“Did you grow up in DC?” Chelsea asks between bites.

I tip the wine bottle, refilling her glass. “We moved around a lot when I was younger. After my father took off, my mom didn’t have a lot of options. She was twenty-four, with a kid, didn’t even have a high school diploma. So she joined the army.”

“Wow. It’s hard to picture her in the army.”

I shake my head, cutting my steak. “Believe me, she’s tougher than she looks. She got her GED and became a military mechanic. We lived on a few different bases when I was a kid. She was never deployed, but they shuffled us around wherever they needed an extra hand.”

“So you were an army brat?”

“Kind of.” You’d think army kids would be disciplined—well behaved—but that’s not always the case. I was forever the new kid, in places where strength was respected above all else. “Kill or be killed” was a big theme. Where the quickest way to prove your worth was to step on everyone else around you. “After she was discharged, we settled in Baltimore.”

Chelsea nods, taking another drink. “And that’s where your mom met Owen?”

“Yeah. He’s a mechanic too—has his own shop. They run it together now.” I smile. “They met when I got into a fight with a couple kids outside his place. He broke it up, called my mother, one thing led to another, they’ve been together ever since. Owen’s good people.”

Chelsea zeroes in on one detail of my explanation. “You got into a fight with a couple of kids?”

“I was a big kid. One-on-one wasn’t really a challenge.”

She grins. “Sounds like you were a troublemaker—like Rory.”

“Troublemaker is an understatement. Rory is a fucking saint compared to me.”

“Becker?”

I turn at the sound of my name and Tom Caldwell approaches our table, smiling. Caldwell’s a bright-eyed, brown-haired, young but hungry prosecutor with the US attorney’s office. A real by-the-book, straitlaced, goody-two-shoes kind of guy. He’s also the prosecutor on my upcoming assault trial against Senator Holten.

“Caldwell.” I nod, shaking his extended hand.

“I thought it was you. How’s it going?”

The interactions between prosecutors and defense attorneys are bizarre. Inside the courtroom, we do our best to eviscerate each other. Outside of it, it’s all friendly handshakes and weekend softball-league games. We’re not supposed to take anything personally—because it’s really not personal. Just business—part of the game.

“Pretty good,” I reply vaguely. “Yourself?”

“I’m good—I’m here with my parents. Showing them around DC.” His gaze turns to Chelsea—and lights up with interest. He probably thinks I don’t notice, but I really fucking do.

Etiquette says I should introduce them. And etiquette can kiss my lily-white ass—pointless set of rules as far as I’m concerned.

But like I said, Tom’s not the type to let much stand in his way. He holds out his hand to Chelsea. “Hi, I’m Tom Caldwell.”

She shakes his hand. “Chelsea.”

“Are you a client of Becker’s?”

She smiles. “No. He’s represents a few members of my family though.”

“They’re in good hands. Becker’s a fine attorney.”

“And your life would be so much easier if I sucked,” I say.

He snorts. “That’s true.” Tom glances toward the entrance. “Well, I should be going. Enjoy your dinner. It was lovely to meet you, Chelsea.” He taps my shoulder. “Jake, I’ll see you in court.”

“Have a good night, Tom.”

As he walks away, Chelsea asks, “Is he a friend of yours?”

I shake my head. “Not particularly.”

We finish our dinner and split a slice of cheesecake for dessert, but no coffee—neither one of us wants to diminish the pleasant buzz of good wine. There’s more moaning, more fruitless readjusting as Chelsea slowly swallows a mouthful of the white, creamy concoction. Fuck—and I accused her of having a dirty mind. My dick pushes against the fabric of my pants the way an inmate strains against the bars of his cell, begging to be set free.

Chelsea’s skin radiates the flushed, cheery glow of alcohol. Her eyes are hooded and happy but shield her thoughts, making her harder to read than usual. She leans back in her chair, regarding me, running her finger around the rim of her glass. “So if you started out as such a troubled youth, how did you become”—she gestures to me—“this? Successful. Honorable. Respectable.”

I pour the last of the wine into my glass. “ ‘Respectable’ is probably pushing it a little bit . . . but the story goes like this: I was fifteen, running around with some real dipshits. Older guys. One night we thought it’d be brilliant to break into a sporting goods store, because that’s the kind of losers we were, only I didn’t know one of them was carrying. He ended up shooting a guard in the leg.”

Chelsea gasps just a little.

And my cock twitches a lot.

“We ran out the back, right into the arms of a waiting squad car.” I shake my head at the idiot I was. “The prosecutor wanted to charge me as an adult, send me away for serious time—and he could have. I had a hot temper and a record, and aside from my mother, I thought the whole goddamn world was my enemy.”

Chelsea leans forward, completely enthralled. “So what happened?”

“The Honorable Atticus Faulkner happened. He was the juvenile judge on my case—a big, mean, scary son of a bitch. And he . . . thought he saw something worthy in me. So he kept me in juvenile court—gave me community service and probation, to be supervised by the hard-ass himself.” I chuckle. “At the time, I thought the judge was doing me a favor—going easy on me.”