11. Eve
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Eve
The courthouse is a circus, and I’m the main act.
Reporters swarm the steps, cameras firing, microphones thrust at my face, a dozen voices climbing over each other for a piece of me. Dean’s hand finds the small of my back and his body angles to take the worst of it, a wall between me and the lenses.
“Ms. Heart, did you orchestrate your ex-fiancé’s termination?”
“Mr. Valentine, are you involved with your brother’s former fiancée?”
“Is it true you planted the evidence? Any comment on the harassment claim?”
I keep my head up and my feet moving and my mouth shut, because Irene drilled it into me last night, over and over, until I could have said it in my sleep.
Not one word on the steps, not one expression they can freeze into a headline.
The story they want is a bitter woman who can’t let go. Don’t hand it to them gift-wrapped.
We push through the doors and the noise drops to a muffled roar behind us, and inside isn’t any better, just quieter.
The gallery is packed with strangers who came to watch a stranger’s life come apart for entertainment, the way people slow down for a wreck on the highway.
A few faces I know. Colleagues of Simon’s.
Neighbors from the building we shared. A woman who toasted our engagement and is here today for the sequel, leaning forward like she doesn’t want to miss a line.
Simon sits at the plaintiff’s table between two lawyers in suits worth more than my old car, his face arranged into the careful expression of the wronged party.
He’s been practicing it. I can tell, because I lived with that face for years and watched him try it on in mirrors.
Kiara’s in the front row behind him, legs crossed, smirking, one hand resting on a stomach that may or may not be telling the truth.
And in the very back, cold as a closed freezer, Hilda.
She wouldn’t miss the chance to watch me lose in public. It’s practically a hobby for her now.
But I’m not alone either, and that’s the part Simon didn’t plan for.
Tyler’s directly behind me, arms crossed, radiating the menace of a younger brother who’s been waiting for a legal excuse to be in the same room as this man.
My mother is beside him, spine straight as a flagpole, wearing the face I remember from every parent-teacher conference she ever turned into a hostage negotiation.
And my father, who barely slept, who walked the block with Dean for an hour the other night asking the impossible questions, is a wall of quiet certainty at my back.
Irene Zimmerman leans toward me as we sit. She’s clever and unhurried, the lawyer my father’s attorney swore by, the only person in this building who looks like she’s having a good day.
“Remember,” she murmurs. “They want you angry. Angry reads as guilty. You give me calm and clear, and I’ll give you a judge who likes you by lunch.”
“All rise. The Honorable Judge Martha Christensen presiding.”
The next two hours are a slow-motion car wreck I have to sit through with my hands folded.
Simon’s lawyers spin a story that would be funny if it weren’t pointed straight at me.
I’m the villain. A woman scorned by her fiancé’s honest moment of doubt at the altar, who then launched a calculated campaign of harassment, defamation, and arson against an innocent man.
The financial irregularities? Reported by a conveniently anonymous source with obvious access and an obvious grudge.
The storage fire? A stunt I staged on my own property for sympathy.
The photos wallpapering his office? Character assassination, plain and ugly.
“None of this is true,” I whisper to Irene, my jaw aching from holding calm.
“Truth doesn’t win preliminary hearings,” she murmurs back, not looking up from her notes. “Narrative does. So we hand her a cleaner one and let his fall apart on its own. Patience.”
When it’s my turn, I make myself breathe. I find my father’s face in the gallery and I hold it like a railing.
“Your Honor, Simon Valentine admitted, in front of a packed sanctuary of wedding guests, to an eight-month affair with his assistant. His own mother confirmed, to my face, that she introduced them. The financial irregularities were discovered by an IT employee during a routine backup, a man I have never met, at a company I have never worked for, whose systems I have never had any access to whatsoever.”
“Ms. Heart,” Judge Christensen says, peering at me over her reading glasses, “do you have evidence that Mr. Valentine has made direct threats against you?”
“I have a recorded phone call from Ms. Nash threatening to take everything from me. I have security footage from my storage unit showing two people who match her and Mr. Valentine cutting the lock the night it burned. And I have.”
