CAROL MARINELLI - Wanted - Mistress And Mother

‘What about your work?’

‘I am lucky.’ He gave a dry smile. ‘There is always someone getting into trouble, either here or in Italy—and being bilingual is a huge advantage. I can work in either country.’ ‘Doesn’t it bother you?’ Matilda asked, knowing that she was crossing a line, knowing the polite thing to do would be to leave well alone, but her curiosity was piqued, her delectable salmon forgotten, barely registering as the waiter filled her wine glass. ‘Defending those sorts of people, I mean.’

‘I believe in innocent until proven guilty.’

‘So do I,’ Matilda said, staring into that brooding emotionless face and wondering what, if anything, moved him. She’d never met anyone so confident in their own skin, so incredibly not out to impress. He clearly didn’t give a damn what people thought of him; he completely dispensed with the usual social niceties and yet somehow he managed to wear it, somehow it worked. ‘But you can’t sit there and tell me that that guy who killed—’

‘That guy,’ Dante broke in, ‘was proved innocent in a court of law.’

‘I know.’ Matilda nodded but it changed midway, her head shaking, incredulity sinking in. She certainly wasn’t a legal eagle, but you’d have to live in a cupboard not to know about some of the cases Dante Costello handled. They were Big, in italics and with a capital B. And even if that man she had read about really had been innocent, surely some of the people Dante had defended really were guilty. His job was so far removed from hers as to be unfathomable, and bewildered, she stared back at him. ‘Do you ever regret winning?’

‘No.’ Firmly he shook his head.

‘Never?’ Matilda asked, watching his lips tighten a touch, watching his eyes darken from dusk to midnight.

‘Never,’ Dante replied, his single word unequivocal. She felt a shiver, could almost see him in his robes and wig, could almost see that inscrutable face remaining unmoved, could see that full mouth curving into a sneer as he shredded seemingly irrefutable evidence. And anyone, everyone, would have left it there, would have conceded the argument, yet Matilda didn’t, green eyes crashing into his, jade waves rolling onto unmovable black granite.

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘Then you don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I know I don’t,’ Matilda admitted. ‘Yet I still don’t believe you.’

And that should have been it. She should have got on with her meal, he should have resumed eating, made polite small talk to fill the appalling gap, but instead he pushed her now. As she reached for her fork he reached deep inside, his words stilling her, his hand seemingly clutching her heart. ‘You’ve been proud of everything you’ve done.’

‘Not everything,’ Matilda tentatively admitted. ‘But there’s certainly nothing big league. Anyway, what’s that got to do with it?’

‘It has everything to do with it,’ Dante said assuredly. ‘We all have our dark secrets, we all have things that, given our time again, we would have done differently. The difference between Mr or Ms Average and my clients is that their personal lives, their most intimate regrets are up for public scrutiny. Words uttered in anger are played back to haunt them, a moment of recklessness a couple of years back suddenly relived for everyone to hear. It can be enough to cloud the most objective jury.’

‘But surely, if they’ve done nothing wrong,’ Matilda protested, ‘they have nothing to fear.’

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