“Ah, yes, well…speaking of that—” Benji cleared his throat and played with the knot of his tie as if it were too tight. “I know Mrs. Beasley means well, but I can’t help but feel a little silly here.”
“And you want to tell her thanks but no thanks?”
“Something along those lines, yes.”
“Good luck with that. If you figure out a way that works, will you let me know?”
“In fact, I probably would have canceled our lunch meeting today and spared us both the trouble, but you left the coffee shop pretty quickly yesterday, and I had no way of reaching you.” The look he gave her might have been vaguely accusing, but he masked it well beneath a polite exterior.
“Oh, yeah. You caught that, did you?” She thought he didn’t really look all that irritated to be here, though, and she was experienced enough with men to guess that it might have something to do with the way she was smiling at him. She was not a vain woman, but she knew men liked her smile, especially when she turned it on them full force. “Well, we’re here now, so we might as well make the most of it.” Waving over a young waiter with a crew cut who beamed back at her, Nadia gave her order. “Hi, there. Can I get a turkey on rye and a hot tea, please?” She turned to her reluctant companion. “What about you?”
“What? Oh. Roast beef, please. On wheat. And just water for me.”
The waiter departed, leaving Nadia and Benji to study each other. He seemed…not wary, exactly, she decided. More like he still wasn’t sure what to make of the whole situation, or of her. That was perfectly understandable, but hopefully he wouldn’t turn skittish and flee, because she was growing increasingly curious about what exactly lay beneath his polished surface. “So, are you saying you don’t need any help with your love life? Most men do, you know. No shame in admitting it.”
“I’m not—I don’t—” Benji sputtered, and then he took a deep breath and tried again. “I’m just saying that I’m not sure where she got the idea that I’m in trouble when it comes to my social life.”
“You’re not wearing a wedding ring. Mrs. B sees that kind of thing as a cry for help. Trust me, I know. She gives me a hard time about that, too.”
Benji’s gaze dropped to Nadia’s left hand, and for some reason the curiosity behind his eyes made her feel self-conscious. She dropped her hands into her lap and cleared her throat.
“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked bluntly to steer the conversation firmly away from herself and back on track.
He blinked. “No.”
“Boyfriend?”
“What? No! I just work a lot, that’s all.” He was turning pink again.
Nadia was delighted. She was going to have so much fun with him, if she could only convince him to let her.
“Makes it hard to meet people that way,” he continued, “but I really don’t need to be your charity case, Miss Nor—”
She raised one eyebrow.
“Nadia,” he amended. “Really. I appreciate your offer, but I’m fine.”
Great. She’d come on too strong and bruised his ego. But clearly he needed her help. No one who was too busy to get out and meet people was fine, not unless they aspired to be a hermit. This man was sorely in need of a social lifeline, even if he couldn’t seem to see it. “New Year’s Eve is just around the corner, you know,” she pointed out. “Biggest social time of the year. Going to any parties?”
“I—there’s a work thing, yes,” he answered, and she could have sworn she heard a note of defensiveness in his voice.
Work?
Her dismay must have showed on her face, because he began fidgeting with his tie again.
Play nice, she told herself. “Okay. So, any ladies at work you’ve got your eye on? I’ll bet I can help you get that midnight kiss.”
He blinked at her but didn’t respond.
Either there was no lady on the horizon, or she needed to prove his need for her help some other way. “I tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. You tell me your moves when it comes to women, and if they’re solid, I’ll walk out of here and tell Mrs. B that her worries are for nothing. Sound fair?”
“My moves? Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack.” Nadia leaned back to allow the approaching waiter room to slide her sandwich and tea in front of her. “Go ahead. Pick me up.”
Benji stared at her and then seemed to notice that the waiter hadn’t moved and was watching them both with new interest. “Thank you,” he told the young man pointedly, glancing at the sandwich that was still in the waiter’s hand. “You can go now.”
Grinning, the waiter set the sandwich before Benji and sidled away with a backward glance and what sounded suspiciously like a snicker.
“I can’t pick you up now,” Benji insisted, lowering his voice and glancing around the café. “Not here, not like this.”
“Sure you can. Here, I’ll set the scene.” Nadia crossed her legs and let the high heel boot of the top one sway flirtatiously as she gave Benji a coy look. “You’re out for lunch. You’re walking though a deli and suddenly you spot your dream girl sitting alone at a table. What do you do?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
“Well, you’d better say something, honey. If you just stand there and stare at her like that, she’ll either think you’re having a seizure or she’ll mace you. Just say the first thing that pops into your head.”
“I feel ridiculous,” he muttered.
“All right, try saying the second thing,” she said wryly. “Come on, it’s not ridiculous, it’s practical. If you can’t say it to me, how do you expect to say it to the woman of your dreams? Go ahead, what would you say?”
Gesturing helplessly, Benji shrugged. “Hi?”
It was about as basic as one could get but still workable as long as he could follow it up with something decent. Playing her part of the dream girl in question, Nadia gave him a dazzling smile. “Well, hi there.” She leaned forward in invitation, more than a little curious to see what his next move would be.
