The fish sarnie, when it showed up, turned out to be pretty much the most perfect thing I’d ever eaten: buttery sourdough wrapped around smoky slabs of eel, slathered in truly fiery horseradish and Dijon mustard, and served with pickled red onions just sharp enough to cut through the meaty intensity of the fish. I think maybe I genuinely moaned.

“Okay,” I said, once I’d inhaled it. “I was too hasty. That was so good I could pretty much marry you now.”

Maybe I was seeing the world through eel-tinted glasses, but right then, Oliver’s eyes had a touch of silver in them. And were softer than I’d thought. “I’m happy you liked it.”

“I could eat one every day for the rest of my life. How could you know these exist and give them up?”

“I…thought it was the right thing to do.”

“I can’t tell if that’s really commendable or really tragic.”

He lifted one shoulder in a self-conscious shrug. And the silence between us, while still not comfortable, seemed slightly less jagged. Maybe this was going to be okay. Maybe we’d been saved by a dead fish.

“So…uh…” Still riding my sandwich bliss, I felt slightly more able to make the effort. “I seem to remember you being a lawyer or something?”

“I’m a barrister, yes.”

“And what do you…barrist?”

“I—” The toe of his shoe whomped me in the knee. “God. I’m sorry. I’ve done it again.”

“I’ve got to say, you play one hell of a hard-core game of footsie.”

“I assure you, it’s been accidental every time.”

He looked so mortified I took pity on him. “It’s me. I’m all legs.”

We both peered beneath the tablecloth.

“How about if I…” I suggested, swinging my feet to the right.

He shuffled his Italian leather oxfords left. “And I go…”

His ankle brushed against mine as we rearranged ourselves. And it had clearly been way too long since I got laid, because I damn near fainted. Dragging my attention away from our under-table negotiations, I found him watching me with this crooked half-smile—as if we’d single-handedly (-footedly?) brought peace to the Middle East.

And all of a sudden he was a lot more bearable. Enough more bearable that I could almost see myself putting up with a man who smiled like that, and bought me amazing eel sandwiches, even if I didn’t have to.

Which was way, way worse than not liking him.

Chapter 7

“Your…your job?” I asked with all the smoothness of a bowl of granola.

“Ah. Yes. Well, I”—this time, his foot only stroked the side of mine as it jiggled under the table—“specialise in criminal defence. And you might as well get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

“The question that everyone asks when you tell them you work in criminal defence.”

This felt uncomfortably like failing an exam. In a blind panic, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Do you have sex in the wig?”

He stared at me. “No, because they’re very expensive, very uncomfortable, and I have to wear mine to work.”

“Oh.” I tried to come up with another question. Except now all I could think of was “Do you have sex in the robe?” and that obviously wasn’t going to help.

“The question people usually ask,” he went on, like he was the only one in the play who’d remembered his lines, “is how do you live with yourself when you spend your whole life putting rapists and murderers back on the street?”

“Actually, that is a good question.”

“Should I answer it?”

“Well, you seem to really want to.”

“It’s not about whether I want to.” His jaw tightened. “It’s about whether you’re going to think I’m an amoral profiteer if I don’t.”

I couldn’t imagine that he—or anyone—would care that much for my opinion, good, bad, or indifferent. I spread my hands in a go-for-it gesture. “I guess you’d better tell me then.”

“The short version is: an adversarial justice system isn’t perfect, but it’s the best that we’ve got. Statistically, yes, most people I defend in court are guilty because the police can broadly do their jobs. But even people who probably did it are entitled to a zealous legal defence. And that’s a principle to which…to which I am ideologically committed.”

Thankfully, while he’d been delivering this monologue—which only needed some stirring background music to reach its full dramatic potential—I was served a truly glorious pie. Beef, as it turned out, almost meltingly soft, swimming in gravy and barely contained by its crisp pastry cap.

“Wow”—I glanced up from the pie and slammed straight into Oliver’s hardest, coldest glare—“you seem really defensive about this.”

“I just find it helps to be honest from the beginning. This is who I am, and what I do, and I believe in what I do.”

I suddenly noticed he’d barely touched his…beetroot, I think it was? Beetroot and other virtuous vegetables. His hands were folded against the table so tightly that his knuckles were white.

“Oliver,” I said softly, realising I’d never said his name before, and confused by how intimate it was. “I don’t think you’re a bad person. Which you must know means next to nothing coming from me, because you only have to pick up a paper or Google my name to know what sort of person I am.”

“I”—now he looked uncomfortable for a different reason—“I am aware of your reputation. But if I’m to know you, Lucien, I’d rather it came from you.”

Shit. This had got real out of nowhere. How hard could it be to get a guy to like you enough to date you for a few months but not so much that you had to deal with those weird emotion things that fucked with your head, ruined your sleep, and left you crying on the bathroom floor at three in the morning? “Well, for starters, it’s Luc.”

“Luke?” Somehow I could always tell when people pronounced it with a k and an e. “It seems a shame when Lucien is such a beautiful name.”

“Actually that’s the English pronunciation.”

“Surely it’s not”—he flinched—“Looshan as the Americans would have it?”

“No. God no. My mother’s French.”

“Ah. Lucien, then.” He said it perfectly, too, with the half-swallowed softness of the final syllable, smiling at me—the first full smile I’d seen from him, and shocking in its sweetness. “Vraiment? Vous parlez français?”