been fired, he’d quit, he’d gone into rehab for—your choice—booze or drugs. He’d come down with a rare illness. He’d run off with a woman. He was in Nepal, searching for The Truth.

The speculation had dragged on for weeks. Then, gradually, it had faded away until, finally, his name was no longer mentioned.

Gentry had dropped below the radar.

Except he hadn’t.

He was here, in the back end of nowhere on a ranch that was as far from being a duded-up guest lodge as the chicken place she’d worked at was from Per Se. She’d come all this way for a job that, it turned out, didn’t exist, only to find herself faced with a Greek god who needed a shave and probably a haircut, who snarled and snapped and was a downright miserable, mean-tempered SOB.

Brutus whined.

Lisa looked at him. He was sitting beside the bed, head cocked, watching her with interest.

“What?” she said. The dog whined again. Lissa reached out and petted his big head. “Well, he is. Mean. Just look how he treats you.”

The dog got to his feet and gave a soft woof. He put his front paws on the bed.

“You want to come up?” Another woof. “Well, come on. Come on, sweetheart. You’re more than welcome to—”

The big dog heaved himself onto the bed. At least, he tried. But he couldn’t quite make it. She could hear his hind claws scrabbling against the rug.

“I’ll help you,” Lissa said.

She grabbed him around his middle. Between the two of them, he finally ended up on the mattress beside her.

“Poor baby,” Lissa said softly. “You’re an old man, aren’t you?”

Old. And sweet. And even if he’d been trained to some kind of idiotic command procedure, you could see that Gentry was good to the dog.

Lissa had put in time volunteering at animal shelters in almost every city where she’d lived and worked; sadly, she’d become good at identifying abused animals pretty quickly, and it was obvious that Gentry had not abused Brutus, that—despite what she’d said—the dog wasn’t the least bit afraid of him.

Back to Gentry again. The man was a mystery.

Not a likable mystery.

Lissa sighed. Why would he be likable? To her, anyway?

This place wasn’t what she’d expected. But she wasn’t what he’d expected. That should have made them even, she thought as she looped her arm around the Newf, but Gentry had taken things too far.