“Stern, glacial, disaffected?” Jennifer guessed.

“Unknowable,” Liza finally settled on.

Jennifer stopped short. She looked like she was about to agree, then shook her head vigorously.

“Oh, I don’t know . . . Once you get to know him, he’s just a great big old teddy bear,” Jennifer said. The lie must have tasted foul coming out of her mouth, because she made the slightest frown when she said it.

Liza walked with Jennifer around the dark side of the building. Jennifer’s face suddenly lit up. Uh-oh, she’s scheming. Liza didn’t know what she was about to be a party to. They walked outside the hallway and back into the cubicle space.

When they saw Dorsey again, looking less troubled and a bit refreshed, Jennifer asked him, “Do you want to use the office workout space downstairs, maybe do some yoga?”

“Why would I do that?” he grumbled, apparently still annoyed.

“To stretch your limbs, exercise. Relax,” she said pointedly.

“There are two reasons you would ask me that, and not one of them is to relax,” Dorsey said smugly. He was responding to Jennifer but looking in Liza’s direction—trying to get a rise out of her, she knew. She wouldn’t take the bait.

Jennifer smiled coyly and elbowed Liza. “What is he talking about? What is he trying to say?”

Liza shrugged. “Please don’t pretend to be curious,” she said, rolling her eyes. “He’s bursting at the seams with some cockeyed theory.”

Dorsey’s full attention was rattling Liza. “Are you the only one allowed cockeyed theories, Liza?”

Jennifer pushed her way back into the conversation. “What did you mean, Dorsey?”

“Two reasons you would ask that. You want to see me do yoga, and if so, you can look at me all you like right here. Or you want to do yoga in front of me—”

“Dorsey!” Jennifer hit his shoulder. The false outrage made Liza want to hurl. This man needed no extra boost to his sense of self-importance.

“And if you want to show me your downward dog now, I won’t object. Either way, I’m better served sitting right here.”

“You are terrible.” Jennifer turned crimson. “I’ve never heard you talk this way. How often are you watching me do yoga, you Peeping Tom?” She pretended to be scandalized. “Liza, don’t you have that feminist blog? Are you going to write about his chauvinism?”

Liza blinked. She walked around the table, conscious of his dark eyes following her. “Hmm, nothing so obvious as that. I’d write about his ego, and his assumptions that everything is about him.”

Jennifer scoffed, but Dorsey’s eyes fixed on Liza and did not move. Liza could only meet his gaze in quick glances. The atmosphere of the room was thick. They were doing this, somehow changing the very chemistry in the air.