Take a Chance on Me (4 page)

My thoughts were weirdly jumbled. I had to take a few deep breaths before continuing. “If your wrists aren’t held very firm as you grip the weights, Nia, you could strain them. Badly. I know you didn’t come here to get more injuries.”

She relaxed a little, exhaling very slowly. “Sorry for being so jumpy. This—” she motioned around the gym, “is all really new for me.” And then smiled. “Thanks for coming to my rescue so fast.”

My throat literally went dry. Her smile was like…pure, undiluted sunshine. The entire fitness center suddenly looked brighter, as if the blinds had been pulled back from the windows and all of the ceiling lights turned on.

“No problem,” I managed.

She finished the set cleanly, using proper form, and then we moved on to the Nautilus machines. After I explained to her that the stomach muscles and the back muscles worked in tandem—that, like the biceps and triceps, you didn’t want to strengthen one and ignore the other—I had her do a few reps on a couple of machines designed for stretching and toning the various regions of the back.

During a rest between sets, she shot me a speculative look. “So, I saw you at the Easter Egg Hunt yesterday. Did you enjoy it?”

“Me? No. My nephews did, though.”

She actually laughed at me. “A flat-out no? Wow. It must’ve been bad. Why not?”

I wasn’t about to try to explain the truth to the little pastry princess, no matter how pretty she was, so I just shrugged and tossed her words back at her. “It’s not really my scene.”

She threw her dark head back and laughed some more, the masses of long black waves falling around her face. “Well played, Chance.”

Our eyes met and—damn. What could I say? I liked her. I didn’t
want
to like her, but I just did. Aside from being so incredibly hot, she was sweet and funny and…different from what I’d expected. Especially given her friendship with Donna.

The thought of which was like being hit with freezing cold water.
Stay away from women who are friends with your exes. Common sense, dude.

“So, uh, did you and your family have a good Easter?” I asked.

She looked fleetingly amused. “For us, it hasn’t happened yet. We celebrate the Greek Easter, so our holiday won’t be until this coming Sunday.”

“It’s different?”

She nodded.”We follow the Christian Orthodox tradition, which uses the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one. Every once in a while the holiday falls on the same day as the Western Easter, but it’s often a week or more later.”

“Interesting.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in The Gala, Chance. If you stop by while I’m working, I’ll give you a couple of our traditional Easter cookies to try.”

“That’s, uh, nice of you, but I’m fine.”

An odd, confused look crossed her face. “What are you saying? That you don’t
want
to try them? Don’t you
like
cookies?” She seemed to consider this an impossibility.

“They’re just always packed with fat and sugar,” I blurted, which was unlike me. I never spoke without thinking, but Nia had me rattled this afternoon, personally inviting me into her family’s bakery and all. “No offense,” I added, “but I’m very cautious about what I eat.”

Her expression morphed from being mystified to something less easy to identify.
I
couldn’t read it, in any case.

“Yeah, Donna said you kept to a very restrictive diet. Because of your triathlon training, wasn’t it?” She raised a dark eyebrow as if she’d guessed my breakup line had been at least slightly exaggerated, if not an all-out fib.

“Exactly. My
training,
” I said with emphasis. I’d actually given Donna a handful of reasons for ending our relationship, my careful dietary choices were just one of them. (Donna loved dining out.) But it also happened to be true that I didn’t eat junk food. Most restaurants were pretty accommodating when I made special requests. I just didn’t like to have to ask.

“Well, there are a lot of good-for-you Greek foods,” she informed me. “The Mediterranean diet is known for promoting longevity and healthfulness. Veggies are a staple. Lean proteins, Omega-3 fats, olive oil, and fresh fruit are commonly used as well.”

As are butter, phyllo dough, and sugar,
I added silently.

“I imagine it’s all very…tasty,” I said instead.
Look at me, being so diplomatic!

