Page 17 of The Prime-Time Experiment

Twice, she lost track of which client she was documenting because Declan had altered something mid-session while simultaneously speaking to her across the floor, forcing her attention to split before she fully processed the previous data point.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to determine how much of the instability was environmental and how much of it was him. Riley tightened her grip slightly around the pen resting against her notebook as she mentally revisited the wording of the contract again, clause by clause, testing each observation against the agreed conditions.

If he had breached the agreement, even subtly, she would have identified it already. The framework had been designed specifically for that purpose.

The first clause required maintenance of core program integrity during the baseline observation period. He was complying with it.

Every session still contained the same foundational structure: compound lifts as primary movements, accessory exercises layered afterwards, load adjusted appropriately for each individual client.

The second clause required observable progression. That condition was also being met. Loads increased and repetitions shifted, which meant clients advanced appropriately across difficulty levels.

She was aware the progression existed, it simply refused to appear in identical data forms twice. Riley exhaled slowly through her nose before reaching for the noise-cancelling headphones beside her laptop.

The reduction in sound was immediate. Enough that the pressure building behind her eyes eased fractionally as the music dulled into something distant and blunt instead of sharp enough to keep cutting through her concentration. Conversations lost their individual clarity, the constant overlapping voices became movement instead of language her brain kept trying to process automatically.

Her shoulders lowered slightly before she consciously registered the adjustment. Better.

She looked back down at the spreadsheet, reorganising the previous client’s session into something workable now that her thoughts could align properly again.

Across the floor, Declan said something. Riley saw his mouth move but heard nothing. He gestured toward her, brows lifting slightly when she didn’t respond. She pulled one side of the headphones off.

Noise rushed back in hard enough to make her flinch internally.

“—ignoring me already, Riles?” he called, amusement threading easily through his voice.

A couple of nearby clients laughed softly. Riley stared at him for a second, still trying to reorganise around the abrupt return of sound. “I was working.”

“Cute headphones,” he replied casually, turning back toward his client like the interaction required no further thought whatsoever.

The comment lodged somewhere unpleasant under her skin. She slid the headphones back on. The quiet returned, but differently this time, less stable. Her attention kept catching on him across the gym floor now, waiting for him to speak again so she would have to remove the headphones and let the noise crash back in.

Twice more, he did exactly that. Each transition felt worse: quiet, noise, quiet again. Her concentration kept tearing before it could settle fully back into place. And gradually, another possibility formed beneath the irritation.

Maybe this was intentional. Maybe Declan had realised early on that consistency was necessary for her to function effectively inside this environment, and now he was deliberately preventing her from finding it.

The thought pulled her attention back toward him automatically.

Across the gym floor, Declan adjusted his client’s stance with one hand while continuing a conversation that appeared entirely unrelated to the correction itself. The movement was easy, practised. Effortless enough that the client laughed halfway through it before immediately resetting their grip exactly the way Declan wanted.

Riley tracked the sequence instinctively. Instruction, adjustment. Then his gaze lifted, falling on her without hesitation.

It hadn’t been a casual sweep of someone checking the room between sets. Something shifted briefly at the corner of his mouth, not a smile exactly. Something smaller, gone almost as quickly as it appeared, but his eyes stayed on hers.

And suddenly, with slow and deeply unpleasant clarity, Riley understood. He knew.

Not simply that she was observing the sessions. That part had been obvious from the beginning. He knew she was trying to map the patterns. Worse, he knew she was struggling to stabilise them.

And he was enjoying it.

Riley pressed her lips together, forcing her exasperation downward before it could translate into anything externally visible. Emotion served no functional purpose here. It would not restore control, improve the data, or resolve the increasingly obvious problem standing across the gym floor pretending not to watch her back.

The environment itself was already difficult enough to regulate.

Sound refused to settle properly into the background. Weights struck the floor in uneven bursts sharp enough to keep pulling at her attention no matter how many times she tried to filter them out. Conversations overlapped into each other without clean separation, forcing her brain to keep parsing tone and language simultaneously even when she was no longer actively listening. The music threaded through all of it, bass-heavy and inconsistent, its rhythm never fully aligning with the movement on the floor.

Nothing prioritised itself correctly. Her attention kept trying to force structure onto it anyway; sorting, categorising, reorganising inputs in real time, but there were too many competing variables and nothing stable enough to anchor the rest around.

And now, on top of that, she was expected to participate, to exercise inside this environment. To be filmed inside it, with him. Riley’s jaw tightened.