The Baby Truce

PROLOGUE

TOM GERARD CAME AWAKE suddenly, aware that something wasn’t right. He reached out and found the other side of the bed empty, the sheets cool to the touch.

“Reg?”

The suite remained silent, and although he couldn’t see into the living room, he felt the stillness.

“Reggie!” He got out of bed and walked out there naked. His clothes were still scattered across the floor, but hers were no longer there.

He stood taking in the emptiness, not liking it. She was gone, and he didn’t think she was out getting coffee and the newspaper. That had been his Sunday morning task during the year they’d been together. Hers had been to laze in bed until he returned. Then they would drink coffee, share the paper, make love again.

Those days were almost a decade past, but when Reggie had come to his suite with him last night, he’d assumed everything would be the same. For a while anyway, until they went back to their real lives—hers in Reno, his in New York City…or wherever he got hired. So far San Francisco was a bust, but he didn’t care, because, honestly, he was an East Coast chef. California cuisine didn’t do it for him.

The phone rang and Tom scooped it up. “Reggie?”

“It’s Pete.” Tom’s long-suffering business manager, who took a nice slice of his income in return for that suffering. “I just booked you a ticket to New York. You leave at noon. Jervase Montrose wants to talk about a job. It looks good.”

“Great.” Tom wasn’t surprised to have nailed an interview with Jervase, despite Pete’s concerns. Yeah, he’d gotten his ass fired a couple weeks ago—the second time in two years—but he was still one of the top chefs in the country. Jervase would be lucky to get him.

Pete gave him the flight information, then added, “Be on your best behavior.”

Hey. It wasn’t like he was a wild man. He simply knew his own worth and he didn’t suffer fools gladly. Was it his fault that he’d run into a hell of a lot of fools lately? “I’ll call you when I land.”

He hung up the phone and stood regarding the empty suite.

In all the time he’d known her, Reggie had never once walked out on him without a word.

CHAPTER ONE

REGGIE TREMONT SNAPPED OFF the TV and tossed the remote onto the sofa, startling her fat cat, Mims. “Damn it, Tom.”

Fired again.

Not a world event, but he was enough of a bad-boy chef to get a small blurb on the E! entertainment network. Volatile chef dismissed. Celebrity witnesses involved.

They’d flashed a photo that made him look more like a pirate than a chef, with his black hair pulled into a ponytail, scruffy facial hair, dark eyes glinting. She was quite familiar with that unrepentant expression—a mask he popped on when he didn’t want anyone getting too close. Or when he was getting ready to walk away.

Reggie grabbed her red cardigan off the arm of the recliner, where she’d left it the night before. She slipped it on while Mims twined around her ankles.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” She headed for the pantry, where the cat food was stored. Like she’d forget to feed the cat. Mims was as wide as she was high.

Reggie opened the can and dumped it into the ceramic dish with Meow spelled out on the bottom, wrinkling her nose as the scent of fish mixed with who-knew-what hit her nostrils. Her stomach roiled. Second day in a row. That did it. She was going back to the old brand.

She fanned the air as she retreated from the kitchen. She had to make a quick stop at the catering kitchen she ran with her sister, Eden, and her brother, Justin, to pick up her portfolios, before her client meetings and site visits. At noon she’d trade her business heels for kitchen clogs and prep for a luncheon the following day.

Full days were good days.

She glanced at her watch after pulling her hair into a barrette at the back of her neck and double-checking her makeup. Please let the traffic be with me for a change.

The kitchen still smelled of the awful cat food and she tried not to breathe as she retrieved her keys from the hook next to the sink. Once she got outside the house and took a deep breath of fresh, non-cat-food-tainted air, she felt better. Well, a little better, anyway. The scent of the lilacs blooming beside the house was surprisingly strong and cloying, but not nearly as bad as Mims’s new food.

Reggie pressed the flat of her hand to her stomach as she walked to her car, parked on the street, since her tiny brick house had no garage. She would not, could not, come down with something while they were short one prep cook.

Mind over matter. That was the trick.

EDEN SWIVELED IN HER CHAIR AS soon as Reggie walked into the tiny Tremont Catering kitchen office. “We have three applicants for the prep cook position!”

Finally. The employment agency they used for catering temps had taken its sweet time. Eden and Reggie had been fighting to keep their heads above water after their last employee quit.

“Have you set up interviews?” Reggie asked, dropping her tote bag on the floor next to her small workstation. She was still fighting queasiness and now her forehead felt damp.

“Day after tomorrow. Back-to-back, starting at one o’clock.”

“Great.”

Eden slipped an elastic band off her wrist and gathered her dark blond hair into a haphazard knot, then pulled a clean white chef’s apron off one of the hooks next to her station. She wrapped the strings twice around her before she tied them. Eden was petite, but…

“I think that’s Justin’s apron,” Reggie said.

“It’ll do,” she replied distractedly. “After the agency called about the applicants, I got news that the Dunmores have an unexpected guest this week, so I have to figure how to stretch what I made yesterday and add a couple more dishes. Then I still have all the morning prep for that luncheon.”

Reggie glanced at the handwritten schedule she kept next to her computer. “Justin’s coming in at nine?”

“New cake order and he wanted to get started.”

“Of course,” she murmured. He wasn’t quite overextended enough and had to take on that one extra project to tip the scales.

When they’d first started Tremont six years ago, all three of them had worked extra jobs to keep the business afloat. Reggie, who like many would-be restaurateurs and caterers, had taken business and accounting classes along with her culinary courses, did the books for a couple small firms. Eden worked as a personal chef and Justin had snagged a part-time job as a backup cook for a resort at Lake Tahoe.

Reggie had long ago given up the bookkeeping to run Tremont full time, but Eden still cooked for three families on a weekly basis and Justin was a backup pastry chef and fill-in cook at the same hotel. And he made cakes. Exquisitely crafted and gloriously expensive cakes that were gaining popularity and bringing some serious money into the business. At the same time they were forcing him into a ridiculous work schedule that didn’t involve a lot of sleep.

“I saw that your ex got the ax again,” Eden said.

“I saw it, too,” Reggie said, without looking up. She tucked her site notes into the wedding portfolio.

“I guess he should have kept his mouth shut.” Eden breezed by her and disappeared into the kitchen.

“A lesson for all of us,” Reggie muttered. A lesson Tom wasn’t learning.

She shut off her monitor before shouldering the leather portfolio. Her stomach tightened as she walked into the kitchen, where Eden had beef stew simmering.

“There’s something wrong with your stew,” Reggie said, wrinkling her nose. She stopped a few feet away from the stove.

“What?” Eden lifted the spoon and sniffed.

“Can’t you smell it? It’s…off.”

Eden sniffed again, then tasted. “No, it’s not.”