Benji’s gaze dropped to her lips as she smiled, and he froze.
Nadia cocked her head at him and waited some more, but it didn’t seem as if he had anything else to say. She resisted the urge to shake her head. “’Hi’ is good for starters, but it won’t get you far unless you follow it up with something else real quick. So…?”
He turned his attention to his sandwich. “I forget,” he muttered, and he took a bite instead.
“Hi, my name’s Benji. Hi, mind if I join you? Hi, that’s a lovely sweater you’re wearing. Any of those would work just fine, trust me. You don’t need to overthink it. Mostly women are going to feel flattered you approached them. As long as you respect their boundaries,” she added, suddenly picturing him going overboard with an unsuspecting girl and having things not end well. “Otherwise you’re looking at mace again.”
He only grunted in response and continued chewing.
Was she losing his interest, or winning him over? It was hard to tell. Perhaps he still questioned her credibility. “Say she gives you the green light, she’s smiling at you—and maybe she’s even invited you to join her. Now what?”
“I’d tell her there’s a little old lady who desperately wants to see me get married, and is she interested?”
The unexpected hint of humor caught her off guard, and this time she was the one who blinked in surprise.
He noticed. “What? I prefer the honest approach,” he said around another bite.
Her lips twitched, and finally she allowed herself to smile. “I like you,” she said after a minute.
He paused in his chewing as if startled by her admission.
Well, it wasn’t the first time her candidness had caught someone off guard, and it was a safe bet that it wouldn’t be the last, either. Nadia leaned forward. “Look, if you’d really rather drop all this because it’s just a pain in your behind, I’ll do it. I can’t promise you that Mrs. B won’t redouble her efforts—and God knows what
form it will take—but I’ll bow out. But if you even just give me a week, I’ll bet I can help you.”
Benji stared at her and then finally swallowed his bite of food. “Why?”
“Because I know what women look for in a man.”
“No, I mean, why do you want to do this?”
“I like you,” she repeated, and she did. Far more than she’d expected to when Mrs. B had set all of this up. “And I like seeing people get their happy endings. What can I say? I’m a romantic.”
“I see.” Those bright blue eyes of his seemed to focus on her just a little bit more than they had a moment ago. “So does that mean you’ve already got your happy ending?”
For a moment she didn’t know how to answer. “Oh, don’t worry about me, honey,” she said finally with more lightness than she felt and a flippant smile. “I’ve got all the romance I can handle right now. My dance card couldn’t be any more full.”
“Oh?”
She ignored the question in his voice and took a sip of her tea.
After a long moment, Benji put down his sandwich and cleared his throat. “Look, it’s nice of you to offer, Miss—Nadia, but I think I’m going to have to decline. I’m not quite as hard up as Mrs. Beasley seems to think.”
Time to pull out the big guns. “You do know she has access to a marriage broker, don’t you? A real live marriage broker. I’ve seen the woman in action. She’s got a stack of prospect photos as thick as my arm.” It was a slight exaggeration, but only very slight. “I’m saying this because I feel it’s only fair to warn you. If you turn me down, that’s what Mrs. B may surprise you with next.”
He looked horrified. “She wouldn’t.”
“Wouldn’t she?” Nadia upped the wattage of her smile. “Suddenly a week with me doesn’t sound so bad now, does it? So what’s it going to be? Do I stay, or do I go?”
He said nothing at first, but then he finally sighed and threw his hands up into the air. “Stay.”
“Good, because I probably wouldn’t have left anyway,” she admitted.
Benji raised his eyebrows.
She smiled back
Chapter Four
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it—and you really have no choice, so just go with it—is to leave here today with a woman’s phone number.”
“You do realize that I have a job to get back to, right? My lunch break ends in ten minutes.”
“Stay focused. This is your job today,” Nadia returned in a tone that left no room for argument.
“Tell that to the man who signs my paychecks—Hey, what are you doing?”
“Giving you a thirty-second makeover. Hold still.” Nadia undid Benji’s tie and stuffed it into his suit pocket before stripping the suit jacket off him, then proceeded to undo the top button of his dress shirt and roll up his sleeves.
He made a funny little sound under his breath.
“What?” she asked, pausing.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just not used to having a woman strip me in public, that’s all.”
“You should be so lucky, honey,” she returned, amused but undeterred. “Listen, no woman will give you her phone number if you look like an auditor from the IRS.” She took a step back to study him. Better, but maybe one or two more things… “Are those glasses absolutely essential?” she asked, removing them to see how he looked without them.
He immediately plucked them out of her hands and put them back on. “If I want to avoid inadvertently wandering into traffic and getting killed, yes.”
“Fine, point taken. But the hair—” Nadia tousled it roughly with her fingers.
Benji started at the contact.
“Relax. I promise you’re in good hands.” There was something endearing about his uneasiness, though, and she gentled the motions of her fingers to appease him.
“My boss is going to think I got jumped by street thugs and mugged. On the plus side, maybe he’ll think that’s why I’m late getting back from lunch and excuse me.”
“You don’t look like you got mugged.” Nadia took a step back and let her gaze travel up the full length of him. “You look good.”