“Your Honor,” Simon’s lawyer cuts in, smooth as poured oil, “Ms. Heart hasn’t established any connection between my client and these alleged incidents. Mr. Valentine wears a court-ordered ankle monitor.”
“He wears it now,” I say, before I can decide whether I should.
“It wasn’t fitted until after the fire, as a condition of the bail he posted after they arrested him for the theft.
It tells this court exactly where Simon Valentine is sitting this week.
It says nothing at all about where he was the night my grandmother’s china burned. ”
The judge’s mouth moves toward something that isn’t quite a smile before she catches it, and bangs the gavel instead. “Order. Ms. Heart, you’ll have your full turn shortly. Counselor, stop interrupting opposing testimony, or I’ll start subtracting from your credibility with interest.”
It grinds on. Back and forth, point and counterpoint, my entire life reduced to exhibits and objections.
I feel myself wearing thin under it, the fear and grief and adrenaline pressing down all at once, and Simon’s lawyers are expensive and patient and willing to say absolutely anything, and for one bad stretch I am exactly what they need me to be, a tired woman running out of fight.
Then Christensen calls a recess. “Fifteen minutes.”
I stand on legs that aren’t fully convinced they want the job. Dean’s beside me before I’ve fully made it up.
“You’re doing great,” he says.
“I’m losing. They’re making me sound insane and I’m just sitting there letting them.”
“You’re not losing. You’re.” He stops, and a decision arrives behind his eyes. “Come with me. Right now. Trust me.”
“Where?”
“Trust me.”
He steers me out a side door, down a hallway, past clerks and paralegals who don’t spare us a second glance, to a single-occupancy bathroom marked STAFF ONLY at the dead end. He checks the hall once, both directions, pulls me inside, and locks it behind us.
“Dean, what are you.”
He kisses me.
There is nothing careful in it. Nothing slow, nothing asking.
His hands frame my face and he pours years of it into my mouth all at once, and my back hits the cold tile and I forget the courtroom, the cameras, Simon’s rehearsed grief, the lawyer’s oily voice, all of it, gone, replaced by the heat of him and the press of his body and the sudden roar of my own pulse.
“I needed you out of that room for two minutes,” he breathes against my lips, “before they convinced you to be the woman they’re describing.
You are not her. I need you to hear me say it.
” His forehead drops to mine. “Whatever happens in there, I’m not going anywhere.
I believe you. I believed you before there was a single piece of evidence.
When this is over, we build something good, you and me, somewhere none of them can reach. ”
“Dean.”
“And.” His mouth drops to my throat, and his voice changes, drops, the steadiness in it giving way to pure heat. “We have eleven minutes. And I have been watching you be brilliant and furious in a courtroom all morning, and I am not going to spend our eleven minutes on a pep talk.”
“We can’t.” But my fingers are already in his hair, pulling. “The hearing. There are people.”
“Then you’ll have to be quick,” he says against my ear, low, with a dare folded into it that goes straight down my spine and pools low, “and you’ll have to be quiet. Think you can manage quiet, Heart? In your professional opinion?”
“Can you?”
His answer is to drop to his knees on the courthouse tile in his good suit, shove my skirt up to my waist, and drag my underwear down my legs with two unhurried fingers, like we have all the time in the world instead of eleven stolen minutes and a building full of bailiffs.
The contrast is what undoes me, the patience and the ticking clock at once, the way he refuses to rush even now, even here, especially here.
He hooks my leg over his shoulder and licks a slow line up the center of me, and I have to slap a hand over my own mouth to keep the sound in.
“There it is,” he murmurs against my pussy, and I feel every word of it. “Already soaked for me. And you have to stay quiet. Thin walls. Officers of the court walking by, two feet of drywall away.”
The reminder makes it worse. Makes it so much better.
The risk pours gasoline on every nerve I have, and he knows, the absolute menace, he knows exactly what the danger does to me and he uses it without an ounce of mercy.
