Free Take A Chance On Me by Jennifer Dawson Page B

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 fucking 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.
    Why did she always give in? Her hand trembled and she clutched the napkin tighter. She knew why. Guilt, pure and simple.
    She’d been living with it for so long that she didn’t know how to live without it. It sat like a lump of coal in her belly, making her shoulders ache and knotting the muscles in her back.
    Realizing Mitch was watching her, she shrugged. “It’s not that uncommon in my neighborhood.”
    “And where’s your neighborhood?” A small smile softened the hard line of his jaw. He held up a hand. “Wait. Let me guess. . . . You’re a South Sider, aren’t you?”
    The dispute between Chicago’s working-class South Side and the more affluent North Side was notorious and passion-filled among locals. And Mitch Riley—tattoo