“You could have gone with that.”

“Dear me. We’ve been dating for less than three days, and you’re already trying to change me.”

“Why would I want you to change when it’s so much fun taking the piss out of you?”

“I…” His brow wrinkled. “Thank you. I think. I can’t tell if that was a compliment.”

It was probably just because I’m a bad person that I was finding him slightly endearing right now. “Yeah. That’s kind of the game. But, come on, you must do something that doesn’t involve wigs and hammers.”

“I cook, I read, I spend time with friends, I try to stay healthy.”

Oh yay. So I hadn’t been imagining the body under those conservative suits. I mean, not that I was imagining it. At least, not very much.

His gaze caught mine. “What about you?”

“Me? You know, the usual. Stay out too late, drink too much, cause the people who care about me needless anxiety.”

“And what do you actually do?”

I really wanted to look away. But for some reason I couldn’t. His eyes kept promising me things I was sure I didn’t want. “I’ve been in a bit of a slump. For a while. I still do stuff—I was out last Saturday—but I never seem to have anything to show for it.”

There was the rabbit hole again, and the last thing I wanted was for Oliver to ask a thoughtful follow-up question that would take me further down it.

“Your turn,” I yipped, grinning wildly, as if my life being basically wrecked was a hilarious anecdote.

His fingers tapped lightly against the table for a moment or two as he seemed to give the matter far too much consideration. “With the caveat that I would be interested irrespective of your parents’ celebrity, could you tell me a little of your background?”

“That sounds like a job interview, not a boyfriend interview.”

“I can’t help being curious. I’ve known of you for years. But we’ve never really talked before.”

“Yeah, because you made it pretty damn clear you wanted nothing to do with me.”

“I would dispute that characterisation but, either way, I do now.”

I made a sullen, embarrassingly adolescent noise. “Whatever. Uneventful childhood, promising career, went off the rails, here I am.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, which was not the reaction I was expecting. “This was too artificial a structure for personal conversation.”

Shrug. Apparently I was still in teenager mode. “There’s no conversation to have.”

“If that’s your preference.”

“What about you?”

“What would you like to know?”

I’d been hoping talking about him would feel less revealing than talking about me. Turned out, it didn’t. I made a sound that could roughly be expressed as “Urdunuh.”

“Well,” he offered gamely. “Like yours, my childhood was very uneventful. My father’s an accountant, my mother used to be a professor at LSE, and they’re both kind and supportive people. I have an older brother, Christopher, who’s a doctor, as is his wife, Mia.”

“Well, aren’t you a bunch of high achievers.”

“We’ve been very lucky. And we were raised to believe that we should pursue something we believed in.”

“Which is what led you to law?”

He nodded. “Indeed. I’m not sure it’s entirely what my parents had in mind, but I think it’s right for me.”

“If I murdered someone,” I told him, discovering, to my surprise, that I meant it, “I would totally want you to be my lawyer.”

“Then the first piece of advice I should give you is don’t tell me if you’ve murdered someone.”

“Surely people don’t do that?”

“You’d be surprised. Defendants have no legal training of their own. They don’t always know what will implicate them and what won’t. I’m not speaking from experience, incidentally.” He gave me a small smile. “My second piece of advice is that if you are ever accused of murder, you should hire somebody significantly more experienced than I am.”

“You mean you’ve never done one?”

“Contrary to what you might think, homicide is actually quite rare. And one tends to come to it later in one’s career.”

“Then what sort of cases do you work on?”

“Whatever comes. I don’t get to choose. It’s often rather banal.”

I shot him a quizzical look. “I thought this was your big passion.”

“It is.”

“You just described it as rather banal.”

“I meant, it can seem banal to other people. If your only experience of the law is television courtroom dramas, the reality that I spend my days defending teenagers who were caught shoplifting nail varnish and small-time criminals who’ve overreached themselves can be somewhat disappointing.” He stood and started gathering up the empty plates and bowls. “Socially, it’s a bit of a lose-lose. Either people think I spend all day putting killers and rapists back on the street for the money, or they think I’m terribly dull.”

Without thinking about it, I rose to help, our hands tangling among the brinnerware. “Maybe we can split the difference and say you’re spending your days putting teenage shoplifters back on the street for the money.”

“Maybe we can split the difference and say I spend my days making sure a single error of judgment doesn’t ruin a young person’s life.”

I flicked a stray blueberry at him, and it bounced off his nose.

“Your point being?” he asked.

Clearing up. I was very busy clearing up. “You…you really do care about this stuff, don’t you?”

“And that observation led you to assault me with soft fruit?”

“Objection. Badgering the witness.”

“You know that’s not a thing in this country?”

I gasped. “Then what do you do when counsel is testifying?”

“You either trust the judge to know what they’re doing—which they usually do, even the mad ones—or you very politely say something along the lines of ‘M’lud, I believe the honourable counsel for the prosecution is testifying.’”

“And to think”—here I heaved a deep sigh—“I was imagining you leaping up and laying the legal smackdown on the smug suits from the AG’s office.”