His tongue works my clit while two fingers fuck into me in a rhythm that should be studied by scientists, and I bite down on the side of my own hand and stare at the fluorescent light and try to remember how breathing works.
My free hand fists in his hair hard enough to hurt, and he groans against me like me yanking it is half of what he came in here for.
“Dean.” It comes out a strangled whisper. “I swear to God, if you draw this out.”
“Eleven minutes,” he says, the smug, glorious nerve of him, not slowing a fraction, his fingers curling deeper. “Plenty of time to get you off and still send you back in there to testify with my name in your throat. Come on my tongue, Heart. Quietly.”
I break apart fast and hard, biting into the meat of my palm to keep from screaming the courthouse down, clenching around his fingers while the whole thing crashes through me in waves, and he works me through every last one, his hands the only reason I don’t slide down the tile into a puddle at his feet.
When I can see again, he’s already on his feet, fixing my skirt, smoothing my hair, straightening my blazer with the focus of a man who has clearly thought about doing exactly this, in exactly this building, more than once.
“Better?” he asks, far too pleased with himself.
“I have to walk back in there. In front of a judge. And testify. Coherently.”
“You’ll do it with color in your face and the knowledge that whatever Simon throws at you next, you’ve got something he never once gave you.
” He kisses my forehead, tender, completely at odds with the man who was on his knees ten seconds ago.
“Someone in your corner who’d set himself on fire before he let you burn alone in there. ”
We slip back in just as the recess ends, easing into our seats like nothing on earth happened. My face is hot. My hair is not entirely under control despite his efforts. But I feel rebuilt, steadier, the woman they were describing nowhere in the room anymore.
I don’t realize there’s a mark blooming on my neck until Simon sees it.
His eyes catch on it. Travel to Dean. And his whole face goes a shade of purple usually reserved for cartoon characters one frame before they detonate.
“You.” He’s on his feet, finger leveled across the aisle at his brother. “You’re fucking her? During MY hearing? In MY.”
“Mr. Valentine.” Christensen’s gavel cracks like a shot. “Sit down.”
“Look at her NECK, Your Honor, they were just, in the middle of, this is.”
“SIT. DOWN.”
He doesn’t. The humiliation comes boiling up out of him all at once, the careful mask crumbling to powder, and he lunges toward our table. It takes two bailiffs to catch him, one on each arm, while he thrashes and spits.
“You think you won?” he screams at me, losing the last of himself in front of everyone. “You think you take everything from me and just walk away with my brother? I’ll DESTROY you. I’ll burn down everything you love, every single.”
“Mr. Valentine, you are in contempt of this court.” Christensen’s voice could frost over a furnace.
“Bailiffs, remove him. Counselor, your client just did more damage to his own credibility in thirty seconds than I could have managed in a week. I’d find new representation, or a new client, depending on which of you wants out first.”
They drag him out still screaming, the threats ringing off the marble and dying in the hallway. Kiara half-rises to follow and Hilda snatches her wrist, hisses something low and vicious, and for once even Kiara folds back into her seat with a face that promises she is not finished with me.
In the ringing quiet that follows, the judge turns to me.
“I’ve seen enough.” She folds her reading glasses with two fingers.
“The restraining order is denied. Mr. Valentine’s conduct in this courtroom, taken together with the charges he’s already facing, makes it abundantly clear to this court that he is the threat in this situation.
Not you. Furthermore, I am recommending the district attorney’s office examine Ms. Nash’s connection to the storage fire.
Your recording will be entered into evidence, and I imagine the police will find its contents very interesting indeed. ”
Relief hits so hard the room briefly tilts.
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
“Don’t thank me. Just stay far away from that man.” Her mouth almost, almost moves toward a smile. “And Ms. Heart? Fix your collar.”
My hand flies to my neck. The mark. Oh, God.
Behind me, Tyler makes a sound like a man trying very hard not to die laughing in a courtroom and only half succeeding.
Dean does not look even slightly sorry. He looks, in fact, like a man who would do it all again, in this exact building, given the chance.
I’m a little afraid I’d let him.