Once Upon a Christmas Eve Read online

Until possibilities for her fainting had occurred to him, he never would have suspected from her slenderness that she was carrying a child. From what he’d heard from her neighbors, she didn’t even have a boyfriend.

  It seemed her neighbors didn’t know her as well as they thought they did.

  It was entirely possible that neither did his partner.

  The thought brought him up short.

  “Does Scott know?”

  Tommi’s brow furrowed. She had no idea why Max would think she’d have confided her situation to a man she’d spoken with only once since he’d stood her up. At least she didn’t until she considered that his partner—and he, himself—might have concerns about her handling the workload.

  “No one does. Except you. But I promise you, I can keep up. Everything I’ve read makes me believe I’m almost through the worst part of the morning sickness. And my energy is supposed to be coming back soon, so starting an expansion in January should be okay…if it’s necessary.”

  All Max really knew about pregnancy was how to prevent it. His knowledge of the mysteries of a woman’s body was limited strictly to how to bring pleasure. But there was no denying her conviction about the apparently diminishing physical side effects of whatever all was going on inside her. That certainty was as obvious as her hesitation about the expansion, and the silent plea in her eyes. He appreciated the conviction. It was the barely masked panic beneath the plea that he didn’t want to deal with.

  Her worry was showing.

  Not wanting to be affected by it, he focused on the other party to her…condition. “What about the father?”

  “What about him?”

  “Why isn’t he helping you?”

  Her glance fell to a silvery vein of quartz in the granite. “Because he’s gone. He went back to France right after he quit.”

  “Right after he quit? This is the guy who worked for next to nothing?”

  “That would be him,” she murmured, tracing the vein with the tip of her finger. “He was in the States to gain international experience. I did the same thing in Nice and Paris,” she said, explaining why she hadn’t hesitated to hire him after a trial run in her kitchen. “Working for little more than room and board in a foreign country is a rite of passage that can earn major points on a résumé.

  “Before he could get the position he wanted in Lyon, he needed a year abroad,” she continued, making a short story even shorter. “But he found another position in Marseille after he started working for me.” She hadn’t realized at the time that he’d been looking for anything else. The entire time he’d subtly pursued her, trying to charm her, telling her maybe he should stay, he’d been looking to leave.

  She hadn’t believed for a moment that she was his seul vrai amour—his only true love. He’d said the same thing with that same charming smile and lovely accent to Alaina, Shelby, Essie and the woman who picked up and delivered the bistro’s linens. He was the sort of man women adored because he was fun, exotic and made them feel good, but any woman with a soupçon of sense knew better than to take him seriously.

  She’d always considered herself sensible. And practical and savvy and skeptical and all the other things a woman needed to be to make smart decisions about her life and those she allowed into it. But add a shared high for a fabulously successful private dinner for twenty and a great bottle of wine to all that European charm and her common sense had gone the way of the dodo.

  Her hushed voice grew quieter. “It was one night. One night,” she repeated, recrimination heavy as she slowly shook her head. “What happened should never have happened at all.”

  A faint edge slipped into Max’s voice. “You should still get child support from him.”

  Never mind that she was busy beating herself up for her lousy sense of judgment, as far as the big man beside her was concerned, it all came down to the bottom line.

  Since increasing her bottom line was one of her new priorities, she took the hint and focused on it, too. Cynicism was new to her, but she could probably learn a lot from him.

  “That would take more money than it’s worth. I called him a month ago to let him know he was going to be a father. He wants nothing to do with me or the baby.”

  “What he wants doesn’t matter. He has an obligation.”

  The edge had sharpened. Hearing it, her glance slid to his handsome profile. “Do you have a child?”

  “No,” he said, flatly. “I don’t know anything about them, either,” he admitted, sounding as if he planned to keep it that way. “But I do know that a man needs to accept his responsibilities if he does have one.”

  “That responsibility is something Geoff will fight and I can’t afford to. The only money he said he’d give me was the cost of getting ‘rid of it.’ When I told him that wasn’t going to happen, he said that even if I could prove it’s his, the courts here have no jurisdiction over him. He also mentioned that I’d never be able to find him. His job there hadn’t worked out and he was moving on.”

  The same awful disbelief she’d felt when she’d hung up from that call stabbed through her now. Afraid Max could see it, she focused on the vein in the bar top. That vein split in two. She felt like that a lot lately, as if the path she’d followed for so long had abruptly forked. Caught with no backup plan, she could only hope she was going in the right direction.

  “Proving he’s the father would be easy.” She needed Max to know that, if for no other reason than to end the speculation in his heavy silence. “The only other man I’ve ever been with broke up with me three years ago. For not being spontaneous enough,” she added, with a wry little laugh, “so it’s not like there’s any room for doubt. But I’m not going to waste energy or money on Geoff.

  “I grew up without my dad,” she admitted, fully aware of certain effects of her decision. “His dying was hardly his fault, but I hated him not being there. I’ve always felt that void in my life. But I don’t want my child around a man who doesn’t want her. I can’t stand the thought of this baby ever feeling unwanted. That’s why I’ll do whatever I have to do to provide for her…and for my bistro,” she added, “because this is how I’ll take care of her. I just need to be able to hire an assistant.”

