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.” Hemimed 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.”
