Chapter 14
Declan
Declan stopped pretending he wasn’t waiting for her.
The first few weeks he’d managed to convince himself it was coincidence.
Riley arrived at roughly the same time every morning, which meant it made sense for him to be upstairs near the door around then.
It made sense for him to finish whatever he was doing before her first client observation.
It made sense for him to have coffee made.
At some point those explanations had stopped holding up under scrutiny, because Riley wasn’t due for another seven minutes and he’d already checked the time twice.
Declan wasn’t usually the sort of person who paid attention to details, that always seemed more like Riley’s territory than his. She was the one who noticed patterns, the one who could spend an hour watching a room and walk away with conclusions nobody else saw.
But somewhere along the way he’d started doing it too. At first he’d told himself it was practical, the experiment required observation. Understanding how she worked made the sessions run smoother. That explanation had lasted maybe a week.
It didn’t explain why he’d noticed she carried her laptop on her left shoulder unless she’d had a particularly long day, or why he’d learned that she preferred hot coffee on the mornings she wasn’t going to be training that day, and iced coffee on the days she was.
It didn’t explain why he’d started keeping track of those things in the first place.
It definitely didn’t explain why he’d started looking for the tiny tilt of her head whenever something genuinely interested her.
The first time he’d noticed it, he’d thought it was accidental.
It wasn’t. She did it every time. Every single time.
And somehow that knowledge had lodged itself in his brain alongside things that were actually supposed to matter.
Which was probably a problem.
Because lately, it felt like half the things he knew about Riley had become important simply because they belonged to her.
Riley came up the front path with her usual purposeful stride, sunlight catching briefly against her hair before she stepped beneath the shade of the verandah.
His shirt hung off her shoulders. Declan’s gaze snagged on it immediately. Christ, it was just a shirt. A black training shirt he’d owned for years, one of about twenty almost identical shirts sitting in his wardrobe.
Except it wasn’t sitting in his wardrobe.
It was hanging loose on Riley, the sleeves falling lower on her arms than they did on him, the hem brushing the tops of her thighs.
She’d rolled the sleeves once to keep them out of the way and, for reasons he couldn’t begin to justify, that detail alone had occupied an unreasonable amount of space in his brain over the last week.
The stupid part was how much he liked it, not because it looked good—although it absolutely did—it was the fact she’d kept wearing it.
He’d offered it as a practical solution to a sensory issue, that was all.
Riley didn’t do things for sentiment. Riley did things because they were useful, which meant every morning she walked through his front door wearing one of his shirts, she was unknowingly carrying around physical proof that he’d solved a problem for her.
And every time he saw it, something deeply possessive and entirely unhelpful lit up inside his chest. It was ridiculous. He was a grown man, and yet somehow Riley borrowing a shirt had become the highlight of his morning.
By the time she reached the verandah, he was already opening it.
Riley looked up. There was never any surprise in her expression when she found him there, as though she expected him.
As though, somewhere in that relentlessly organised brain of hers, Declan opening the door had become part of the routine.
The thought settled somewhere dangerous. “Hi,” she said. And there it was again, that stupid giddy feeling.
“Hey, Riles,” he said, stepping back to let her inside.
She moved past him and into the house, and once again he found himself noticing something he probably shouldn’t have.
A few weeks ago, Riley would’ve left far more space between them.
It wouldn’t have been because she’d been uncomfortable around him exactly, but because she approached proximity the same way she approached everything else: deliberately.
Now she simply walked through the doorway. The distance was still there, but it no longer felt looked as thought about. God help him, that made him happier than it had any right to.
The house was quiet as they headed downstairs, neither of them feeling any particular need to fill the silence.
Riley never seemed bothered by it, and Declan had discovered he wasn’t either.
Somewhere along the way he’d stopped feeling responsible for carrying every conversation and started appreciating the fact that she never required it from him.
When they reached the gym, Riley paused briefly in the doorway.
