He smiled at her and inclined his head to look her in the eye. “I’m Theo. I’m running a little late, so would you mind having a seat in the conference room?” He gestured toward an area walled off in smoky glass. “I’ll only be a few minutes.”

Lucy nodded. She looked from the trainer’s big white smile to the exotic woman on the exercise machine and it hit her. She’d just seen that perfect female face and that perfect female form on the front of that month’s Cosmo! The woman on that bench was supermodel Gia Altamonte!

Lucy sucked in a breath of surprise, and the partially desiccated Milk Duds went along for the ride.

Theo Redmond peered at her, his brow now furrowed in concern. Then he patted Lucy’s back in an area that would have been between her shoulder blades if she’d had shoulder blades, but there’d been nothing remotely bladelike on Lucy’s body for years, as she well knew, and she was about to make some amusing comment along those lines when she realized she wasn’t getting any air into her lungs.

“You OK, Miss Cunningham?”

Lucy smiled nonchalantly, confident she could will herself to breathe. Any second now it was bound to happen.

The trainer and the cover girl continued to stare at Lucy as the seconds ticked by.

The hell with this, she thought, clutching her throat in what she prayed was the universal sign for: There seems to be a Milk Dud lodged in my airway.

Trainer Ken leaped into action. He ripped Lucy’s laptop strap from her shoulder, twirled her around so that her back was toward him, and brought his arms up under hers. In a hot flare of humiliation, Lucy realized several things at once: Gia Altamonte was on her cell phone, summoning the paramedics in a particularly annoying high-pitched Latin accent; the trainer had his hands dangerously close to Lucy’s underwire-buoyed twins; and, in her last oxygen-fed thought, she realized she was too large for Theo Redmond to encircle in his arms in order to save her life.