Take a Chance on Me(21)

“No.” As if he had a right to the final say.

She strummed her manicured nails on the table, her wheels spinning as she stared off to a spot over his left shoulder.

Gracie nudged him under the table, then jutted her chin toward Maddie.

He shook his head.

She scowled and kicked him.

Ignoring her, he moved his calf out of the line of fire. Instinct told him that it was better to let Maddie think it through than talk her into his way.

Fifteen seconds passed before Maddie straightened in her chair and shifted her attention to him. “As you know,” she said, her tone taking on a professional quality as though she were about to give a presentation, “my funds are rather . . . limited at the moment.”

Mitch nodded seriously, pressing his lips together to repress his smile. Damn, she was cute.

“However,” Maddie continued, her chin tilting even higher, “I will write you a check for your time and trouble when I return home. How much did you charge an hour?”

Mitch scrubbed his jaw with his hand, contemplating. While he wanted to argue, he decided that letting her win this round helped his overall strategy. He’d never cash the check anyway, so there was no point in the debate. His lips quirked. “I charged four hundred dollars an hour.”

She blanched, her skin turning a shade whiter. “Oh, well, I can see why you’d leave that behind. It must have been horrible to make that kind of money.”

He laughed. If she only knew. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gracie looking at him with avid speculation. “You asked, Princess.”

“Yes, I did.” Maddie blew out a breath. “Let’s back up—how much does your friend charge to tow a car?”

“Only about a hundred bucks,” Gracie chirped helpfully.

One-fifty was more like it, but Mitch wasn’t about to volunteer the information.

Maddie’s gaze narrowed. “Okay, so that’s a hundred for the tow, and I’ll call and find out the going rate at the motel. There’s food.” She turned to Gracie. “Then there’s the stuff you gave me. I’d better get a pen and paper and start a tab.”

“You are not,” Mitch said with a low threat in his voice, “starting a f*cking tab.”

Gracie sputtered. “I have to agree with Mitch here. I tossed in a bunch of stuff I had lying around my house. It was nothing.”

Her defiant little chin raised another notch. “I don’t know how yet, but I’m paying my own way and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”





Chapter Six



“What’s next, Princess?” Mitch asked, as silence descended over the kitchen.

Tension coiled in Maddie’s belly. With Gracie gone, she didn’t have anything to distract her from the current situation.

She picked up a napkin and dropped it primly in her lap. The list of problems waiting to be tackled grew in her mind, threatening to overtake her. She twisted the thin white paper around her finger. She didn’t know “what’s next.”

What if she failed? Fell flat on her face? It would prove to everyone how incapable she was of taking care of herself.

No. Stop.

She would not give up. She straightened her shoulders. “I don’t know, but I’m going to figure it out.”

Amber eyes darkened. “Let me guess, you don’t want any of my help.”

The “No” hovered on her lips, but she pushed it back. She peered over his broad shoulder to study the blue and rose flower-patterned wallpaper and white cabinets, so distressed from age that they were once again in style. “You’ve already helped me. More than I can ever repay.”

“Maddie,” he said, his tone taking on the decided cadence of an exasperated male. “I gave you a place to sleep. It was nothing.”

“Easy for you to say when you’re the one with food and shelter.”

“True,” he said, scrubbing his hand over his jaw. “But if the situation was reversed, wouldn’t you have done the same?”

She looked away from the cabinets at the man causing her distress on an entirely different level from her base survival. The black T-shirt stretched over his broad chest and muscled biceps. That tribal tattoo scrolled, curling down his arm like the snake in the Garden of Eden, tempting her with lust and danger. The image of him sitting around the kitchen table in the brick bungalow she shared with her mother was so preposterous that she laughed. “God no, I live with my mom.”

A slow grin slid over his lips and some of the tension filling the room eased. “Really, now?”

Most twenty-eight-year-olds in this day and age lived in their own condos in Chicago’s trendy neighborhoods. She would have, too—she’d saved every cent of the money she’d made as her brother’s office manager to do just that. She’d even found the perfect place, but then Steve proposed.

Desperate to live on her own, she’d insisted on still getting the place, but everyone kept telling her how impractical it was to buy. How much more sense it made to save for another year and buy a house when they were married. She’d listened to lectures on the state of Chicago real estate, mortgage rates, and how the condo was too small and the plumbing was subpar. Finally, sick of the whole ordeal, she’d ripped up the check for five percent of the down payment.