Her gaze moved through the room, taking in the equipment, the layout, the positioning of everything within it.
A month ago, he would’ve assumed she was hesitating.
Now he understood that she was simply checking.
Making sure the space she expected to walk into was the same one she’d walked into yesterday.
It was, Declan had made sure of that.
The thought arrived so casually that it took him a second to recognise how ridiculous it was. Because he had made sure of it, often enough that he it had his nightly habit. The mats stayed where she expected them to be, the equipment remained arranged the same way.
It mattered to her, which meant it mattered to him too.
Riley crossed the room and set her bag down, beginning her usual routine. Laptop, notebook. Everything placed exactly where she wanted it before she seemed willing to settle herself.
Declan leaned against the wall and watched her. There was no point pretending he didn’t anymore. He watched her constantly.
Which he found ironic, considering Riley was probably the least attention-seeking person he’d ever met. If anything, she seemed happiest when everyone forgot she was there. He didn’t think that would ever be a possibility for him now.
The knock at the front door barely registered at first.
Declan heard it somewhere in the background of his thoughts, filed it away as something he would deal with in a second, and then promptly returned his attention to Riley.
Across the room she was reorganising a section of her notes, her brow furrowed slightly as she compared two columns of data. The concentration on her face was familiar now. He’d spent enough hours watching it to recognise the difference between curiosity, frustration and genuine engagement.
The knock came again. This time Riley looked up. “Your nine o’clock client has arrived.”
Declan blinked. For a second, he just stared at her. Then the actual meaning of the sentence caught up with him. “Right.” A laugh escaped before he could stop it, and he dragged a hand across the back of his neck.
Riley’s gaze narrowed slightly. “Was there a change to the schedule?”
“No.”
“Did they arrive early?”
“No.”
She studied him for another second. “Then why are you still standing here?”
Declan laughed properly at that. “Good question.”
Something in her expression shifted, not concern exactly, but observing him. “Are you alright?”
The question should have been easy to answer.
Instead, he found himself looking at her for a fraction longer than necessary, caught by her eyes again. It kept happening.
He’d never paid this much attention to anyone’s eyes before, but Riley’s made it difficult not to.
They were an impossible shade of green; clear, steady and far brighter than anything else about her.
Most people noticed her restraint first, or the careful way she moved through the world. Declan noticed her eyes.
Maybe because they gave so much away once you learned how to read them, or maybe because they were genuinely distracting.
Either way, they were fixed on him now with quiet expectation, waiting for an answer he should’ve given several seconds ago.
“Yeah,” he said eventually.
Riley nodded, apparently satisfied. Declan wasn’t, because the truth was he had absolutely no idea what was wrong with him anymore.
A few months ago he would’ve answered the door before the first knock had finished echoing through the house. Instead he’d stood there staring at Riley while the person paying him waited outside.
Which probably wasn’t the behaviour of a man who had everything under control.
Unfortunately, that particular conclusion was becoming harder and harder to avoid.
?
By five o’clock, Declan was beginning to suspect he had a problem.
Riley had spent the entire day in the corner of the gym collecting data.
That had been the arrangement for months now. Riley sat in the corner of the gym with her laptop, observing sessions, collecting data, and somehow managing to make herself almost invisible while she did it.
The invisible part was where the arrangement started to fall apart, because it turned out it was remarkably difficult to ignore someone who spent six hours a day sitting in one of your oversized shirts, quietly taking notes on your entire profession. Especially when that someone was Riley.
All day his attention had been splitting itself in directions it wasn’t supposed to.
He’d be halfway through explaining an exercise to a client and catch sight of her typing something into her laptop.
He’d glance over between sets and find her watching a movement pattern with the same intense concentration most people reserved for bomb disposal.
At one point he’d completely forgotten a client’s rep count because Riley had pushed her glasses up onto her head and immediately forgotten she’d done it. The client had noticed.
“You right, mate?”
Declan had lied and said yes. The worst part was Riley seemed entirely unaware of the effect she had on him.