“Is that hard?” I ask.
“What?”
“Not being around your family. I see most of mine every day. Hell, my mom still calls me to make sure I’ve eaten all the colors of the rainbow once a week.”
A smile parts her lips. “I miss them a lot. But …” Her smile wobbles a bit. “I went to law school and work in the city. I can’t do what I love to do and live in Linton with them.”
I nod.
“I’m still really close to them,” she says. “And I visit as much as I can—at least once a month to see Nana.”
“Nana?”
“My grandmother. She’s as feisty as my brothers, but God, I love her. She was my dad’s mom and spoiled us rotten growing up.” She takes a deep breath and then adds, almost as an afterthought, “Now I try to spoil her when I can.”
Something about the way she says this catches my attention. It’s sweet and careful, something I’m not sure I’ve really attached to Blaire so far. But when she looks back up at me, that’s all washed away.
“What about you?” she asks. “Are you close to your brothers?”
“I work with Oliver, so we’re together every day. We see Wade and Boone a lot. Coy is gone a lot, doing his thing.” I shrug. “But, yeah, we’re all close. We golf together, go boating, play some poker.”
“My brother Machlan has a bar,” she tells me. “They tried to have poker night there a couple of times until I advised him to shut it down. I had no idea those things got so serious.”
“Oh, yeah. If you ever meet Coy, ask him what joker’s wild means.”
She laughs. “I’ll make sure I never do that. Thanks for the warning.”
A soft knock on the door sounds through the room, and a waitress arrives. She takes our orders and disappears quietly.
Once we’re alone again, I relax back in my chair and look at the beauty across from me.
“So,” she says, resting her forearms on the table. “What do you do for fun?”
“Honestly?”
“Yes, honestly.”
“I work.”
Her laugh is the freest I’ve heard from her. It causes the corners of my lips to twitch.
“You sound like me,” she says. “I get such satisfaction from finding a bit of evidence the prosecution didn’t think I’d see or hearing a verdict go the right way.”
I lean forward and rest my arms on the table. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Do you ever have to take on clients you know are guilty?”
“Yes. Sometimes. But, before you go judging me, I’d like the opportunity to explain.”
I nod. “The floor is yours.”
She smiles, but her game face is on. A finger touches the gold chain sitting around her neck. “My job is to ensure my clients are tried fairly in accordance with the Constitution. Yes, I’ll represent men and women who I know are guilty if, and this is a big if, they haven’t been accused of a violent crime. And I cannot ethically encourage them to plead not guilty, and I won’t put them on the stand if I think they might lie. I have to sleep at night.”
Her eyes shine with a ferocity and intelligence that fucks with me. It raises a hundred questions that I want her to answer if for nothing but to watch her speak.
“For what it’s worth,” I say, “I think that’s highly admirable.”
And fucking hot.
I sit back again and try to block out the image of her in a courtroom.
“What do you do?” she asks. “Work-wise, I mean.”
“Business shit,” I say, trying to brush it under the rug. Going into the ins and outs of my world seems like a waste of time when we could be talking about her.
She grins. “I’m going to need a little more than that, Mr. Mason.”
“I’m the CEO of Mason Limited. My grandfather started it. My father expanded it. Oliver and I are ushering it into a new age.”
“I love the sound of that.”
“It’s fun.”
She slides a lock of hair behind her ear. The candle in the middle of the table casts reflections across her high cheekbones. She looks like a model sitting across from me, but one you could touch without knocking her over.
I’ve been with a lot of women, but none quite like her. She might just be the total package.
“What?” she asks, catching me studying her.
I could toss her a canned line or redirect the conversation to something that’s not how gorgeous she is. But if I know anything about Blaire so far, it’s that she can pick out a line of bullshit a mile away.
“You’re beautiful, Blaire.”
She flushes. “Thank you.”
“It’s not a line. I mean it—you’re fucking beautiful.”
The candlelight flickers as she shifts in her seat. Her eyes pull away from mine, and I instantly regret opening my mouth.
She clears her throat as her fingertips touch her necklace again.
“I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable,” I say carefully. “That might’ve been a little forward.”
“It’s fine.” She takes a deep, steadying breath. “To be frank, I’m not used to situations where someone would say something like that.”
“I don’t understand.”
She sits up a bit straighter. “I don’t have a lot of dinners with men who I’m not trying to outwit or outplay. This whole thing tonight is a little foreign to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t date,” she says simply.
My brows shoot to the ceiling. “You don’t date? At all?”
I tilt my head as though it will help me hear her better—as if the idea of Blaire not dating will make more sense if the octaves are a bit higher.
It’s baffling. How could a woman like her not date? Sure, women say that shit all the time because they think it ups their desirability. But I actually believe Blaire. And, lo and behold, I need to adjust my cock at the thought. So maybe they’re on to something with that line.
“I mean, I’ve dated,” she says. “Just … not often. I’m just too busy to entertain another human. I can barely keep my own life on target, let alone adding someone else’s life in.”
“I feel the same way,” I say. “My life goes a hundred miles an hour. I can’t be thinking about buying flowers or chocolates or making sure I pick up my shoes.”
“See? That’s a hard limit for me. Pick up your own damn shoes.” She laughs. “That is one of the reasons I find men to be barbaric creatures, as you so carefully noted.”
I point a finger at her and wink. “That’s what you tell yourself.”
“Excuse me?”
“You like to think you find barbaric tendencies in men to be appalling. Society has taught you that. There’s no place in the world for aggressive men, men who know what they want.” My smile deepens. “But deep down, you enjoy an alpha male.”
She bites her bottom lip. “That’s not completely true.”
“Is it not?”
“No. I do find those tendencies appalling. Truly. They insinuate that the woman is the lesser sex—that we should pick up men’s shoes, make them dinner, have a lower paying job—and to that, I call bullshit.”