Chapter Eight

THAT COULD HAVE GONE BETTER.

Of course, it could have gone much, much worse, and Alex had been steeling himself for reactions ranging from a drink in his face to a full-on screaming match.

Instead, Rachel Bishop had looked at him with this closed-off, hurt expression and set her cell phone timer for two minutes. Two minutes in which he had poured out his regrets about his part in the situation and then been summarily dismissed.

He wound his way from the food truck court toward his dark-blue Subaru parked down the street. Fine. Perfect, actually. He’d done what he’d come to do, apologize and offer his assistance, and she’d refused. He was off the hook.

Except he was still thinking about her. That was about as far from off the hook as he could get.

He opened his car door with his key fob and threw himself into the front seat. He’d made an error coming here tonight. He’d prepared himself for all the possible ways she might react and how he would handle it. He’d just been thinking of her in terms of a wronged chef whose career had been damaged.

It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might be an extremely attractive woman.

He’d looked her up online, of course. Her only photos on her restaurant’s website and her Facebook page had been the run-of-the-mill head-shot variety: hair in a knot, white chef’s jacket, arms crossed over her chest while she gazed seriously at the camera. If she’d been wearing makeup, it was the kind devised to make her look natural and no-nonsense.

He hadn’t expected a dark-haired beauty with a killer figure and long, wavy hair that begged a man to bury his fingers in it. So no, he might not have given his apology the full attention it deserved.

He really was a jerk. Wasn’t that the very thing he’d been trying to call Espy on, the tendency to judge a woman who had done extraordinary things solely on her looks and sex appeal? Of course, he wasn’t actually judging her on her looks; they were an unexpected bonus.

That was some hard-core justification if he’d ever heard any.

Alex pulled away from the curb into the waning evening traffic and made his way southeast through the city to his condo in Cheesman Park. Denver’s neighborhoods ebbed and flowed into each other much more smoothly than a city map might suggest, pockets of distinct architecture separated by commercial space of every vintage and dotted with contemporary homes that had sprung up in place of historic ones that were too old to be saved —or where the demand was too high to justify leaving an 800-square-foot foursquare intact.

His building was a 1970s high-rise, built on the site of a former 1930s mansion, long since torn down to accommodate the city’s population growth. It had been updated several times over the decades, the last time while he was living there. He’d written his first —and possibly only —book in the middle of a construction zone, the hammering and sawing so relentless that it had invaded his dreams. Now, however, he found himself with prime Denver real estate, equity in the bank, and a rental unit next door that brought in enough income to keep him there.

It was the one truly good thing he’d gotten out of his last relationship. There were advantages to dating a real estate agent, after all.

Alex turned onto his street as one of his neighbors pulled out of a spot, and he navigated the wagon into the empty space. He grabbed the plastic bag holding his food —from the amazing French truck at Rhino Crash —and made his way into the lobby and up the elevator. Silently, the metal box slid upward to one of four penthouses on the top floor. Yes, he’d gotten lucky for sure. Thirty-one-year-old self-employed writers typically didn’t get penthouse apartments in the city.

The new lock turned smoothly and he pushed through to his loft space, dropping his keys on the table by the front door and striding through to the open renovated kitchen. Good for resale, Victoria had said, picking out high-end appliances and finishes that made it the perfect bachelor pad for the man who liked to entertain.

He’d never even turned on the oven.

Instead, he found a chilled bottle of pop in the refrigerator, pulled out some utensils, and took his takeout to the drafting table in his bedroom. He could eat while he worked on his proposal. Now that he’d dispatched his duty to Rachel Bishop, the block he’d had against putting words on the page should evaporate and he could get both his agent and his publisher off his back.

But the blinking cursor on the screen didn’t move, even as the pile of duck-fat fries and shredded confit shrank to nothing more than a smudge at the bottom of the paper container.

He had nothing to say.

“That can’t be true.” Alex tipped his chair back on two legs. He always had something to say about everything —according to Victoria, it was one of his greatest faults. A teenager walking through the botanic gardens with his eyes on his cell phone rather than the beauty around him would spawn an incisive essay on how technology had at once heightened society’s focus and damaged its ability to see the bigger picture. Fitness enthusiasts running the stairs at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in their designer exercise duds with perfectly coiffed hair might spark musings on the commercial intersection of fitness and beauty. The world around him was filled with details that other people missed. It was his job to draw attention to those things.

And yet the only detail on which he could focus was the slightly uncomfortable way Rachel had sat at that table, looking lost and out of her depth. What was she doing right now? What was she going to do next? Was she like all the people who left corporate America —or prison —and realized that no matter how bad it was on the inside, it was better than a world of free choice?

There was an essay there, all right, but unless he wanted to make matters worse, Rachel Bishop could never be the topic of his writing.

