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briquette.”
     
    “Not to be rude or anything,” said Zoey, trying not to betray her confusion, “but what are you doing back here? I thought we had a date.”
     
    “Indeed we do, Zoey, and this was supposed to be it: a homemade dinner in the best Greek restaurant outside of Greece. You see, I actually own the place. It’s one of my most cherished investments, so I thought this would be the perfect place for a date. I sent my driver to bring you here and paid the staff to go home for the evening. Everyone but Ravi, that is, who was helping me set up the dining area. He should be gone by now too. I was hoping to have this done by the time you got here so I could impress you with my amazing cooking skills. As you can see, though, I may have bitten off more than I can chew.”
     
    “In that case, you’d better let me help,” said Zoey, pulling off her cashmere sweater to reveal a black polo underneath. Placing the sweater on a clean, unused table, she donned a spare white apron and walked to the Greek’s side. “Now let’s try it together,” she said. “What’s the first thing we need to do?”
     
    Stelios put the baking pan he was holding down and grinned. “The first thing we need to do is dice two onions.”
     
    Zoey tried desperately not to show it, but after everything that had happened to her recently, Stelios’ romantic surprise was having a profound effect upon her. A billionaire—a man who could literally have whatever he wanted—had nearly burned down the kitchen of his own five-star restaurant trying to impress her. She felt weightless and impossibly heavy all at once, but she had to focus; Stelios had just slipped a sharp knife in her hand.
     
    His hand gently cupped her left one, pushing the fingers into a loose fist on top of an onion he had just cut in half. His right hand gripped the knife handle, just behind Zoey’s right wrist, and guided it to a point on the onion a hair’s breadth away from her fingers.
     
    “Use your left hand to feed the onion into the blade,” Stelios said, slowly guiding her, “while the right one rocks the blade through it.”
     
    “And I’m not going to cut my fingers?” Zoey asked worriedly as the sharp blade fell incredibly close to them.
     
    “No,” Stelios smiled. “Your knuckles are going to keep that from happening. Plus, the more you do it, the easier it gets.”
     
    When the onions were sufficiently diced, Stelios chopped up some dill while Zoey crumbled a block of feta. The Greek was working much more slowly than before, and Zoey noted there was far less banging than she had heard on the way in.
     
    “Who taught you how to cook, anyway?” Zoey asked, watching Stelios measure cups of wine and chicken broth. “Did someone show you how or are you just trying to look like you know what you’re doing?” she said with a playful smile.
     
    “A little bit of both,” Stelios laughed. “My mother loved showing me how to cook her food. I remember her saying, ‘You may be in America now, but you should always have something from your country’. She used to make the most wonderful tirokroketes. You’d happily fight people to get to them.”
     
    “And tirokroketes are…?” Zoey asked, as she fetched butter and ground beef from the fridge.
     
    “Basically, they’re fried cheese balls.”
     
    “That sounds delicious. My mother and I never really did any cooking together, except once, when I needed to make brownies for a school fundraiser. We got all the ingredients together and my mom dug up a cookbook she’d bought when I was about four. For some reason, she’d never used it. We put everything in the bowl, but we didn’t have a mixer, so I volunteered. The stuff was so thick I thought my arms would fall off, but I wanted to do it myself. My mom kept cheering me on as I stirred, and in the end, it came together.”
     
    “I hope your brownies turned out better than my first attempt,” he said, shaking his head and tossing onions