Chapter 3—No Shelf, No Pretence

"Robin's POV"

The driver arrived at exactly the time Christopher had said he would.

I climbed into the back of a car that smelled like leather and money and told myself this was just a job. A shelf fitting. An hour of work, maybe less, and then I'd be back home with a fair amount added to my week.

That was what I told myself.

The building Christopher lived in had a doorman who greeted me by name before I'd said a word, which meant Christopher had told him I was coming, which meant he had been thinking about this before I arrived. I filed that away somewhere quiet and followed the doorman to the elevator. The lobby alone was enough to make my job site clothes feel out of place, marble floors, a ceiling that went up further than it needed to, the particular kind of silence that expensive buildings had.

The penthouse doors opened directly into the apartment, and I stepped inside and forgot what I was about to say.

The space was something else entirely. Floor to ceiling windows running the full length of the far wall, the city laid out beyond them like it had been arranged specifically for this room. Everything was clean lines and dark furniture and expensive quiet, the kind of apartment that looked like no one actually lived in it.

Christopher was already there, standing a few feet from the entrance, and he'd changed out of the suit. Dark trousers, a simple black shirt, sleeves pushed to the elbows. He looked different without the jacket, less like a CEO and more like a person, which I hadn't fully expected.

"Robin," he said, and something about the way he said it, like he was glad I'd actually shown up, made me feel like I'd walked into something I hadn't agreed to yet.

"Hey," I said. "So where's the shelf?"

He looked at me for a moment without answering, and I felt the pause before he spoke.

"About that."

I tilted my head. "About what?"

"There is no shelf." He said it simply, no fumbling, no drawn out explanation, just the words laid flat. "I didn't bring you here for a repair job. I brought you here because I wanted to talk to you, and I didn't know a better way to make that happen."

I stood there with my bag in my hand and looked at him.

I should have been annoyed. Any reasonable version of me would have been annoyed, having driven across the city for a job that didn't exist. But what I actually felt, standing there in his empty, expensive apartment while he watched me figure out what to do with the information, was curious.

Just curious.

"You could have called," I said.

"I know." He held my gaze. "I'm sorry. If you want to leave I'll have James take you home right now."

I set my bag down near the wall.

"I don't want to leave," I said. "I just want to know why."

Something shifted in his expression, quick and small, like he hadn't been sure which way this was going to go. He moved toward the kitchen and came back with two glasses of wine, holding one out without asking if I wanted it.

I took it.

"Come on," he said, nodding toward the balcony doors.

The balcony ran the length of the apartment and looked out over the city from high enough that the noise didn't reach. We settled into the chairs out there, the wine between us, and for a moment neither of us said anything. The city did its thing below, all light and movement, and up here it was just quiet.

"You watched me work," I said eventually. "Both days."

"I did," he said, no hesitation.

"Why?"

He turned his glass slowly in his hand. "Because I couldn't stop," he said, and he said it like it was a plain fact, no drama attached to it. "And then I saw you at the party and it was the same thing. I just wanted to be around you. I didn't have a clean way to make that happen so I made a messy one."

I looked at him. "You're the CEO of a company and you couldn't think of a better plan than a fake shelf."

He laughed at that, a real one, low and quick, and it changed his whole face. "Apparently not."

"That's terrible."

"I know."

I laughed too, and something in the air between us loosened.

We stayed out there for a long time after that. The wine ran low and we let it, neither of us moving to do anything about it. He asked me how I'd gotten into the trade and I told him about my dad, about spending school holidays on building sites, about how fixing things had always made more sense to me than most other options life had put in front of me.

He listened properly. Not the way people listened when they were waiting to talk, but the way someone listened when they were actually taking it in.

I asked him what he did when he wasn't running a company and the question seemed to catch him slightly off guard, like people didn't usually bother asking. He sat with it for a second, turning his glass in his hand, then said he read mostly, that he went to the gym more out of habit than enjoyment, and that he hadn't quite figured out much else yet.

"Yet?" I said.

"I'm working on it," he said, and smiled at his glass.

We talked about the city, about food, about a place he knew in the east end that he said had the best pasta he'd ever eaten. He described the dish with enough detail that I could tell it actually mattered to him, which I hadn't expected, and I told him he was making me hungry, and he laughed and said we could go sometime if I wanted. I told him about a place near where I grew up that had been knocked down three years ago and how sometimes you didn't know a place mattered until it was gone. He said he understood that more than I probably thought.

The lights across the city had fully taken over by the time the conversation started to slow, that comfortable kind of slow where nothing needs to fill the gaps.

Christopher set his glass down on the small table between us and looked at me with the same steadiness he seemed to look at everything, only this time there was something underneath it, something deliberate working its way to the surface.

"I'd like to do this properly," he said.

"Do what properly?"

"Take you out. An actual dinner, somewhere good, just the two of us." He paused. "If you're open to that."

I looked at him, at the city behind him, at the empty wine glasses and the easy quiet we'd built between us over the past few hours without even trying.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm open to that."

The corner of his mouth lifted, slow and genuine, and he nodded like something had just been decided.

It probably had.