“So, what’s your assessment of our client?” Nate had asked a few days ago as they doctored their respective coffees in the DGS break room.
“He’s an asshole,” she’d said simply. Because it was the truth. The rest of it… That was much harder to piece together. “But something about this just doesn’t feel right. I know he says he did it, and the forensics back it up, but…he held himself back. He didn’t tear them to shreds. Everything we’ve heard about monsters, and he proved it all wrong. That has to count for something.”
Her favorite senior partner had stared at her for one beat. Two. Those ice-blue eyes seeing entirely too much. “So figure out what it means. That’s why we brought you in. Because his life could depend on it.”
The directive had haunted her. And overachieving Indian-American that she was, she’d been unable to resist taking another crack at the mystery. At the man tilting back his chair legs as far as his cuffed hands would allow.
“Back so soon?” Joe Peluso arched a dark brow at her, looking just as uncooperative and bruise-mottled as he had upon their first encounter.
“I don’t want you to think DGS is ignoring you,” she said as she took the chair across from him and dropped her recorder and notepad on the table. “We take our clients very seriously.”
Especially when all sorts of city movers and shakers were calling for said clients’ heads. Dealing with this kind of tricky political bullshit was new for her, but Nate and Dustin were used to it. They’d sat next to her last week like they were holding court, firing off questions like nothing big was at stake. For them, maybe that was true. They were basically two of the city’s best criminal attorneys, working largely with the underprivileged population—usually those impacted by the new Patriot Acts instituted in late 2019. Immigrants, LGBTQ citizens, low-level supernaturals accused of petty crimes. But thanks to good looks and boatloads of charisma, they were also veritable rock stars, minor New York celebrities. The kind of men who got shout-outs in gossip columns and took models out to dinner at the trendiest Greenwich Village hot spots. Dickenson, Gould, and Smythe also handled big-money corporate litigation and high-profile divorce, which was why Nate and Dustin could afford to be pro bono and pro boning. Between the two of them, they had twenty-five years of trial experience and a mind-blowing number of successes.
Neha had barely a quarter of that. She was still making a name for herself. How she handled assisting on this case, how she handled Joe Peluso, could either be the most promising career move she’d made in years…or her biggest disaster to date. And her good looks and charisma? Well, those things weren’t seen as assets in women. Neither was a healthy sex life. All she could count on was her dedication and her skill.
It was already clear where Joe’s interest was. Not in those things. He paid little attention to her introductory chatter and answered her in monosyllables whenever possible—the same act he’d pulled with Nate and Dustin that first day. All while making sure to focus on her mouth. On the high collar of the blouse she’d chosen to wear today—buttoned all the way up—and the loose fit of her suit jacket. He certainly hadn’t done that with his male lawyers.
If this was how all their meetings were going to be, Neha was already over it. But she knew better than to let him see her frustration with his games. “Why don’t we talk about your military service?” she suggested. “The prosecution won’t overlook your time in the Marines, so neither should we.”
He rolled his eyes and made a dismissive hand gesture—or at least a truncated one, since his hands were secured to the table. “I know what this is all about, you know. You and your Brooks Brothers buddies, you want me to get up there and talk about what it was like over there. Paint me as some kind of wounded war veteran who went ‘off’ because of PTSD. That ain’t me, Doc.”
“Then who are you?” She followed up with the obvious question.
He gave her another one of those long, slow clothes-stripping looks. “You haven’t figured that out yet? Babe, I’m a guy who can’t stop thinking about you.”
After seeing her once? Yeah, right. And hell was experiencing a polar vortex. Neha understood what he was going for now. It wasn’t so much sexual harassment as distraction, distraction, distraction, “Cute. Flattery will get you absolutely nowhere, Joe.”
Her shutdown didn’t even faze him. “You think this is flattery? I barely know you. It’s been, what, a week since you walked your ass in here with Feinberg and Taylor? This ain’t flattery. It’s obsession.”
His dark eyes glinted. No, they smoldered. And if she hadn’t guessed it was mostly an act, it would’ve been a damn good smolder. As it was, the back of Neha’s neck prickled uncomfortably and she had to flip through her notes to refocus herself. “It’s unproductive, is what it is,” she said. “Can we please stay on topic?”
“You are my topic,” he insisted. “What if you’re my real way out of here, Doc? What if you’re my only hope?”
“Bullshit.” Neha snorted at the dramatic intensity in his voice. Intensity that she didn’t buy for a minute. “You’ve been watching too many prison movies.”
Joe immediately dialed back the swaggering jailhouse Romeo act, relaxing in his seat and huffing out his annoyance. “Yeah, because I’ve got nothin’ to do in here but Netflix and chill.”
“I’d suggest switching to The Great British Bake-Off,” she said, dryly. “It might keep you from hitting on your lawyers, and you’ll learn how to perfect a Victoria sponge to boot.”
He laughed at that. A genuine laugh, not something manufactured for her benefit. It wiped some of the years from his face, took away a little of the smarm and the menace, too. “You old enough to remember that guy who used to host his cooking shows drunk? Graham Kerr? My nonna loved that guy. Him and Julia freaking Child.”
It was a surprisingly personal detail for someone pretending he didn’t want to share a single thing with her besides bodily fluids. Neha’s fingers itched, but she let the digital recorder capture what she didn’t dare write down, lest Joe become a semi-silent sleaze once more. “Yan Can Cook and Ming Tsai,” she murmured instead. “We were all about the Asian solidarity in my house.”
She waited for him to say something blatantly flirtatious in response. Or something gross and racist. But the moment stretched between them like their reflective smiles. It was…nice. A real connection, an honest one, over something as simple as cooking shows. It didn’t do a damn thing for Joe’s case…but it made all the difference to her. It reminded her that there was a person at the center of this. Joe wasn’t a gentleman. He didn’t say all the right things and observe all the social courtesies. He clearly didn’t give a damn what anybody else thought. And he didn’t seem to care if he lived or died. He was still entitled to the strongest possible defense, still entitled to basic human decency.