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      MILLS & BOON

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      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      In first grade Michele Dunaway knew she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up, and by second grade she knew she wanted to be an author. By third grade she was determined to be both, and before her high school class reunion, she’d succeeded. In addition to writing romance, Michele is a nationally recognized English and journalism educator who also advises both the yearbook and newspaper at her school. Born and raised in a west county suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, Michele has traveled extensively, with the cities and places she’s visited often becoming settings for her stories. Described as a woman who does too much but doesn’t ever want to stop, Michele gardens five acres in her spare time and shares her house with two young daughters and five extremely lazy house cats and one rambunctious kitten that rule the roost.

      For Chris Waldo.

       The sky’s the limit and you’re conquering that!

       I’m proud of all you’ve accomplished.

      And for Marty Smith,

       my brother and chef extraordinaire;

       and to my fantastic editor Beverley Sotolov,

       who helped make this book one of my favorites.

      Contents

      About the Author

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter One

      Rachel Palladia was up to her elbows in dough. Unfortunately, none of it was green—the kind she really needed. Specifically, one-hundred-dollar bills, and lots of them.

      Damn it all. No, damn him. Rachel let the curse word fly as she thought of her thirty-six-year-old fiancé, Marco Alessandro. Make that ex-fiancé. A woman simply did not marry a man to whom faithfulness meant he could sample the sous chef whenever his libido demanded it.

      “I’m Italian,” Marco had proclaimed when she’d caught him and the nubile sous chef buck naked and bopping like rabbits in Rachel’s bed. “Italian men take mistresses. You will always have my heart. You will be my wife.”

      Rachel had uttered a few choice expletives, tossed his diamond ring at him, told him to get out of her life and her apartment—and promptly donated her bed and linens to Goodwill. She was sleeping on one of those inflatable single mattresses until she could afford something else, but at least the inflatable was pure, unsoiled.

      Rachel sighed, slapped the white-flour blob on the stainless-steel worktable and used a rolling pin to smooth out the piecrust. She was out several thousand dollars in nonrefundable deposits for wedding items and there were charges on her credit cards for other nonreturnable ones.

      Even worse was that she was still working for the son of—Rachel bit off the word. Her mom insisted that ever since Rachel had moved to New York City at eighteen she’d started cussing like a sailor. Rachel planned on cleaning up her language, but this fiasco with Marco wasn’t helping any.

      She placed the rolled-out dough in the pie pans and began trimming the crusts. To have come this far only to come to this…Rachel resisted the urge to throw the excess dough. She’d been in food service all her life, beginning at her grandmother’s diner in Morrisville, Indiana. Instead of attending college, Rachel had graduated from the CIA—Culinary Institute of America, that is—then worked her way up in a succession of kitchen jobs until she’d landed here as head pastry chef at Alessandro’s, a fine Italian restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

      God knows how many other women had revolved in and out of Marco’s life before she’d caught him with the sous chef one week before Valentine’s Day.

      She’d spent the holiday of love alone, nursing her wounds and chastising herself for missing the signs. She had to be an idiot. That mistress stuff only happened on TV, or so she’d thought. Now she was stuck in an employment contract with a noncompete clause that wouldn’t allow her to work within fifty miles of the restaurant. Which left out finding another job in New York City, a town she’d loved from the very first minute she’d stepped foot in Penn Station the summer she’d been eighteen. Unless Marco let her out of her contract she had no option but to keep on at Alessandro’s if she wanted to stay in any of the five boroughs.

      New York had vibes rural

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