6. Stephanie
STEPHANIE
The email from Oliver Norcross arrived in her inbox the very next day.
Ms. Vincent,
Thank you again for your help with this matter. Let’s take this on a week-by-week basis—I’ll reach out over the weekend and let you know what my expectations for next week are.
As far as this week goes, I’m attaching a copy of my son’s schedule, so that you can find a likely-looking time to meet up with him and try to make it seem casual.
I will ask that you make sure this happens sometime today, as the more time he spends unsupervised the more likely he is to find his way into trouble.
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or concerns. Otherwise, I’ll speak to you in a week to find out how things are going.
As promised, the email had an attachment. Stephanie clicked it open. It was a breakdown of the week and all the places Elijah Norcross was likely to be each day.
And I’ve got to find him somewhere today and engineer a meeting that looks accidental. And then I’m going to have to persuade him to start hanging out with me, even though I rejected him just last night.
For the first time since making this agreement, the obvious obstacle occurred to her—Elijah might simply turn her down when she asked to spend time with him.
After all, she’d been rude last night and she knew it.
And that had been fine when she hadn’t had any desire to see him again, but now that she meant to start spending time with him, she needed him to like her, and not to be angry.
That was going to be tough given the way their last conversation had gone.
Still, there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet and try to put herself in his path.
She looked at the schedule. Apparently Elijah would be at the gym for several hours this morning, and while Stephanie didn’t belong to that gym, she happened to know that a person could pay twenty-five dollars for a guest pass and get in for a few hours.
That would be enough time. Either she would win him over or she would find out that doing so was going to be impossible.
She dressed in her best gym attire, feeling that looking cute would go a long way here.
The top was fitted, with a crisscross pattern at the back, the fabric an emerald green that brought out the color of her eyes.
The shorts were fitted at the top and flared just a little at the thighs, and she knew they made her butt look amazing.
She tied her hair back in a ponytail and grabbed her purse.
The gym was only three blocks from here—there would be no need to take the car.
By the time she arrived, her heart was doing flip-flops in her chest. She couldn’t help looking around as she walked into the lobby, but there was no sign of Elijah anywhere.
That’s good. It’ll give me a minute to get my bearings before I have to try approaching him.
She stopped at the front desk and paid for her guest pass, a lanyard that she was obliged to wear around her neck.
She wished she could take it off. Advertising that she was a guest here would make it hard to sell the idea that their meeting again was nothing more than a coincidence.
But on the other hand, what is he going to think?
That his father emailed me his schedule this morning?
The truth was too crazy to believe. That would work in her favor.
She went first to the mats that were positioned in front of a wall of mirrors and began some stretching. While she did it, she looked in the mirror, surveying the room and trying to catch a glimpse of Elijah.
There.
He was on one of the weight machines in the corner of the room.
Stephanie usually avoided those machines when she visited the gym for the simple reason that she wasn’t exactly sure how to use them, and she didn’t want to make a fool of herself in the attempt.
Most of them were intuitive enough that she could probably have figured out what to do with them if she had tried, but even so, the idea of figuring things out with people watching as they would be here turned her off.
Today, though, she’d have to cope with it. She couldn’t just stay over here on the mat and hope that he would notice her, and that if he did he would make the first move.
She got to her feet, set her sights on a machine right next to the one he was using, and made her way over to it without looking left or right, pretending she hadn’t noticed Elijah at all.
She sat down at the machine and adjusted the weight to a medium setting. Then she looked at it with misgivings. How did she go about using the darned thing?
“Need a hand?”
Exactly what she had hoped would happen.
She recognized his voice, she realized. She hadn’t known that she would, that it would be so familiar to her when she heard it again.
But there was a depth and a power there.
It resonated on a low frequency that wasn’t common, and yes, she did know that voice.
She turned toward him and adopted an expression that she hoped registered as surprise.
“Elijah Norcross?” she asked. “Don’t tell me this is your gym.”
“Has been for years,” he said with a laugh, and she relaxed a little.
That wasn’t the attitude of someone who was angry that he had been rejected last night.
Maybe this was going to go all right after all.
“I’ve never seen you here before, though.
And I think I would’ve remembered if I had.
” His eyes swept over her, checking her out again.
He’s shameless. And yet, that was going to work in her favor here. She held up her guest pass and grinned. “I don’t come here very often,” she said. “Not enough to make a membership worth it.”
“Which is why you don’t know what to do with the machine,” he surmised.
