Body of Law (Body of Law #1) (6 page)

Thoughts of her were still with me when I walked into the main lobby. As usual, Roger was harassing Nicky over some imaginary complaint. Normally, I would have been content to join them, but with the memory of Violet walking away so fresh in my mind, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t be able to get anything done until I caught a glimpse of her again. The shifting of the rising elevator made my foot tap like I was in some goddamn musical. I felt like I was a kid again, the anticipation of that first smell of perfume, the blush of her smile…

The elevator opened and I saw her almost right away. She was wearing one of her new 2-piece suits; it barely covered more than the dress she’d worn the other night. Perfect. Shifting her feet uncomfortably, she laughed awkwardly and stepped away from Morgan. Being the dolt he was, however, he kept right on talking to her.

Oblivious fucking idiot.

Normally, I would have let her squirm. In different circumstances, I’d even enjoy it. But if there was anything I hated worse than blue balls, it was seeing any sort of happiness on Quinn Morgan’s face. And the fact that he was talking to Violet, looking at her and being pretentious enough to think that she was enjoying him flirting with her, was like a vice squeezing my balls.

“Mr. Scott?” a voice behind me said.

I wouldn’t have responded but a young Hindi woman stepped in front of me, nearly causing a collision. I went to step around her and she sidelined me, her massive beehive hairdo nearly taking Violet completely out of my sight. I sighed and took the hand she threw at me. “What?”

“I’m Jessica Sahni, one of the summer associates.”

I let go of her hand and nodded. There was only one summer associate I had eyes for and, at that moment, she looked desperate, like a wolf about to gnaw its own leg off. Somehow, Morgan had managed to box her in between an office door and a display table.

“Quinn!” I ignored the intern and approached Quinn and Violet with open arms. “Don’t you have a prescription to pick up? I’ve heard the sooner you get started on those antibiotics, the sooner the burning sensation will go away.”

“Sebastian.” He flinched at the sound of my voice and, though I wasn’t too sure, from the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Violet smile. “Well, you of all people would know…” I was vaguely aware of the way he looked back and forth at us, but her smile shone everything out of view. “Blondie, lovely to see you again.”

Her clenched smile hid an underlying rage. “Um, thanks—I mean, you, too.”

I waited until I knew Morgan was sufficiently away from us before I tried looking at her again. She was getting more beautiful every time I saw her. Was that because I hadn’t fucked her yet? Yeah, that must have been it.

“I mean you too?” I repeated, my eyebrows raised.

Violet glared but smiled at the same time. “Shut up.”

As per our routine, I handed her my briefcase and went straight for my office. “Was he bothering you?”

“What makes you say that?”

I took my briefcase back from her, just to have an excuse to touch her hand. Her eyelashes batted back at me, both an invitation and a question. I wanted to accept whatever she was offering and answer any question she had, but my open office door and the traffic passing by in the hallway stopped me. “By the look on your face, you were either going to be sick or run for the nearest open window.”

She wrinkled her nose. “His breath smells bad—garlic I think. But the way he talks about all the people he knows, all the ways he can help me…”

The change of conversation put a knot in my stomach.

“He only wants to sleep with you.”

“And you don’t?”

I shook my head and snickered. “This work environment is a bad one to sleep around in; besides, Morgan doesn’t even really
know
that many people. Sleeping with him won’t get you anything but a reputation.”

“Is that why you don’t like him?” she asked, closing my office door. “Because
he
sleeps around?”

I sighed and ignored her emphasis on the pronoun. There was no doubt she had heard rumors about me and my recreational activities by now.

“Don’t get me wrong—we’re all liars here. But Morgan has a nasty habit of bribing judges and hiring people to intimidate witnesses. I knew he was a fucking degenerate the second I met him.”

She smiled widely. “Like when you know milk has gone sour before you have to sniff it.”

“You shouldn’t let on so easily.” I shook my head, my eyes watching her as she bent over. “
I
can hate him all I want because I make more money than him. You, however, shouldn’t ruin your reputation before you have one.”

