"So." Tommy leaned back in his chair. "You're the prosecutor who's got Vance running scared."
"I've got Vance's lawyers billing overtime. That's not the same thing."
"It's a start." Tommy's smile was warm. "Jake says you're impressive. Jake doesn't say that about anyone."
"Jake's known me for eight hours."
"Jake knew his last CO for thirty seconds before he decided he'd follow the man into hell." Tommy shrugged. "He reads people fast. It's his thing."
Emily glanced at Jake, who was watching this exchange with an expression that was hard to read. Amused, maybe. Or warmer than that.
"What else did he tell you about me?" she asked.
"That you work too hard. That you don't take vacations." Tommy grinned. "That you looked at him in that conference room like you were trying to decide whether to hire him or arrest him."
"I was doing neither."
"You were doing both." Jake set his bourbon down. "I could see you calculating. The case, the timeline, whether I was going to be useful or another complication."
"And what did you decide I decided?"
"That I was definitely going to be a complication." His eyes held a knowing light. "And that you were going to work with me anyway."
Emily took a longer drink of her margarita than she'd intended. He wasn't wrong. That was the problem. He'd read her in an hour better than people she'd known for years.
"How do you do that?" she asked. "See people so clearly?"
Jake's easy charm faded, replaced by gravity. "When I was overseas, reading people was the difference between coming home and not coming home. You learn to watch. To notice what people don't know they're showing you." He looked into her eyes. "You do the same thing, by the way. You do it with evidence instead of faces."
"It's not the same."
"It's exactly the same. You look at numbers and see patterns. I look at people and see truth." He leaned closer, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him. "That's why we're going to work well together. We read different things."
Emily became aware that the rest of the table had gone silent. Ray and Tommy were watching. Claire was watching. Even Gator, behind the bar, had paused with a bottle in his hand.
She didn't care.
"What truth are you reading right now?" she asked.
Jake leaned back, watching her. "That you're trying to decide if I'm too good to be true. That you want to trust me but you don't trust easily, and you're not sure what to do with someone who doesn't seem to want anything from you except your company." He paused. "And that you haven't laughed. Really laughed. The kind where you forget to be careful. In a long time."
The realization he was right set in. Not exactly cracking in her walls. But rattling the frame.
"That's a lot to read from one conversation."
"You're not as hard to read as you think."
"No one's ever said that to me before."
"Then no one's been paying attention."
The evening unfolded.
Tommy told stories about Ray in high school, about the summer they'd all worked construction together and Jake hadput his truck through the wall of a storage shed. Ray defended himself badly. Jake offered no defense at all, laughed and admitted to every crime Tommy accused him of.
Claire and Tommy discovered a shared obsession with a true crime podcast and disappeared into a debate that involved increasingly wild hand motions. Gator drifted over between drink orders, asking Emily questions about the law, about what had brought her to Tampa. She found herself answering honestly, more honestly than she usually did with strangers.
And through all of it, Jake.