  She was willing to compromise to do that, too. She just needed the man avoiding her eyes to back down on cutting her employees’ pay. They had responsibilities of their own. Now wasn’t the time to remind him of that, though. Not only had she not yet uncovered whatever other surprises lurked in the papers he’d brought her, Alaina had just walked past the open kitchen door. Preoccupied with unwrapping her muffler, she hadn’t seemed to notice them at the bar.

  “Alaina is here,” she murmured. Realizing the time, she grimaced. “Oh, geeze,” she groaned. “I’m so sorry. You said you were in a hurry when you called.” Apology magnified her disquiet as she tucked her hair into her clip and reached for her cap. “I hope I didn’t make you late. I really didn’t mean to keep you.”

  Max was certain she hadn’t. He didn’t doubt, either, that she felt as awkward about why she’d held him up as she did about all she’d just admitted.

  She slid off the stool. With his own thoughts in check, he rose with her. “Are you okay now?” he asked, just to be sure she was steady on her feet.

  “I am. And thank you…” For not looking at me as if you think I’ve totally screwed up my life, she thought. Something that almost looked like compassion lurked in his eyes, along with a remoteness she found herself wanting badly to understand. “For helping me. And for this,” she hurried to add, picking up the papers and envelope.

  “Not a problem.” Focused on the time, aware that he was going to be late, he took a step from her. Alaina had just stuck her head out the kitchen door. Looking as if she didn’t want to interrupt, the waitress ducked back inside.

  Now that someone else was there, he could leave.

  More relieved by the reprieve than he wanted to admit, he nodded to the envelope. “Call after you’ve gone over that. There are
a few things I know you’ll have questions about.”

  Looking every bit as uneasy as he knew she felt, she told him she would and followed him to unlock the door and pull up the shade. As he walked out, the bistro lights flicked on, spilling brightness onto the sidewalk.

  Her first customer was already hurrying toward the door as he rounded the front of his car. Since it was Friday, it occurred to him that Tommi could easily be there until midnight.

  Max was the last person on the planet to tell anyone she worked too hard. He thrived on twelve-hour days. Fourteen was even better. But even he could see she was pushing herself to the limit to take care of her business, her employees, her customers and her neighbors. In the meantime, she was also doing what she had to do to make sure she could care for the child she apparently intended to raise on her own.

  He’d known someone else like that. Someone who’d been abandoned by the man who’d gotten her pregnant and who’d worked as hard as she could to provide for her child. She’d struggled so hard and for so long that she’d literally worked herself into her grave.

  The door on those memories slammed with the might of a gale-force wind. Tommi was not his mother. She had resources and skills his mother had not. Still, the sympathy he felt for her mingled with a sort of pity she’d probably hate knowing was there. Those telling feelings were just buried under a pile of defenses that brought the irrefutable need to walk away from what he shouldn’t have to be dealing with at all.

  If not for his partner, he wouldn’t know a thing about her.

  Allowing no further consideration than that, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and opened his car door.

  Starting the car, he keyed in “call me asap,” and sent the message to Scott’s cell phone.

  He was on his way to his breakfast meeting when Scott called an hour later.

  “Hey, man, I got the email Margie sent with the résumés you wanted me to look at. I know we need to hire a new office manager for Chicago if we’re going to transfer Hochmeier to New York, but I just haven’t had a chance to open it yet.”

  “That’s not what I’m calling about.”

  The connection to India was as clear as lead crystal. Satellite technology at its best. The pause on the other end of the line sounded hugely relieved. “What’s up, then?”

  “Tommi Fairchild. How well do you know her?”

  “Not as well as I’d like,” he admitted bluntly. “Why?”

  He’d told Scott a couple of days ago what Tommi had wanted when she’d agreed to the ill-fated meeting at the hotel. He’d also told him her operation had franchise possibilities, so he’d follow through on the preliminaries as he usually did, and that Scott could follow up with operating or construction changes. He hadn’t exactly said that he’d be keeping the door open for him with her. But Scott had caught on, proclaimed him “the best,” and insisted he owed him one.

  If he’d been keeping track, his partner would realize he owed him more than that, but this wasn’t about all the times Max had saved his butt over the years.

  “Are you sure you’re serious about her?” he asked.

  “As serious about a woman as I’ve ever been. Is there a problem?”

  The guy hadn’t even hesitated.

  “Not for me. Investment-wise, her business is definitely smaller than we’d normally look at, but the profit potential is there.” That was his focus. Or so he wanted to believe. “I just think you might be getting in deeper than you realize.”

  The laugh that came through the phone’s tiny speaker was quick and easygoing. “Since when did you start worrying about my love life, partner? First, you offer to help me out. Now you’re warning me away?”

  “Just doing my due diligence. You know I like all the facts up front.”

  “So what facts do you think I need to know?”

  “Just one. She’s pregnant.”

  The laugh died.

  After a few rather long moments, Max thought the connection had died, too.

  “Hey. Are you there?”

  “Yeah. Yeah,” Scott repeated, apparently mulling the little drawback. “Pregnant, huh? Where’s the daddy?”