“You shouldn’t just
imagine,
” she shot back. Then she grinned, as if laying a trap. “Don’t judge a cuisine until you actually try it. I’ll bring you a piece of
spanakopita
on Wednesday, and you can taste it for yourself.”

What the hell was
that?

My longtime rule was that if I couldn’t spell or even pronounce a food, I wouldn’t eat it. Just. Say. No.

I started to shake my head.

“It’s a spinach pie,” Nia said. “There are onions, feta cheese, herbs and spices, along with a lot of spinach, all of it packed between a few thin layers of pastry.”

“I…um, well—” So, okay, there were
vegetables
in this thing, but still.

“You don’t really know a lot about my family or our heritage, do you?” she said sweetly, but I couldn’t mistake the edge of challenge in her voice.

“Guess not,” I had to confess.

“Well, then, you’re lucky I’ll be able to enlighten you.”

She finished her cool down and final stretches in silence. Then, with a “See ya Wednesday” and a quick wave, Aphrodite’s slightly mischievous twin sister disappeared out the front door of the gym while I stared, open mouthed, after her.

Just who was instructing who here today?

~Nia~

This much I could tell you about the guy: He was
not
who I’d had in mind when Donna was bitching about him earlier this year.

His body reminded me of Ryan Gosling’s in
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
A couple of times Chance Michaelsen moved in a way that caused the bottom of his shirt to rise up, and I caught a glimpse of the incredible abs underneath. That
omigod
six pack.

I fanned myself thinking about it and tried to keep from literally bolting out of Harbor Fitness. I crossed the street and headed over to the shady side, just to cool down.

This notion Donna had that Chance didn’t pay attention was pure baloney. He observed everything. He wasn’t someone who used a lot of extra words to make his point, but he listened. And he spoke when necessary.

Also—and I’d stake my life savings on this—he was NOT gay.

But he did have a weird thing with food. One of the fitness instructors (Yasmine?) brought a birthday cake into the gym not long after I arrived. Chance looked at it as if it were infested with maggots. I almost laughed aloud at that. He sort of needed someone to loosen him up, didn’t he?

But then he’d touched me, and it was like a burst of static electricity—shocking and unexpected. Seriously, that old cliché about not playing with fire? Totally applicable here.

So I should have known better than to poke at him. It was like rousing a tiger. But I couldn’t seem to help myself. I’d had only a handful of serious dating relationships so, perhaps, I wasn’t the most experienced woman on the North Shore, but I’d always been able to tell when a man was flirting with me. Chance Michaelsen didn’t leer, but the intensity of his gaze had only strengthened since yesterday. Everything about him said
hot and hotter
.

I checked my watch. I had an hour to take a walk, work off some of this nervous energy, and just regroup mentally before going back to the bakery and working again.

Fun as it was to flirt back a little with Donna’s very straight and sexy ex, this was a relationship that could go no further than the gym. Aside from the unwritten rule that a girl didn’t go out with her friends’ ex-boyfriends, no matter how attractive one of them might be, I could already tell that he’d be doomed (at least in my parents’ eyes) as a potential suitor for me.

In an Old World Mediterranean family, you just didn’t bring people into it who didn’t love to eat. Period. Literally
every
member of my immediate and extended family was a foodie, and most of them specialized in some area of Greek cuisine.

My mom, my dad, my aunt and uncle in Wilmington Bay, Wisconsin—all of them were restaurant owners. My relatives in Wisconsin ran Jason’s Joint (known throughout the southeastern part of the state for their gyros). And when my cousin Nick left Wilmington Bay, he moved down to Chicago with his partner to work at a restaurant—The Playbook—and spiffy up their dessert menu with Greek delicacies. My brother Dimitri worked at The Gala, as did I. And we had other cousins, aunts, uncles, and other distant family who lived within an hour or two of Mirabelle Harbor and were the verified kings and queens of
moussaka
, rosemary roasted potatoes, lemon chicken, lamb,
tiropita
,
dolmades
,
tzatziki
sauce, and
souvlaki
.

