Indicted (Bad Judgment #1) by Leigh James

in myself if I’d misjudged him so greatly. He might very well be a man-whore, but I didn’t think he was a corporate criminal worthy of a federal prison sentence.
    In spite of my exhaustion and my nerves, I made myself stay up and draft a list of questions to ask him tomorrow. The wine helped. The worrying, however, did not.

Chapter 7
    I barely slept . I kept thinking about Walker, the arraignment, my disheveled appearance on the news, and how nasty Alexa had been. Mostly, I thought about Walker. I didn’t want him to go to jail.
    I couldn’t babysit him if he was in jail.
    But they could take him later today, I knew. And he would have to stay there until his trial, which would be months from now. My heart constricted at the thought. It would be horrible for him, even though a federal penitentiary was a cakewalk compared to state prison. He shouldn't be held in jail because he was innocent — at least I currently believed he was innocent — and he was not a flight risk. It was fight or flight, a desperate moment in his life, and he wanted to fight. He wasn’t going to run away from his problems: he wanted to stay and clear his name, defend his honor.
    Also, over the past twenty-four hours, the idea of him being under “house arrest” had started to sound sort of hot to me.
    A hobby, I admonished myself again, and turned the water in the shower to cold.
    While I was blow-drying my hair, I thought about calling my friend Mimi Johnstone, but I didn’t have time. I’d worked with Mimi when I’d started at Proctor; she was one of the smartest, toughest lawyers I’d met, and even though she was a woman, she never took any crap from anyone. She was also very blunt about sex, the vagaries of being an attractive female lawyer, and who (and who not) to sleep with.
    Mimi was the one who told me about The Rules. They’d been in the back of my mind since I’d met Walker, but I hadn’t wanted to think of them clearly. Now I recited them to myself as I put my makeup on, thinking of seeing Walker in a few hours. I shamelessly put on foundation, blush, mascara, and lip gloss. I’d already put on a push-up bra.
    The Rules were directly on point in my current situation. I needed to listen up.
    Rule Number One: Don’t sleep with your clients. Not ever. Not the rich ones, not the ones who plead and promise you things, not any of them. Those clients can’t get you your livelihood back. The Board of Bar Overseers will not care how irresistible your Hot Client was. They’ll just see that you exercised magnificently poor judgment, irretrievably violated your professional code of conduct, and are no longer fit to practice law — if in fact you ever (you ever) really were.
    Rule Number Two: Go sleep with someone else. Preferably, anybody else. And do it quick, so you don’t do it with your Hot Client.
    Rule Number Three: Stop looking at your Hot Client’s strong jawline and the tendons in his forearms as he clenches the steering wheel or makes a fist. Ignore those other things (particularly those located in your private parts) that are clenching. (Okay, I came up with this one.)
    Rule Number Four: Get your Hot Client fully acquitted so you don’t ever have to look at him again, or think about what he would look like naked above you, those big biceps holding you down. (Yeah, I came up with this one, too.)
    I’m gonna have to give Mike the Spike a booty call tonight, if I have time, I thought, feeling monumentally depressed.
    I pushed it all from my mind. I had to go shopping before I dealt with Walker. Dealt with his arraignment, with his impending imprisonment or house arrest, with not looking at or thinking about his biceps. I was going to get some new clothes so I didn’t look like I was coming straight from Bargain Basement when I was on the news tonight. Right now I was wearing my best black suit, with a tight cream tank top underneath, and my highest black heels. I looked as good as I could, and I was going be big and