She laughed. “Is it that obvious?”
“Afraid so. Look, I’ll give you a hand. Your arms go here and here, and you’re going to squeeze them together like this.” He mimed the motion in front of her, then waved his hand to say that she should go ahead and give it a try.
She did. The machine didn’t budge.
“Okay, you’re starting with too high a weight,” he told her. He reached behind her and adjusted the setting. “Give it a try now.”
She did. This time the arms of the machine came together easily. “That was too easy,” she said. “I can do more weight than that.”
“Well, give that a try first,” Elijah said. “Do it ten times and see if it still feels easy, and if it does, we’ll give you more weight, but if repetition makes it start to feel hard then you’re where you should be.”
Stephanie began to move the arms of the machine, slowly and gradually, testing herself. “So you come here a lot,” she pushed on, ready to advance the conversation.
“Almost every day,” he told her. “It’s an important part of my routine. Though if you had come home with me last night,” he added somewhat roguishly, “things would have been different. I would have skipped the gym to show you a nice morning. Breakfast in bed and everything.”
She took a deep breath. It was time to pretend to eat some humble pie. “I’m sorry I turned you down last night,” she said. “I hope I didn’t make things too uncomfortable.”
He shrugged. “No need to apologize,” he said. “It was just an invitation. If it wasn’t something you wanted, you were right to turn it down. I admit I was surprised, though. We were having a good time, I thought.”
“No, we were,” she said quickly. “It was just that I went to that dinner for work reasons. It meant a lot to me to be there, to be meeting people and trying to get my name out there. And I really didn’t want to be seen that night as the woman who blew off the function and left with a guy—even if he was a really cute guy,” she added.
He grinned at her. “I figured it had to be something like that,” he said. “I mean, it obviously wasn’t that you weren’t interested.”
Well, that was bold. Still, it helped her cause that he felt that way about it. “Of course not,” she assured him. “If the circumstances had been different, I would have given you a different answer. I just needed to keep my mind on my work, that’s all.”
“You’re very serious about working,” he observed. “I can respect it. It’s kind of cute, to tell you the truth. But do you also know how to have a good time?”
“Maybe you’d like to find out for yourself,” she suggested. This would be so much better if he was the one to ask her out, if they went on seeing one another because he had suggested it. If it was by his request, he would have no reason to ever suspect that her motives were anything but pure.
Not that he’s likely to suspect it anyway. Not with the way he had been talking. It was so clear that the idea of anyone not thirsting for a date with him was completely outside the realm of his experience that he didn’t know how to process it.
And sure enough, he made his move. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Do you like basketball?”
Stephanie released the machine back to its neutral position and sat forward. “Basketball?”
“I have season tickets to see the San Valentino Vipers,” he explained. “I’d love to take you to tomorrow’s game, if you’d like to go, and to dinner afterward. Then you and I can get to know one another better, without me interfering with your work. How does that sound?”
“Well, it sounds like fun,” she admitted. “I do like basketball a lot. I’ve been a fan for years.” That much, conveniently, was true. She would enjoy a Vipers game. She had never been.
“The tickets are great,” he assured her. “Courtside seats. Only the best. How about if I pick you up tomorrow at six o’clock? Would that work for you?”
“Sure,” she said, reflecting that this had all gone better than she could have hoped it would.
She’d have something to report to Oliver Norcross tonight, and she knew he would be pleased.
“You know, I have to say once more—I’m sorry for the rough start between the two of us.
And I’m grateful to you for giving me another chance. ”
He waved a hand. “Think nothing of it,” he told her. “I had a feeling you were going to come around, and I’m not at all surprised to hear that the reason you told me no was some work thing. I’m just glad we ran into each other again so you had the chance to come to your senses about it.”
Stephanie gritted her teeth and nodded. The one thing that was going to make this a challenge was his arrogance—how could he stand there and say he had known she was going to change her mind? As though it had been inevitable?
But on the other hand, his arrogance removed any guilt she might have been inclined to feel about the fact that she was tricking him.
She was playing him, deceiving him, but if anyone in the world deserved this kind of deception, it was the man in front of her.
He deserved to think he was going on a date with a woman who was interested in him, when in fact she was only going to be there out of obligation and self-interest.
If it had been anyone else, Stephanie would likely have been ashamed of herself for using him for her own advantage.
But with Elijah… he just assumed way too much. He was way too cocky.
The idea of him getting played was, she could admit, a little appealing.