To be on the receiving end of Annabelle Martin’s full attention, to have her big brown eyes focused on me, well, it made my head fuzzy and I had to glance away to try to reboot my brain, which had just stalled out like it had a dead battery.

I hadn’t been alone with an attractive woman in so long, I barely remembered how to behave. Of course, this was all new territory for me as a man who used a wheelchair as his safe space. I’d never had cause to doubt myself with the opposite sex before, not like I did now. I glanced back at her face to see what she made of all this.

In the yellow porch light, I could just see the pulse point at the base of her throat. Was it ticking as fast as mine, or was that just wishful thinking? I sat beside her in a wheelchair. How could she see me as anything other than a broken man? She couldn’t, and it was good for me to remember that.

“I need you to be me,” I said.

She was quiet for a moment and then asked, “Be you? As in, you as a woman? Like you had a gender reassignment?”

A laugh punched out of me. “Uh, no, more like my representative, the face of Daire Industries.”

“I’m a graphic designer,” she said. “I draw things, make them pretty or interesting. I have zero skills in the business world, obviously.”

“You don’t have to do anything other than go to a gala and schmooze with the press, local politicians, and businessmen, assuring them that I am one hundred percent invested in the housing development for which the gala is being held to solicit money from investors.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“Why me?” she asked. “Surely you must know someone from your business days who would be better suited.”

“True,” I said. “You aren’t really qualified.”

She didn’t like that. I saw her shift in her seat, and her chin tipped up ever so slightly. Why was teasing her so much fun? Was it flirting? Was I flirting? My history with women had never included this sort of back-and-forth. It was always much more straightforward with me being rich and the women I dated wanting to be with a guy who could pay for the lifestyle to which they wanted to become accustomed. None of those relationships, if I could even call them that, had lasted more than three months, a fiscal quarter in businessman’s terms.

“Again, why me?” she asked.

“Because this is mutually beneficial in that you need a big client, and if you do this for me, I will be delivering you one,” I said.

“Delivering or coercing?” she asked.

“Does it matter?”

“I’d prefer to work with someone who actually wants to hire me,” she said.