Jeannie Watt - Undercover Cook

Working undercover has never been so…delicious

Detective Nick Duncan will do anything to crack his latest case. Even if it means engaging in some less-than-legal undercover work. When his grandfather begins taking cooking classes at a catering company suspected of laundering drug money, it’s almost too easy!

Until Nick meets Eden Tremont—his new cooking instructor and the suspect’s sister. The bubbly blonde is a whiz in the kitchen…and with his old grandfather. And before he even realizes what’s happening, Nick is ambushed by his feelings for the woman. It’s been a long time since he’s cared about anything other than his job. But his reckless deception may cost him more than his case.

“I can learn by watching.”

Eden, their cooking instructor, set a clean skillet on the counter in front of him. “Use this pan. Cook some eggs. Make your grandfather happy.”

Gabe gave a soft snort as Nick started stirring his eggs in the bowl. A few minutes later, the old man said, “You know, Eden’s cute.”

“Yeah.”

Gabe tapped the spoon on the side of the bowl. “Aren’t you ever going to start looking again?”

Nick sucked in a breath. It’d been two years since he’d lost his wife in a car wreck. And no, he hadn’t started looking again. “This isn’t the time to discuss this, Granddad.”

“When is?”

Nick shook his head and reached for another egg. He cracked it on the side of the counter and the whole damned thing exploded in his hand, splattering yolk on his shirt and pants.

“Thin-shelled egg,” Eden said from behind him. “They need to feed the chickens more calcium.”

“Good to know,” Nick said, looking down at the yolk spots. Eden smiled at him and he smiled back…wondering what it would take to get her to trust him.

While she began talking to her gathered students, Nick pretended to listen. Which of those closed doors across the room might hold a computer? he wondered. There was a computer in the front reception area, but he doubted it was linked to financial accounts. He would check it out, though.

When he got the chance.

Dear Reader,

Have you ever heard the old saying, “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive?” Detective Nick Duncan hadn’t planned on tangling webs when he joined Eden Tremont’s cooking class. All he wanted was the quickest way possible to discover if Tremont Catering was involved in laundering drug money. Unfortunately, thanks to the efforts of an enthusiastic member of his investigative team, he ends up masquerading as a home security expert and actively deceiving the first woman he’s been interested in since losing his wife.

Trust is paramount to Eden Tremont after being raised by a father who made promises he never kept and recently discovering that her ex-boyfriend was a serial cheater. Nick Duncan, the man who’s installing her home security system seems utterly trustworthy, but after Eden starts to fall for him, she discovers all is not as it seems.

The challenge of writing this story was to keep Nick’s character sympathetic as he actively deceived the heroine. He had good reasons for what he did, but as time passed, he became less and less certain that the end justified the means—especially when he was bending the law himself. Eden had to come to terms with her trust issues and decide if the man she’d fallen for was the real Nick Duncan.

I hope you enjoy reading Undercover Cook, which is the second of my three-book series, Too Many Cooks? I’d love to hear from you at jeanniewrites@gmail.com or via my website, www.jeanniewatt.com.

Best wishes,

Jeannie Watt

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeannie Watt lives off the grid in rural Nevada and loves nothing better than an excellent meal. Jeannie is blessed with a husband who cooks more than she does, a son who knows how to make tapas and a daughter who knows the best restaurants in San Francisco. Her idea of heaven is homemade macaroni and cheese.

To Jake, my consultant in kitchen and cop matters.

Thank you.

Contents

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

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

“COOKING LESSONS?” Detective Daphne Sparks paused with her coffee halfway to her lips and made an are-you-kidding face. “We have a missing, probably dead, informant, and your solution is cooking lessons?”

“Dumb idea,” Marcus Jethro echoed from across the table.

Nick Duncan kept his eyes on Daphne, his partner, because if he looked at Marcus he was going to say something he regretted.

“It’s simple,” he said. “I go with Granddad to the lessons at the catering kitchen, get the layout, figure out how best to get at the company financial records.” And from those, determine whether Tremont Catering, based in Reno, was laundering Lake Tahoe drug money. As he’d said. Simple.

He pushed his chair back slightly to make room for his legs under the small table in the back corner of a Virginia Street deli—the place where he and Daphne usually met for lunch in the late afternoon, after the noon-hour crowd was gone and they could talk.

“How is it that the lessons happen to be at this particular kitchen?” Daphne asked mildly, pushing long black hair over her shoulders. Nick shrugged. “I see,” she said, lifting her coffee cup in a small salute.

“Any information you get that way is totally inadmissible,” Marcus interjected in a superior tone, before adding a carefully measured half teaspoon of sugar to his coffee. He hated to be left out, and since he was a forensic accountant for the Reno PD, and because of that usually chained to his desk, he often was. Marcus had visions of crime-fighting glory that weren’t quite working out.

“I’m not going to seize the records,” Nick said. “I’m going to examine them, see if we’re wasting time on something that isn’t going to pan out.”

He and Daphne had been working for months as Reno PD members of the Washoe-Tahoe Drug Task Force, trying to get a toehold into the drug traffic moving through the Tahoe Summit Hotel and Casino. They knew kitchen personnel were involved, and they’d gotten some indication of how the money might be moving. But task-force funds were spread so thinly that after eight fruitless months of investigation, the Tahoe Summit had been shoved to the back burner…despite the fact that Nick and Daphne’s twenty-one-year-old confidential informant, Cully, had recently gone missing. Nick thought that circumstance warranted further investigation. His lieutenant had disagreed. Strongly.

“I don’t like it,” Marcus said.

It didn’t matter if he liked it, because Nick didn’t answer to him. Technically, since his asshole lieutenant had suspended him for thirty days after their heated “discussion,” Nick didn’t answer to anyone in the department, which was why his investigation into Tremont Catering fell into the unofficial category. His own time, his own dime. But how the hell else was he supposed to get the answers he needed, not only to work on the drug trafficking, but to find out what had happened to Cully?

“What do you suggest?” he finally asked Marcus, more to mollify him than anything. They needed his expertise once Nick got copies of the financial records.

The accountant rolled his shoulders and then took on a thoughtful expression while slowly stirring his coffee. “If you decide to go with the cooking-lesson angle, you could use it as a means to conduct an indirect investigation and try to determine if there are indications of expenditures exceeding legal income. Then go before a judge and ask for a warrant.”