The Gala—a name my parents shortened from the sweet Greek custard pastry known as
galaktoboureko
—happened to be one of my family’s specialties. Did it have sugar? Did it have fat? Hell, yeah!

If Chance were to come waltzing into my parents’ restaurant and bakery and react to its namesake by wrinkling up his perfectly formed nose and carrying on about grams of trans fats or some such nonsense, conversation in the place would stop and everyone in it would stare at him in horror and disbelief. You’d be able to hear a drachma drop.

Then the heads would start shaking, the fingers would start wagging, and Chance would be immediately dismissed as any kind of marriage material. I knew this to be true.

Which, in a strange way, was sort of a relief, I realized, as I speedwalked through the heart of Mirabelle Harbor, making a large loop around the picturesque downtown. Chance Michaelsen might have penetrating hazel eyes, but he was a guy I could write off from Day One. And that was a good thing because, to be frank, he could have been dangerous to my heart. It was more than his looks. There was just something about
him
that got to me.

Now, Grant Jordan, on the other hand, had real potential. He wasn’t a committed foodie, but he had a healthy appetite for rich and exotic dishes. We’d gone out to eat at several fancy restaurants, even once to The Playbook, where we chatted with my cousin and sampled not one, not two, but
three
of their desserts, even after having eaten a full meal. He was adventurous, experimental, and not at all afraid of a little fat or sugar.

I crossed Castle Street and headed up toward Brighton Avenue—always a treat to peek in on the arts and crafts shop near there. Plus, there was a bench I liked beneath the awning of the store where I could sit down and make a call.

I pulled out my phone and speed dialed Grant’s private cell number.

“Hi, you’ve reached Grant Jordan,” the confident voicemail message said. “I can’t answer at present, but your call is very important to me. Please leave me a message, and I’ll return it as soon as possible.”

“Hey, Grant, it’s Nia. I was just thinking about you and wanted to say hello. I know it’s the start of a busy week, so just give me a call when you have a free moment.”

Aw, that was lame, but I’d gotten used to leaving him voicemails. He
did
answer, and usually he was fairly quick about it. But it was weird to always have to go through an electronic intermediary before being able to speak with someone I was supposedly dating.

Checked my watch again. Still a half hour left before I had to report back for cooking duty. This time away from The Gala was a much needed break. And I had to admit, I was surprised that, after just one session with Chance, my back was already feeling a little bit better.

Or maybe it was just better by comparison to the rest of my body, which had started to ache in unusual places, thanks to the exercises he’d made me do. My arms were sore from that overhead pull/press thing, and my stomach muscles were still burning in response to those seemingly endless torso twists.

I exhaled. It was a beautiful spring day, though, and I loved getting to drink in the sunshine.

My phone buzzed. Grant.

“Hello, you,” I said. “That was fast.”

“Hey, beautiful. What are you doing right now?”

“Just out for a stroll. Wish you could join me.”

He laughed. “Me, too. More than you know, Nia. I’ve got the monthly investors’ board meeting starting in about four minutes. It should’ve been called a B-O-R-E-D meeting.”

As we chatted for those precious few moments, I couldn’t help but imagine what life with CEO Grant Jordan would be like. He lived large, with a mansion in Winnetka on Lake Michigan and a corner high-rise office in Chicago that overlooked Lake Shore Drive. He had great tickets to some of the biggest sporting events in the city—Bulls, Bears, Blackhawks. He had a fast European-made car, a driver on call when he wanted to take the guests out in a limo, and even a little boat, which was attached to a summerhouse he owned on Nantucket. Money wasn’t much of an object for Grant.

Then again, these little snippets of conversation would likely be the most I’d get from him between six a.m. and eight p.m. on weekdays. He worked long hours, which was why we only got together on Friday or Saturday nights, if at all. Time was the rarest commodity in Grant’s world, not cash, diamonds, or gold.