And he did, too. He still looked neat and trim overall, but he looked far more approachable now. Geek chic, Nadia thought, pleased. Without the suit jacket covering him up, it was obvious now that while Benji might be lean, he wasn’t scrawny.
Benji’s dark hair, mussed just enough, and those wide blue eyes that looked just a little bit shell-shocked gave him an endearing sort of lost-puppy look that even made her own pulse flutter for a moment.
“Oh, yeah,” she assured him. “Much better. Trust me.”
“Jury’s still out on that. Now what?”
Now it was time for him to practice. “Follow me.” Nadia led him out of the café where they had been eating and into a bookstore two buildings down. “A bookstore is a safe place to start. If you can’t think of anything to say, all you have to do is look around and make a comment about one of the books nearby.” She lowered her voice as they wandered further into the store, and then she spotted a young woman browsing. “There, target acquired. Up ahead on the left.”
“The woman in the suede skirt?”
“She’s perfect. Now remember what I told you: eye contact, be breezy, friendly—”
“She’s really not my type.”
“For the purpose of today’s exercise, that doesn’t matter worth beans. You’re asking for her phone number, not her hand in marriage.”
“Nadia, I’m not sure—”
“Marriage broker,” she reminded him. “I kid you not.”
He muttered something under his breath but made no more protests.
“Good.” She gave him a nudge in the direction of the suede-skirted woman. “Go on, you can do this.”
Sighing, Benji trudged off toward the blonde as if he was headed to the guillotine.
It was hard not to smile. Nadia did her best to hide that fact by grabbing a book from a nearby shelf and holding it up before her face as if she was reading it, and then she turned a surreptitious gaze in Benji’s direction. He gave her a backward glance, and she waved him onward with an encouraging nod and a furtive little flick of her hand.
As Benji approached the blonde, the woman shifted her weight from one leg to the other and inadvertently turned her back to him as she flipped through a book. He stopped in his tracks, then took a deep breath and circled around to the other side where he made a rather poor show of pretending to examine the shelves nearest to him before clearing his throat loud enough that even Nadia had no trouble hearing it from a distance.
Ouch.
The blonde jumped and looked up, and Benji nodded at her with a smile. She nodded back with what might have been a trace of a smile herself, but then she immediately returned to her reading.
Not bad though, Nadia thought, trying not to wince. At least he’d managed to make first contact.
She saw him open his mouth then, presumably to introduce himself, and gesture at the bookshelf before them both.
The woman’s eyes widened, and she shook her head curtly before hastening away and out of sight.
Nadia blinked. What on earth…?
Benji looked bewildered himself. Then he glanced at the bookshelf and did a double take before jerking back as if it had burned him.
Shoving her book back into its place, Nadia hurried over to him. “What did you just say to her?”
“I asked her if she had any favorites she could recommend to me,” he said, his cheeks bright with color.
“Well, that doesn’t seem so—” Nadia caught sight of the category label on the edge of the shelf. SEXUALITY. “Oh.” She started to laugh, got a dirty look from Benji, and clapped a hand over her mouth to try to smother the sound.
“Would you please stop laughing? She’s probably gone to tell the manager there’s a pervert loose in his store.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, knowing she couldn’t possibly sound sincere when she was still so obvio
usly fighting laughter but unable to help herself. He frowned at her, but his miffed expression only served to add to his adorableness quotient. “Really, I’m sorry. Let’s try it again, okay? But this time we’ll pick a section that’s more you.”
“Finance,” Benji said immediately.
“Not finance,” Nadia objected almost as quickly. “How many love stories do you know of that started out with ‘we met in the finance section’? You need something with at least the potential for romance.”
“Personal finance?”
She groaned inwardly. “Come on, dig deeper. You’ve got hobbies, right? We could try books about one of those—unless it’s Star Trek or something like that. I don’t want to see you trying to hit on a woman in some pseudo-alien language.”
“I am not a Trekkie,” Benji told her, sounding aggrieved.
“Okay, fine.” She turned her attention to the large category signs overhead in the bookstore. “Something else that would be more appropriate for—”
“You know,” he interrupted her, “you could always just say you’d tutored me, or whatever we’re calling this. Mrs. Beasley would never know the difference.”
“You think I would lie to her? I think I might be insulted.”
“I think you might be faking.”
To a certain extent she was, yes, but she was reluctant to put an end to their fledgling acquaintance just yet, and she had a sneaking suspicion that he wasn’t quite so opposed to all of this as he let on anyway. “You agreed to a week,” she reminded him.
He snorted. “Only because you used scare tactics.”
“One more,” she cajoled. “Just try one more, and I promise we’ll call it quits for the day.”
“One more,” he agreed finally, sighing.
“Okay, so how about…“
“How about travel?”
She turned and gave him an appraising look, wondering if he was just grasping at straws or if he really had ventured out to see foreign places. “Travel? That’s not bad, Benji. Faraway places, exotic settings… I think we have a winner. Come on.” And she headed toward the travel section in the bookstore, motioning for him to follow.
The Heavenly Bites Novella Collection Page 8