John laughed and shook his head. “No. No. There was nothing wrong with her.” As far as he could tell. Actually, as far as he could tell, she was pretty much the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen in his life. He’d spent the whole forty feet of her walk across that restaurant attempting to believe that she was actually there for him. It couldn’t be. Mothers didn’t set up their sons with movie-star beauties. And then that smile. Gah. His heart barely beat that hard when he went jogging. He’d considered it a miracle that he hadn’t upended his water glass onto his pants or something idiotic like that. No. He’d made a fool of himself in a different way. A considerably worse way. Him and his clumsy freaking mouth. Guilt lanced through him. “It’s just—Dating is a waste of time for me right now. I’m not in the position to...do that.”

“For someone who is so unbelievably articulate in the courtroom, you sure have a lovely way with words when it comes to yourself,” Richie said drily.

John pushed the pads of his fingers against his forehead as if he could massage through the bone and straight into the headache that always seemed to brew right there. “I play enough mind games at work to want to do that in my free time.”

“Ah,” Richie said with a sage nod. “Say no more. She was one of those.”

Richie had already turned back to his desk, and John usually took every opportunity of averted attention from his chatty officemate to get as much work done as possible, but something about Richie’s words made him pause.

“One of whats?” he asked Richie’s back and then silenced another one of his mother’s phone calls.

“A game player. Someone who has their own set of rules. Who sets traps and then greedily rubs their hands together when they watch you fall ass-first right into them. Trust me, I know the type. Sounds like you dodged a bullet.”

Still a little stymied by his friend’s assessment, John turned back around and woke up the twelve-year-old monitor that sat like a heavy, judgmental toad on his desk.

John considered himself to be an excellent judge of character—you kind of had to be in a courtroom—and that had not been how Mary Trace had seemed to him. But at thirty-one years old, with a grand total of one and three-quarters girlfriends in his entire life, John wasn’t exactly an expert on women. Maybe Richie was right.

His computer belched an error message at him and John groaned, his mind getting pulled back to the task at hand.