Chapter One

Chapter 1

His secretary announced simply, “It’s her.”

There was no ambiguity as to who “her” might be, not after the force twelve media storm of the previous weeks. The country was convulsed. Seven-eighths of the nation’s front pages and the evening news was devoted to it. If war had broken out with Russia and China, it might have made page two.

“Shameless” Baylor had spent much of the previous seventeen days wondering if Beth MacMann would have the balls to call him.

He was, at age not quite fifty, the top trial attorney in the country. He had been the first lawyer to charge $1,000 per hour, which—for too long—had been considered the unbreakable sound barrier of legal billing.

There were half a dozen second-best trial attorneys each of whom, naturally, considered him- or herself the top trial attorney in the country. But none of them had been simultaneously on the covers of all three weekly newsmagazines, none had been portrayed in movies by a famous British actor pretending to be American. None owned a professional baseball team. And, to be sure, none had been married and divorced four times. The previous record had stood at three. That he had any assets left after such serial marital wreckage was perhaps the greatest testament to his courtroom skills.

He hadn’t been baptized “Shameless.” In fact, up to the moment he set out to become the best trial attorney in the country he had been the soul of decency, what used to go by the name of “Christian gentleman,” a veritable poster boy for all that is good and sunny in human nature. His real name was Boyce, a