Confidence Tricks

by Tamara Morgan

  This was it—her break. She was in.

  She rolled the windows down, letting the night air blow in and cool her skin. It was effective in cleaning off the stink of the strip club and Todd’s cologne—but not in wiping off the smile that worked its way across her face, ear to ear and soul-deep.

  Grandma Jean would have been proud.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Poppy drank the last of her coffee and shook the cup, determined to get every drop of caffeine she could out of the damn thing. Her throat hurt from working so hard to breathe clean air the night before, and her five a.m. wake-up call wasn’t doing the bags under her eyes any favors. Todd and Graff and Asprey and the stripper might have been able to spend the entire day recovering from the smoke and depravity in the comfort of their own beds, but until the con was all the way complete, Natalie had her usual yoga class to teach.

  Besides, Poppy figured the extra income couldn’t hurt. There was every chance she’d end up owing Asprey thirty thousand dollars when all was said and done. She needed a getaway fund.

  “Good morning!” she called with a brightness she didn’t feel, greeting her students at the door. “Nice to see you again.”

  Most of them were regulars, the same dozen women who got their morning calm on before heading off to high-intensity jobs as surgeons and professors and account executives. There was an eerie similarity to each one, with their sleek ponytails and name-brand gear, but Poppy liked them. They were the kind of women who had purpose and drive, willing to get up early five days a week to stick to their goals.

  Kind of like her, if you didn’t count their college degrees and intrinsic value to society.

  “I thought we might work on our flexibility today, so we’re going to start with some intense stretches to loosen everything up.”

  As one, all twelve women followed her to the ground, their legs spread as they reached slowly toward each foot, toes pointing and muscles awakening.

  “Is there room for one more?” a deep male voice asked, materializing at the door.

  Poppy looked up from her stretch to find Asprey with a rolled blue yoga mat under one arm, dressed the most casual she’d ever seen him in loose gym pants and a gray T-shirt. Instead of making him look grubby, as it would most people, the informal look suited him. His dark hair was adorably rumpled, pieces of it falling into his eyes, and he exuded a refreshing energy she could feel from all the way across the room.

  In fact, he looked fantastic, not at all as though he’d spent most of the previous night twirling a fake mustache.

  She couldn’t compete. Not at six o’clock in the morning. Not when there was a good chance her hair was on crooked and there were coffee grounds in her teeth.

  All heads turned toward the interruption, more than one of the women straightening her posture once she noticed what—or rather, who—caused it.

  “Come on in,” she said, motioning with one hand and allowing her middle finger to shoot clearly up as she did. Asprey noticed it and smiled wider, beaming as though he’d gotten a full eight hours of sleep.

  Of course he’d be a morning person on top of everything else.

  “Set up anywhere there’s space. I hope you’re more limber than you look, because we’re getting really deep today.”

  “I can go deep,” he promised, trotting into the small studio, which was set off from the weight room by a mirrored partition wall. “’Scuse me. Pardon me.” He touched the shoulder or back of every woman he passed as he made his way to the exact center of the room, asking politely if a few of them would scootch over just a touch so he could squeeze in.

  Dead center. Right in her line of vision.

  She stabbed the MP3 dock behind her and cranked up the sounds of the surf as they went through the regular warm-up, trying her best to remember to breathe. That tiny act, so integral to yoga, seemed beyond her in that moment. It didn’t help when Asprey looked up from a pelvic tilt, his pants stretched tight across the crotch with all his manly, unapologetic parts right there for her to ogle, and gave her a thumbs-up.

  “Let’s all move into Downward Facing Dog,” she called. She would not pay attention to Asprey’s unapologetic parts. “I’ll come around and help you extend your legs one at a time to add a challenge. I want to see straight lines and tight cores.”

  At least with this pose, she wouldn’t have to look directly at him. Besides, in her experience, men couldn’t handle the dog. They got distracted by all those yoga-tight asses in the air and moved into a trance. She was pretty sure that was why yoga had been invented in the first place.

  The women shifted into rows of human molehills, so Poppy started at one end, checking form and technique as well as she could, given her lack of any actual training in the field. When she got to Asprey, she lost her footing a little, and only caught herself from toppling into him at the last minute. He had good form. Great form, actually, and he didn’t seem at all distracted by the woman in front of him, whose incredibly trim glutes were on his eye level.

  She would never call Asprey an athletic man, and she doubted strength competitions were where he got even a portion of his monumental arrogance. But his lean build was never more appealing than at that exact moment, his limbs long and firm as he held his body stable, a Greek statue molded by reverent hands.

  Poppy grabbed his right calf and lifted his leg to waist-level, exerting none of the gentle pressure the other women in the class got. He grunted but didn’t falter, exhibiting more flexibility than she thought possible. And still he didn’t waver. He looked like a man with great staying power. Stamina.

  Oh, man. And his ass was yoga-tight. She felt a trance coming on.

  “How am I doing, teacher?” he asked, turning his head to watch her. She dropped his leg with a heavy thump. “Do you give out gold stars for good technique?”