“I was being polite.” She leaned against my desk with that perfect ass of hers, laying her palms down like she wanted to push her chest in my face intentionally. It was impossible for her not to know that her skirt was riding up.

“Your facial expressions give you away,” I told her. “If you want to come to court with me today, you’ll have to work on looking indifferent.”

“First of all I don’t think about my body language when I’m having a casual conversation with someone. Second of all—“ She suddenly stopped as my words sank in. “Wait…court? Really?”

I took a step closer and inhaled her subtle perfume. “If you can keep that absurd grin off your face. The last thing I need—”

She jumped into my arms before I could stop her—not that I would have. I knew it was only supposed to be a hug of gratitude, maybe one of those moments of youthful excitement, but the feel of her breasts pushed up against me gave me an almost instant hard-on. But more than that, I have to say I was surprised by how well she fit in my arms, how the contours of her just melted into me like she was meant to be there.

Her breathing accelerated as she dared to look up at me. Without even thinking about it, my hands reached out to cup her ass, gratified by how amazing she felt and the gasp my touch produced. I squeezed a little harder and watched her smile. Had I done that? Really made her smile just by running my hands against her? If that made her smile, I knew things that would make her ecstatic. Painfully hard now, I traced my thumb against her bottom lip and watched her tremble until I couldn’t take it anymore.

I slammed my lips against hers, effectively keeping her from saying anything her expression wasn’t. But while I worked my tongue into her sweet little mouth, she crashed her hips into me and pulled my head closer toward her. I lifted her up by those globes until she was all but forced to wrap her legs around my waist. It was the perfect opportunity to sit her back on the desk, throwing everything aside as I pulled her tightly against me, my hands instantly pulling up her skirt.

She squirmed against me as I found the cotton of her panties—so much sexier than the lace I expected. And, like the lip of her mouth, she gasped as I ran my finger up and down the crotch of them, a moment before I moved the thin material aside and plunged my finger inside her pussy.

“Ohhh,” she called out loud, enough for me to lean my weight against her, covering her mouth with my free hand. I wasn’t sure if she had locked the door, but the last thing I needed was someone walking in and ruining our fun.

She wasn’t just wet, she was dripping. I worked another finger into her tight canal and licked her ear lobe while she bit the inside of my hand.

“Even now,” I whispered in her ear. “So easy to read…”

I would have loved to fuck her brains out right then and there, but a knock on the door pulled me away from her.

“Mr. Scott, you have court in thirty minutes—”

I swallowed hard, trying to be amused as I watched Violet struggle to pull her skirt back down, but only feeling pained instead. I took my anger out on the shadow outside my door instead. “Go away!”

By the time I looked back at her, the moment was gone, the lust between us cooling as quickly as it had heated. “Get me coffee, the Pryce briefs, and be back here in five minutes.”

Violet straightened her skirt and brushed her fingers through her hair. She was unsteady on her legs, but her flushed skin would have been enough to give her away.

“So I take it you do want to sleep with me?”

Chapter 8

Violet

“All rise, the honorable Judge Robert Harris presiding.”

My legs were still unsteady when I stood, following the bailiff’s instructions, but I managed to hold onto the pew beside me for leverage. At the defendant’s table just a few feet in front of me, however, Sebastian was as steady as a rock. How he could be that solid after what just happened between us was beyond me. I shook my head and did my best to put it out of my mind—clearly, just like he had.

“Alright children, what’s on the agenda for today?” The judge’s voice boomed easily in the acoustics of the courtroom. It actually made me flinch, startling me just when the sight of Sebastian’s smile had drawn me away again.

The district attorney spoke with a blusterous tone despite his small frame. “Your honor, we’re here because somehow Mr. Scott got his client’s manslaughter charge reduced to breaking and entering and his client can’t even be bothered to do the community service he was sentenced to—”

“My client has already made arrangements to complete his community service in a timely manner,” Sebastian replied. “Unfortunately, his busy school schedule and family obligations have prevented him from doing so. We’re only here because the prosecutor has a hard-on for me.”

