“Saucy wench,” Reeve says with a chuckle.

“Right?” I agree. “Anyway, this I do know to be true, because Midge has told me on more than one occasion. Grant taught Midge how to use all of her assets, especially coming up in a legal world when women were the minority in our profession. That included not only her legal knowledge but her wit and her sensuality.”

“That was very progressive of him,” Reeve butts in.

“Agreed,” I say with a smile. “Unfortunately, Grant died eight years later at age fifty-two from a heart attack. Rumor is Midge was having sex with him at the time.”

“What a way to go.”

“The best way to go. Rumor also has it that Midge was devastated when he died, that she truly loved him even though he never divorced his wife to be with her. It’s said she’s never had a serious relationship since then but that she does take a lot of lovers—some men, some women. There’s a really kinky rumor running around that she’s actually fucking one of the law clerks in the criminal division. He’s only twenty-four or something, but apparently hung like a racehorse.”

“She sounds unbelievable,” Reeve says. “Although much of that is rumor, so how can you know?”

“Well, what little interaction I’ve had with her, I can believe every bit of it. She’s the most progressive, enlightened female attorney I’ve ever met. I aspire to be like her.”

“Hopefully not the part where she takes a lot of lovers, right?” he teases.

“Definitely not,” I tell him. “I’m very satisfied with my current man.”

That earns me an affectionate squeeze from Reeve, and I squeeze him back for good measure.

“I will tell you a true story about Midge, though.” I’m in a sharing mood for some reason. “She didn’t interview me for the job at her firm. Her cousin Danny did. But Midge was watching from a video monitor and feeding him questions. They had one special question they asked each applicant, and apparently I gave the best answer, and that earned me the job.”

“I suspected you were brilliant,” he says as his hand slides down to caress my ass.

Mmm. Nice.

“I’ll never forget meeting her on my first day. I looked horrible, so dowdy and uninteresting. Midge encouraged me to explore my feminine side. To use my other attributes to help get me further in the game.”

“Well, first, I can’t imagine you ever looking dowdy, and second, you’re saying I have Midge Payne to thank for your little striptease in the elevator?”

“You should send her flowers or something,” I mutter.

“I definitely should,” he replies. Then as an afterthought he asks, “What was the interview question that you nailed?”

“Oh, that,” I say as I lean up on my elbow so I can look at him. He’s grinning up at me, completely enjoying my loose lips, because I normally reveal very little about my life. I find I like this sharing thing. With great flourish, I say, “Danny asked if there was ever a scenario in which I’d be willing to put my law license at stake. Apparently, every single candidate answered with a resounding no.”

Reeve’s smile fizzles and dies. His jaw goes tight. “And how did you answer?”

He clearly knows I answered the opposite, but he wants the details. And for some reason, I feel like he’s not going to like my answer. It was a simple question, but the answer was a bit more complex. I spent a lot of time and money earning my law license, and there are very specific things I can do to lose it. Law schools pound into their students the fear of letting their ethics waver and getting in trouble with the bar. The loss of my law license would be catastrophic, so this is something I do take seriously.

But as with most everything in life, there are exceptions. Even though I know he really won’t like my answer, I give it to him anyway. “I laid out several scenarios where I would jeopardize it.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure of my exact words . . . it was so long ago. But I think I said I’d do it if someone’s life was at stake.”

For some reason, Reeve’s body seems to relax with that answer, and his smile starts to form again.

“I also said I’d do it if justice could prevail, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone else.” His smile slides again, which presses me to ask, “Does that bother you?”

“No,” he says hurriedly. “It’s just . . . I don’t like the thought of you putting your license at risk. That’s your livelihood. Your life. It’s never worth the risk.”

Reeve’s eyes are wide and worried, and yet he’s not truly getting me. And that just won’t do. After what we just shared when he was making love to me, I need to make sure he gets me.

I swing a leg over Reeve, straddling his pelvis. Placing my hands on his stomach, I peer down at him, his face lit up by the bedside lamp. “Remember I told you a little bit about my childhood? Grew up poor, yada, yada, put myself through school, blah, blah, blah?”

He nods at me, his hands coming up to stroke my knees resting at either side of his rib cage. “I expect there’s a little bit more than yada, yada, and blah, blah, blah.”

“There is,” I tell him. “I lived in a dusty trailer park in a tin can with a leaky roof and feral dogs fighting in the dirt streets outside. We subsisted mostly on ramen noodles, and on a good day our elderly neighbor would throw us a few veggies from her garden to go with it. All my clothes came from the thrift store, and by that I mean I had one pair of jeans, a few shirts, and maybe three pairs of underwear. The lack of clothes meant doing laundry more often, and by laundry I mean using the kitchen sink to wash them. We didn’t have money for birthday presents or Christmas, and I didn’t even taste my first bite of steak until I was in college and my boyfriend took me out to dinner one night. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. My childhood was rough. Wouldn’t wish it on any child. I was teased and bullied because I was poor, and the only pleasure I really got in life was escaping into books through the school library.”

Reeve doesn’t say anything, but his eyes burn with anger and sympathy.

“I had it rough, but despite having hardly anything at all, the one thing I did have was love. My mom provided me with so much love, none of the other stuff really mattered.”

“I don’t know what to say,” Reeve says in a raspy voice, his hands tightening on my knees.

I continue my story. “My mom worked odd jobs. She didn’t have a high school education, having dropped out of school after falling in with a bad crowd who liked to party hard. She got pregnant with me, and I don’t know my father because my mom doesn’t know who he is. He was a passing face, a faded memory from a night when she was so high on drugs she didn’t get his name and didn’t insist he use a condom.”

“Jesus,” Reeve whispers.

“But she loved me. More than anything. She gave up drugs and alcohol when she got pregnant with me, never used again. But work was hard to find in eastern, rural North Carolina. We had good times that would provide the occasional mac and cheese. We had bad times, though, when she was out of work, and by bad I mean I would go days without eating unless it was a school lunch. My mom had choices to make. She’d have just enough money to pay the electricity bill, and during the winter, we had to have heat, so that meant no food. We were always giving up something to get something else.”

Reeve’s hands leave my knees and travel up my arms, stroking me with reassurance as I continue my story.

“I remember a few times that I was so hungry I couldn’t stop crying, which would make my mom cry.” I take a deep breath, push it out, and bare a very personal fact about my life. “She’d have men come over to our trailer. They would disappear into her back bedroom, and I would hear noises coming out of there and the bed knocking against the wall. I was too young to really know what it meant, but I know that when the men left, my mom would have money and she could buy me food.”