  Poppy let out a half-snort, half-snuffled sound. “This is basic stuff. If you’d ever taken my class before, you’d know it gets a lot harder than this.”

  She clapped her hands, ignoring the five women she had yet to get to. “Okay, guys. I want you to break off into two groups. Half of you take a breather by the back wall. The other half I want spread out on the floor. I doubt we’re there yet, but let’s go for full Warrior.”

  Warrior Pose III was one of her favorites because of its simplicity. The stance pretty much required a person to make the shape of a T with one leg flat on the floor, the other extended at a forty-five degree angle behind her and the upper torso bent at the waist. It was easy enough in theory, but holding it still for any length of time required supreme balance and control.

  She hadn’t been able to successfully do it until recently. She hadn’t been able to do any poses at all until recently, if she was being honest. There had been a Kundalini yoga program offered at the jail. She’d taken the classes hoping to alleviate some of the monumental boredom that assailed her inside there, and found she liked the calm focus of it, like martial arts while taking a nap.

  And she could use the classes to her advantage now, especially since most of the poses she taught were made up on the fly. It was a different kind of training, keeping her con mentality primed and ready to go.

  Asprey shook his arms and legs, rolling his neck quickly. “Stay right there,” he said to Poppy. She paused in the middle of switching off the music. “I need you to be my focus.”

  She remained in an awkward hunched position near the front while Asprey set himself and extended his leg. His front half bowed before her, though he kept his gaze trained on her as he bent to become a flat plane. His T-shirt slipped up as he reached his full length, enough so that she could see the flash of skin above the waistline of his pants. Hard, lean, tan—all those things a man should be if he could possibly help it.

  And he didn’t waver or wobble once. There was even a moment when he winked at her.

  The class broke out into applause as he resumed a normal standing position.

  “Do the Crane!” someone called from the back o
f the room. Just last week, they’d discussed the possibility of learning the two-handed stand that forced you to curl your body entirely up in the air—but Poppy had no idea how to do that advanced of a technique, so she’d distracted them with some basic splits.

  “Oh, come on,” she tried. “Let’s not put our new student on the spot.”

  “I wish I could,” Asprey said, his eyes laughing, “but I recently underwent some trauma to my arm and it’s not quite back to normal yet. I can probably do a one-legged squat, though.”

  Before Poppy could say anything in protest, he fell into a squat and lifted one leg so that he balanced on the ball of just his right foot. With an otherworldly and strangely masculine kind of grace, he squared his back and brought his palms together in front of him. It was mesmerizing, how much concentration it took him to remain there with his entire body focused on one task, all of his muscles working together to accomplish their goal. The rise and fall of his chest in a perfectly even pattern was the only sound in the room.

  The goal of yoga was to create a sense of inner balance bred of the mastery of one’s own body—that much she knew. But as Poppy blew out a long breath, striving for some of that inner balance, the room spun, Asprey as the irresistible and unquestionable center. Her body felt each turn, hot and cold at the same time, her skin pricking to life as if after a long sleep.

  This wasn’t mastery. This was desire, plain and simple—and it moved in lopsided revolutions that shook and expanded by the second.

  She wasn’t alone.

  As Poppy took in the sight of all the women trained on the exact same phenomenon created by Asprey and the air around him, she coughed loudly. It was successful in getting Asprey to unfold himself and stop the one-man show-off exhibition, but the applause only grew in enthusiasm.

  “Thank you, thank you,” he said with a laugh, holding up his hands as if to ward off the ministrations of his new fan club. “I’m a little out of practice these days.”

  “That was amazing!” a blonde in bright blue bicycle shorts said, coming up to touch him on the arm.

  “Where did you train?” a redhead added, sidling up on his other side.

  “Yeah,” Poppy added, curiosity getting the better of her. “Where did you train?”

  “Are you asking me a personal question?” Asprey straightened and looked her firmly in the eye. “An…exchange of truths, perhaps?”

  Damn him. She’d forgotten about their deal. “I retract the question,” she said hurriedly.

  He ignored her, and even though he addressed the room as a group, it was obvious he spoke only to her. And the worst part was that she wanted to know. How did an over-privileged trust-fund baby turned jewelry thief who took nothing seriously in life master the kinds of techniques that took years of dedication and training? Who were these people?

  “It’s not that exciting,” he apologized with a schoolboy smile, his blue eyes twinkling. “I spent a year in India in my early twenties. It was one of those find-yourself-in-third-world-hostels sort of trips that I took right after I graduated from college. There was this popular ashram in Chennai—near the south coast—and I stayed there for a while, working with the yogi and kind of hanging out.”

  “Third-world hostels?” She doubted it. Where would he have ironed his vests?

  He grinned sheepishly, clearly caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Well, sometimes. There might have been a few five-star hotels booked during my trip to break things up a little. Also so I could shower. But the ashram was real. I stayed there for a few months, even slept on a pallet on the floor, if you can believe that.”

  The other women jumped all over the idea, peppering him with questions about his spiritual journey and whether or not he’d read Eat, Pray, Love. Poppy tried to be angry at him—after all, he was hijacking her yoga class just like he was hijacking her con.