Alex shoved back from the desk with a frustrated sigh and took his empty paper bowl to the trash can beneath the sink. He wasn’t going to get anywhere on the proposal tonight. He picked up his phone and texted a quick message to Bryan: Going to the gym. Meet me there if you’re free. Outdoor climbing was always his first choice to settle his thoughts, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Bryan texted back immediately. Be there in 30.

At least Alex felt better about one thing: at the moment, Bryan had no more of a social life than he did.

*   *   *

The gym wasn’t exactly packed, but it still took Alex a few minutes to find Bryan in the expansive, warehouse-like space. This wasn’t a typical gym; it catered to Denver’s extreme-sports enthusiasts. It wasn’t unusual to see men and a few women training for things like American Ninja Warrior, taking advantage of all the unusual obstacles meant to build the skills necessary to hang from, vault over, and flip off the sides of cliffs and buildings. Every time he felt good about his level of fitness, all he had to do was show up and watch someone running the parkour course like it was a child’s inflatable obstacle bouncer. He was still recovering from his last attempt at the salmon ladder.

When he finally located his friend, Bryan was climbing the twenty-foot bouldering wall, scaling the side with such rapidity that a couple members had stopped to watch him. Alex waited until he reached the top, then called up, “Are you done showing off?”

“Not quite,” Bryan called without looking behind him, then began downclimbing with as much fluidity as he’d shown on the way up.

“You can’t help yourself, can you?” Alex said when Bryan came back over to him.

“What?”

Alex followed his friend’s gaze and saw a pretty blonde give him a shy smile before she went back to talking to her friend. “You going to go talk to her?”

Bryan shrugged. “I see her around here sometimes. Respectable climber, though she’s got some bad habits.”

“Somehow I don’t think you were showing off for her because you’re interested in her climbing habits.”

“How did the conversation with the chef go?”

Alex shook his head with a wry smile. “Nice subject change.” He might have a good reason to be gun-shy about jumping into a relationship again after Victoria, but Bryan should have no such qualms. Women practically fell at his feet, including nice ones that he could take home to his mother. Yet even if one did catch his attention long enough to date, she didn’t last past the first month.

“I take it the fact you’re here means it didn’t go well?” Bryan started toward the room in the back where the parkour course was located, along with some separate apparatuses set up specifically for climbers.

“She gave me two minutes and then basically told me to get lost.”

“Then you’re off the hook.”

“Yeah.”

Bryan looked at him sideways. “Wow. She was that hot?”

Alex blinked. “What? Who said anything about her looks?”

“You’re a good guy, Alex, but even you don’t feel that guilty over a stranger unless you’ve got some personal interest in her. So what gives?”

He almost felt embarrassed to voice it aloud. “She’s clearly not the type to skate by on her looks, but she could if she wanted to. No question.”

Bryan whistled. “And she can cook? Marry her.”

“She won’t even talk to me. I thought she was going to slap me when I put my number in her phone.”

“Nice one. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“To help her out professionally.”

“Sure. Keep telling yourself that.”

Alex rolled his eyes and approached the ledge on the far side of the room. “Can we get to it here? I’m afraid you’re going to spring a 5.13 on me next time you call me out for an easy climb.”

“Fine.” Bryan shrugged. “But you know you suck at multitasking. As long as she’s out there and she hates you, you’re not going to write a single word. You remember our senior year? You were going to fail AP Lit until I forced you to ask out Belinda Ashton. As soon as you had the date set up, you wrote your entire term paper in an evening.”

“I wrote my entire term paper in an evening because I was afraid of not graduating.”

“Right. So you’re welcome.”

Alex climbed the steps to take his position at the slanted concrete wall, wishing his friend didn’t know him and his strange work habits so well. It was easier to tell himself that he didn’t have a problem when Bryan didn’t needle him about it. Instead, he chalked his hands and then reached up for the narrow ridge of smooth concrete. The wall sloped away toward the floor so there was no way to get a foothold and help support his body weight; it was hand and forearm strength all the way across. To make it harder, the ledge undulated up and down, changing the balance and grip. Lack of concentration or strength meant an eight-foot drop to an only slightly padded floor below.

He took his position and inched his way across, his feet swinging while the muscles and tendons in his hands and forearms strained.

“Ninety degrees!” Bryan called, and Alex pulled himself up to put the stress on his biceps and not his elbow joints. This was the perfect metaphor for his life. Hanging on by the tips of his fingers, a fall beneath him if he made one wrong move. No matter what Bryan said, he needed to pull himself together, write the proposal, and get to the other side. This was the time to power through and keep his mind on the task before him.

Not on a beautiful chef and the mess he had inadvertently made of her life.