I shifted my gaze from Sebastian and his client to the briefs I was holding in my hand. There wasn’t anything extraordinary looking about the defendant himself, but the last name on the docket was familiar and I knew Sebastian well enough to know that he wouldn’t take a case unless it involved a lot of money and a boost to his reputation. I opened the file and braced myself for the worst.

I remembered reading about the rowdy college student just a year earlier. I didn’t know all the details, only that a fraternity initiation gone wrong had resulted in an elderly woman dropping dead of a heart attack. In the state of Illinois, this would have easily garnered a 2 to 5 year prison sentence but, being the wealthy son of some executive, his
attorney
had gotten the charges reduced and the sentence lowered.

I clutched the brief in my hand, looking up every so often at Sebastian. As I expected, he glided around the courtroom with ease, as articulate and humorous as if he was just bantering with the mail clerks. And even though I was furious, I couldn’t help but think how graceful he was, how natural he looked in front of the judge’s bench.

Was this something Sebastian had been born knowing how to do? Maybe. But my position of knowing him in his youth allowed me to believe that this ability of his wasn’t all practice and experience. Even the first time we met, he had been all ease and class—not the usual bundle of nerves I was used to seeing when I met Dad’s students. On the occasions Dad allowed any of his “best and brightest” to meet me, they’d always been overeager to impress their professor’s only child. Sebastian, however, hadn’t. He didn’t put on airs, even from the beginning.

Maybe that was one of the reasons why I had been so smitten by him.

I was half sick by the time Sebastian was done making his argument to Judge Harris, but I wasn’t surprised that he managed to talk him into giving his client an additional 90 days to complete his community service. I watched the prosecutor swear under his breath before storming out with his colleague. Other than me, they seemed to be the only people who were unhappy with the outcome.

Meanwhile, Sebastian and his client exchanged pats on the back and smirks that were everything you’d expect from a lowlife. I closed the page of the brief and sat back down, the flutter Sebastian had filled me with now replaced with sickness. I knew what being a criminal defense attorney included, but it was entirely different, seeing the process in person. Somehow, the reality of it was more horrific than the mere knowledge of it. After everything my dad had warned me about, I really should have been more prepared for this. Yet somehow, I wasn’t.

Sebastian leaned over the galley and smiled at me. “Was it everything you’d hoped it would be?”

I shifted uncomfortably and stared at the ground. How was it that he could make me want him and hate him all at once?

“It went much faster than I expected,” he said. “You might be my good luck charm.”

I swallowed the rising bile in my throat. “Don’t say that.”

“What’s wrong? You look like Morgan was just talking to you again.”

I shook my head. “That was disgusting.” I had to swallow the taste of vomit in my throat. “What you just did was
disgusting
.”

Sebastian scoffed. Clearly this was something he had heard before. “I do lots of
disgusting
things Violet; you’ll have to be more specific.”

My entire body fluttered, a feeling I still hadn’t become used to since he had reentered my life. Of all the times he had to get my name right, it had to be now?

“That defense—” I practically had to spit the words out. Where was one of my father’s wines when I needed one? “You defended a thief, a murderer—”

“That’s what this job is,” he said proudly. “That’s what our forefathers fought for. What that imbecile did doesn’t matter—”

“Only whether or not he can pay his retainer?”

“That does help.” He smirked. “But everyone deserves a defense, no matter what they’ve done.”

“But you know he did it. You know he went into that townhouse to steal a rare parakeet and ended up killing a grandmother of three. How can you let him wander the streets without serving any sort of consequences for his actions? Sifting the shit out of a kitty litter box hardly makes up for taking the life of another human being.”

“And breaking a glass door.” He laughed. “Don’t forget the glass door.”

“Don’t make a joke out of this, Sebastian. This isn’t funny.”

“There was also the bird. If I recall correctly, its name is Stanley. I believe it was greatly startled in the struggle. Maybe the DA should bring Stanley up here for testimony. I’m sure it would make a riveting witness—”