  But it felt good to see a friendly face, especially when it came accompanied by a fluttery feeling that started somewhere near her chest and worked in tumbled circles down to her stomach. As much as she might not want to admit it, trying to do this all on her own was lonely work. She was tired of being lonely. She was tired of feeling isolated. She was tired of being locked up, even if it was just inside her own head.

  They eventually got back on track, and it was the hardest Poppy had ever been on her poor students, moving from gentle morning yoga to sets of crunches that left them all sweaty and heaving. If she could have gotten away with it, she might have even suggested they break up into sparring partners. Then they could see who was better at showing off—even if they didn’t all have fancy overseas experiences to back it up.

  “So,” Asprey said, as Poppy stood at the door, bidding farewell to the students one by one. He was the last in line, and he made no attempt to exit the premises in a timely manner. “That was fun, wasn’t it, Natalie?”

  She threw a towel at him and glared. “Some of us have to preserve our cover for a few more days. It was a stupid idea for you to come here. What if Todd had come in?”

  “Todd wakes up every morning at seven-thirty. On a good day, he’s out of the house at eight, at which point he stops for a coffee at that lingerie barista stand over on 129th before heading to work. He’s an evening gym patron, stops by on his way home for the night. That is, unless he opts to stop at the bar around the corner, which he typically does on Thursdays and Fridays, because those are your days off.”

  “You really are the accomplished stalker, aren’t you?”

  He threw the towel back at her. “I’m not accomplished at anything. People are predictable, and anyone can figure them out. It takes nothing but time.”

  She wasn’t so sure about that. Asprey had an uncanny way of putting a person at ease, stripping her of defenses carefully wrought over years of hard use. “You came here on purpose to aggravate me, didn’t you?”

  “Not at all. I came here to make sure you’re okay.”

  She stopped in the process of gathering her things to clear the studio for Zumba, which started in fifteen minutes. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He helped her lift the stack of yoga mats and pile them in the corner. Before she could step back, he placed a hand on her arm. “I didn’t like letting you walk out with him last night.”

  She let out a short bark of a laugh, but the hand remained. “I’ve been walking out with him for weeks, Asprey. That’s kind of the point.”

  His eyes flashed, the blue deepening to an almost twilight hue. “I know it is. But that was before you met me.”

  “Are you sure that is what’s really bothering you about me and Todd?” She held her breath, waiting for the explosion. This was why it was a bad idea to let feelings take over in the middle of a job—it clouded judgment, made them second-guess the kinds of decisions necessary to pull things off successfully.

  “I just want you to know I’m here to help, that’s all,” he said quietly. “I know you’re a lone wolf and you can take care of yourself, but if this arrangement of ours is going to work, I reserve the right to be concerned when we leave you in the hands of a criminal in the middle of the night.”

  Her hand moved to his cheek, acting as if of its own resolution, taken in by the moment and the unexpectedness of his reply. His face was scratchy, just like she expected, the stubble grazing her palm almost like a caress. “I am the criminal in the middle of the night, Asprey.” Before she could think better of it, she added, “And I don’t sleep with my marks. I’m not that kind of con artist.”

  “I never thought you were.”

  “I know. That’s why I wanted to make sure you heard it from me.”

  Asprey released her then, and they moved toward the door, side by side but not touching. When he turned to face her, the smile once again played on his lips. “Speaking of truth, does this mean it’s time for my question? Seeing as how I divulged the roots of my training in the manly art of yoga?”

  The breath she released was both a laugh and a cry. They were treading on dangerous g
round, and she didn’t mean the overly waxed studio floors. Right here, right now, there was every chance she’d feel compelled to tell him whatever it was he asked—and there wasn’t anything that existed that could be so disastrous to her sense of self-preservation.

  When he hesitated, she used the moment to her advantage, angling for a distraction. “That’s not fair. You came here intending to goad me with your superior yoga skills. Let me guess—you learned them to impress a woman.”

  “That’s only partially true,” he protested. “I journeyed to the ashram for a woman. I stayed for me.”

  It was getting uncomfortable being trapped in the tiny studio, especially since he blocked the only exit, all six feet of him. She moved so that she stood between Asprey and the door, and relief compelled her to capitulate.

  “Fine. You win. What’s your big, important question?”

  He steepled his fingers and pretended to think about it, not giving in until Poppy let out an exasperated sigh and made a motion at her wrist. She was technically at work, and it wouldn’t help matters any if word got back to Todd that she spent fifteen minutes chatting up her hot new male student.

  “Where did you learn to fight?”

  Once again, he managed to topple all of her expectations with one simple question—and she could see what he was doing, sneaking under her layers of protection, chipping away at her façade one personal fact at a time.

  “I have to man the juice counter until this afternoon,” she said, her mouth taking over her common sense. “If you want to pick me up three blocks west of here, by the newspaper stand that sells those weird sock puppets, I’ll show you.”

  To his credit, Asprey didn’t let his surprise show beyond a quick widening of the eyes and the grin he’d never be able to fully eliminate because his laugh lines ran too deep. “Three blocks. Sock puppets. Got it.”