“You’re angry?” His eyes narrowed as he considered her. “I get judging me, but why get pissed? What I did got you a victory. You won. What’s it matter to you now?”
She stared at him and then deflated. He was right. Why should she care? The case was done. Her client was satisfied. Yet anger simmered hot. “We’re supposed to be pretending we don’t know each other.”
“It’s not working, so we might as well get it all out there.”
She stuck out her chin. “Fine. It irritates me because I wanted to like you. You came to my rescue Friday night. You were funny and nice. Someone that I could see—”
“Getting drunk and kissing?” he asked, not hiding the sarcasm.
“Being friends with,” she said tartly. “But it’s ruined because you’re also someone who cheated on his wife and acted like a jerk in court. Someone whose word can’t be trusted. And I’m mad that you had to be that person.”
His expression darkened. “Because your friends have to be perfect?”
“I didn’t say—”
“I’m the one
who has the right to be angry. You helped someone steal things from me that I can never get back. I made you money. You should be thanking me. But no, you’re mad at me because I don’t fit into the image I’m supposed to. You can’t neatly tuck me into the villain box because I helped you the other night. And you can’t let yourself like me either because you’re only allowed to like people who have a flawless record and who have always done the right thing, like you.”
Her throat went tight at that. “Don’t act like you know me because I told you one high school story.”
He lifted a brow. “So you haven’t always done the right thing?”
A fist of tension gathered in her chest, old panic pushing at her nerve endings. “No.”
He leaned close, putting his lips right next to her ear. “I don’t believe you. I bet your dates have to bring a résumé and a background check with them before you let them hold your hand.”
“Screw you. You know nothing about me.”
He rose to full height again, his thighs almost close enough to bump her knees, and met her gaze. “You don’t know me either, Rebecca. And you’re too locked up in your fortress of self-righteousness to take the time to ask me the whole story or see the person in front of you. You have some photos and the word of a woman who hated me. How would you fare in court if all anyone got to hear about you was your worst mistake? How would you look if you were distilled down to that one thing?”
Her stomach plummeted at that.
“What would your sentence be?” he challenged. “Because I’m still paying for mine every damn day.”
She closed her eyes, trying to breathe through the wash of anxiety that flooded her, the familiar cold dread of that what-if. What if people knew? What if the truth about what she’d done in high school came out? What if…
“My sentence would be worse,” she said softly, the admission slipping out without her permission.
“Worse?” He scoffed. “The divorce ruined me. Restaurant I dreamed of all my life? Gone before I could open it. My credit? Blown. My credibility? Shattered. And as a bonus I picked up a fun drinking problem I had to deal with because getting wasted felt a whole lot better than realizing I had nothing left, that I’d climbed to the top of the mountain only to be pushed off the summit before I even got to snap a damn picture.” His jaw flexed. “I’ll be the first to admit that I was a shitty husband and had no business being married. But I didn’t deserve to lose everything, and I don’t deserve your judgment.”
The back of her throat burned. The words hitting her like pellets of ice. She hadn’t asked him the whole story, even when she knew better than most that there were at least three sides to every story. She’d just believed what she’d known from her client and what she’d seen in the photos. She lifted her head. “Was it you in those pictures?”
“Yes.” His gaze met hers, steady and clear. “But my ex-wife was the one who took them because she was there, too.”
She blinked, the words not lining up. “What?”
“Two years before the divorce, we had a big fight because she’d racked up all this debt on our credit card without telling me, so to make it up to me, she surprised me with a threesome.”
“A…” Rebecca’s words got jumbled in her mouth. “She… That’s…”
“Screwed up?” he asked dryly. “Yeah, it was. That was the kind of fucked-up dysfunctional relationship we had. You get in a fight, so you surprise your husband with your best friend naked in your bed.”
Rebecca’s face heated, the topic far out of her comfort zone.
“And I was too young and too reckless to realize how epically messed up it was to use that kind of shit to try to fix something in a relationship,” he continued. “But it happened, there was a camera involved, and she apparently saved the photos of me and her best friend for a rainy day.”
Rebecca stared at him, the admission knocking around inside her and bumping assumptions off-kilter. “She set you up?”