  “Gone.”

  Silence gathered again. When the ex–college linebacker spoke again his affable tone was back. “You didn’t get a reputation for being hard-ass thorough for nothing, did you, Callahan? Thanks for the heads-up.”

  It was Max’s turn to pause. “No problem. Just wanted to know if you were still interested.”

  “I am. Definitely.”

  Max didn’t hear a trace of doubt in his partner’s tone, nothing at all to indicate that the little bombshell he’d just dropped had given him anything more than a few moments pause. That didn’t seem anything like the man he knew, the man who made it a rule to never date a woman two weeks in a row so she wouldn’t get serious. But then, nothing about his partner and Tommi Fairchild made any sense. Not to him.

  “This might change my approach,” he heard Scott admit, “but I’m still in the game. Keep the ball rolling with her, okay? I’ll be back next week. And about those résumés,” he went on, shifting gears with the ease of a race-car driver, “it might be a while before I get to them. Gray wants to close on one of the properties here. I’m going to be tied up for a while.”

  Since HuntCom was one of their biggest accounts, he told him he was glad to hear that. That their commission would be in the two-million range also softened any irritation he might have felt over yet another delay with staffing the so far nonexistent East Coast branch. Moments later, he ended the call as he aimed for the freeway on-ramp.

  The status of their own business wasn’t what had mattered to him, anyway. He’d just wanted to know if Scott was still interested in pursuing the woman. Since he hadn’t let himself think about why he’d wanted to know that before he’d texted him, now that he knew how truly infatuated his partner was, he wasn’t going to think about it now, either. He would just handle her account the way he would any other—and stuff down the protectiveness he didn’t want right along with everything else he didn’t want to feel for her, anyway.

  If there was anything Max could do, it was block what he didn’t want to deal with. After all, he’d had a lifetime of practice. Yet, whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not, that protectiveness was still there, along with all of his defenses, when he returned to the bistro after Tommi’s call two days later.

  Chapter Six

  The cold drizzle that had leaked from the gray sky all Sunday morning was taking a break when Max parked in front of the bistro. From the looks of the wreath on a large, red storage box under its domed green awning and the ladder nearby, Tommi had decided to use the undoubtedly brief respite to put up Christmas decorations.

  She just didn’t appear to be anywhere around.

  Since the bistro was closed for the day, Max headed for the corner of the redbrick building to go around back, passing a row of two-foot-high faux fir trees on his way. They occupied the long iron planter box below the arching gold THE CORNER BISTRO stenciled on the large front window.

  When he’d been there a couple of days ago, the planter had overflowed with some sort of flowers in yellow and rust.

  Twenty feet ahead, he saw Tommi poke her head around the corner of the building.

  She’d heard a vehicle slow on the wet pavement, heard the slam of a door after it stopped. Seeing Max walk from the expensive black Mercedes that hadn’t been there minutes ago, her heart gave a funny little jump.

  He had his hands tucked into the front pockets of his casual cords. The stance pulled back the sides of the heavy squall jacket that made his shoulders look huge, and exposed the crew-neck sweater stretched over his hard chest. He looked very large, very male and despite his faint smile when he saw her, very preoccupied.

  To her relief, no mention had been made of how she’d wound up in his arms when they’d talked briefly on the phone Friday afternoon, and nothing he’d said indicated any misgivings about continuing to do
business with her.

  Her own uncertainties about the partnership had compounded, though.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” she called. One of the clauses in the proposal he’d left dealt with putting their own manager on-site. He assured her that the proposal simply covered all the bases and that the point was negotiable. Still, its existence added another stress to the awkwardness and anxiety she felt now that he was here. “I should have had these up last weekend.”

  With the nod of his dark head and his distracted, “No rush,” she went back to lining up faux trees in the planter below the window on the park side of her bistro. She didn’t want to keep him waiting, but she really needed to finish what she’d put off far longer than she should have.

  This would be her third Christmas since she’d opened the restaurant. The two years before, she’d plunged head-first into the joy of the season and changed the decor from “fall” to “holiday” over Thanksgiving weekend. With her life totally upended, joy missing, the task simply hadn’t been a priority.

  For a number of reasons, she made it a priority now. She didn’t want to cheat her customers of the sparkle and cheer of a holiday atmosphere. Or her neighbors. Or her staff. She especially didn’t want one of her sisters or her mom dropping by and wondering why her decorations weren’t up. “Looks nice.”

  Max had rounded the corner.

  “Thanks,” she murmured, stressed enough without the unnerving way his glance slid over her. In the space of seconds, his assessing blue eyes moved from the scrunchie holding her high ponytail in place, to her cocoa-colored parka and down the length of her jeans. Since she hadn’t been able to zip up her favorite pair that morning, she was wearing her fat ones; the pair that, under other circumstances, would have had her ruthlessly cutting carbs until her skinnier ones fit again. It seemed as if she’d thickened around her waist almost overnight.

  She could have sworn his glance lingered on her middle.

  She stepped back from the planter. Trying not to worry about whatever he was thinking, she frowned at the middle tree in the compact row of seven.