“You represented my ex,” he said, voice flat. “Your last name is something with an L…”
“Lindt.”
Fuck. “You know who I am.”
And who he used to be. All those ugly things. Things he wished he could forget. Things he’d been so happy to be free of for a few hours Friday night.
“I—”
A chilling thought hit him. “When did you realize who I was?”
She winced.
“When?”
She sighed. “When I heard your last name at the clinic.”
He stared at her in disbelief. “So the whole time? And you just let the night go on like it did and didn’t say anything? You were… You kissed me, Rebecca. What the fuck?”
She turned her head with a cringe. “At first, I didn’t think it was relevant. The night had been stressful enough. I didn’t want to add to it.”
“But what about after that? All that talk about restaurants and passions and shit? You knew that I used to have a restaurant, how I lost it. You knew the whole time.” He scoffed. “No, you didn’t just know. You helped make that happen. Were you just laughing at me in your head? Was that kiss some sort of game?”
She frowned. “Of course not. I wouldn’t do that. I just didn’t know how to undo the situation once it started rolling, and then wine happened and I got caught up in a moment. I thought by saying no to seeing you again, that it would be the end of it, but…here we are.”
He ran a hand over his face. “I can’t believe I bought dinner for the woman who helped take my restaurant from me.”
She stiffened at that. “Are you really going to hold it against me that I did my job?”
He gave her a hard look. “Why wouldn’t I? Brittany didn’t deserve a damn dime of my restaurant. I lost everything in that courtroom because her parents could afford a high-priced lawyer and Brittany could put on a show.”
Rebecca’s cheeks colored. “You cheated on your wife. You flipped out in court. I didn’t do those things. I just represented your wife to the best of my ability.”
His jaw clenched. “So that means you can rest easy at night, right? You did your job. That’s all that counts. It doesn’t matter if your client was lying or not. Or if you helped destroy someone else in the process. Just do your job and collect your nice paycheck. Got it.”
The dog barked at them as if sensing the tension.
“I don’t have to worry about if she was lying if there were pictures.”
A bitter taste filled his mouth. “And that tells the whole story, right?”
She crossed her arms.
His neck felt hot, all the old anger trying to bust through the surface. He wanted to yell, to tell her the whole damn story, to flip tables like he had in the courtroom. But then he’d just prove what she already thought of him. That he was out of control.
And what did it matter anyway? What was done was done, and after today, he would never see her again. She’d already decided who he was. Not her type. Yeah, no shit. He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “Whatever. Come on. I’m sure Marco is done with the paperwork, and I’m done with this.”
He turned to head back to the front.
“So you’re telling me that wasn’t you in the pictures?”
His fingers curled into his palms but he didn’t say a word. What was there to say? He couldn’t say no.
He needed to get the hell away from this woman. She was stirring up old shit he didn’t want to have to think about again, old versions of himself that he wanted buried. He could feel that treadmill speeding up, trying to knock him back. Thinking about all this was making venom rise up in his throat. Venom and destructive urges.
“Right,” she said, taking his non-answer for affirmation.
That did it. He whirled around, making her pull up short. “No, not right. You of all people should know that there are gray areas, different angles to see things from. Isn’t that what lawyers are supposed to find?”