Revenge: A Bad Boy Romance (54 page)

Public speaking terrified me. Any kind of presentation had me on edge. I would be nervous if friends asked me to stand up and tell them how my day had been. There was something about having people staring at me that I just couldn’t come to grips with.  

I liked to blend in with the crowd. In class, I would purposely avoid the front two rows, and try to find somewhere in the middle hoping that would help me blend in. It didn’t work.

Most of my professors used the ‘socratic method’ of teaching. I’d never heard of it before starting law school, but apparently Socrates had liked to pick on nervous young girls and ask them to explain the ins and outs of the case we read before class.  

No matter how well I knew the case, the words wouldn’t come to me when I had to answer a question in front of all my peers. I usually ended up just quoting random sections from the case until the professor got bored and decided to move on to someone else.

The presentation was done with a day to spare, so I’d used the additional time to practice actually speaking it out loud. That was when I realized just how much Foster had screwed me over. This was obviously his way of getting back at me for the whole
pro bono
thing.

The presentation had been set aside for Friday afternoon, so my audience consisted of bored-looking associates, and partners who were all ready to head off to their beach houses in Delaware, or whatever else it was these people did on the weekends.

Foster showed up and sat at the front, because of course he would. This had all been his idea, and he damn well wasn’t going to miss out on all the fun.

I’m going to kill him. Slowly.

I stood at the front of a large conference room while the partners talked to fellow colleagues that they hadn’t seen in weeks, due to the tendency of most partners to lock themselves in their offices.  

Most of the associates kept a respectful silence, but each of them had some form of caffeinated beverage in front of them, so the silence was likely as much due to exhaustion as anything else.  

Foster coughed loudly, and after a few seconds the remaining conversation died down to a hush and finally there was total silence.

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman,” I began.
God dammit, April. You’re giving a presentation, not hosting the Oscars.
“I mean, good afternoon. I’ll try not to keep you all here for too long today. As you may know, the Delaware Court of Chancery recently released a new decision on poison pills in takeovers. The court’s reasoning in this case contains a few key differences from established case law that I want to draw to your attention.”

I pressed a button on my laptop to change over the next slide which contained my bullet points summary the existing law.

“A lot of the current law on poison pills has been taken from the seminal case of…” I paused catching the smile spreading over Foster’s face. “...the seminal case of Coch Industries.”  

My slide had shown the case as
In re Coch Ind. Shareholder Litigation
, but there was no getting around the fact that everyone in the legal profession just referred to the case as ‘Coch,’ or ‘Coch Ind.’  

There was no getting around the unfortunate pronunciation of the word ‘Coch.’ I made a point of saying the case name a lot at the beginning, hoping people would get used to hearing me say “Coch” again and again. Most of the attorneys in the room were well versed in the case, so they didn’t react, but I did notice a few snickers from some of the attorneys working in non-corporate practice areas.

This was the easy bit. The next case was the real killer.

I turned on to the next slide and described how the Coch case had been used by courts in the last few years, and then flipped over the slide detailing the key points from the new case.

“Just last month, the Delaware SC released its judgment in the case of
In re Kunt, Inc. Shareholder Litigation
.”

Foster snickered loud enough for everyone in the room to hear, and he set off a few of the other attorneys as well. The partners didn’t join in the laughing, and they had the decency to look vaguely embarrassed for me.  

“The… the Kunt case will change the way we look at poison pills for companies without a diverse group of shareholders.”  

Instead of getting used to it, every time I said… the name of the case, the laughs grew louder and louder until I just gave up and started referring to it as ‘the new case.’

The meeting room which, like the rest of the office, was usually too cold for comfort, now felt hot and suffocating. My blouse clung to the sweat pooling on my back, but I resisted the urge to stop and take off my cardigan. At least the cardigan covered the sweat patches.  

The twenty minute presentation only lasted fifteen minutes, because I went through the rest of the material in a desperate panic. I’d be surprised if anyone could understand much of what I was saying, let alone follow the legal reasoning involved.

“Any questions?” I asked, adopting a tone of voice that I think made it very clear I didn’t want any questions. My audience picked up on the hint.  

All of them except one.

“Yes Foster. You have a question?”
Of course he has a fucking question.

“I remember reading Coch in law school,” Foster said. “It was a tricky case to get my head round, but from what I’ve heard, Kunt is really hard to understand. Do you agree that there are lots of complexities involved in understanding Kunt?”

I’m going to kill him. Slowly and painfully.

“Yes,” I snarled. “It’s a complicated case.”

“But if you use Kunt correctly, you stand a good chance of getting a satisfactory outcome in your case?”  

“I guess it depends which party you are,” I replied. “I know some attorneys who think they understand the case, but actually they don’t have a clue.”  

A few of the associates laughed, but Foster kept a straight face.

“If that’s all—” I began.

“I have another question,” Foster said. “If you were just getting started with corporate law, where would you recommend people start? Coch Ind. or Kunt?”  

Foster spoke quickly and to my paranoid ears he managed to make “Ind. or” sound a lot like “in your.”  

I’m going to kill him. Slowly, painfully, and with a smile on my face.

“Coch,” I replied, as I quickly shut my laptop and stormed out of the room.  

He’s going to pay for that. I headed straight back to my desk and opened up the motion that we’d prepared in Doris’ case. We were still a long way from getting anywhere with finding her son, but we had to get the ball rolling.  

It would take years, and I almost certainly wouldn’t still be at the firm to see the end of it, but that was the way most things worked in the legal world. You had to wait years to see the results of your hard work. Presumably the wait was worth it in the end, but Doris might be dead by then.

Foster had asked for a draft of the motion ready for his final review over the weekend. Despite the huge fuss he’d made about not wanting to do
pro bono
work, he’d actually written most of the motion himself and I’d only chipped in on the statement of facts and some of the procedural sections.  

The last thing I’d been working on was getting proper case citations in the document to conform to the court’s standards. That sort of work always got dumped on the junior attorneys or summer associates, because we still had the citation rules fresh in our minds from law school.

Apart from a few more nuanced citations, I had basically finished the project and could send it over to Foster with only about thirty minutes more work.  

Screw that.  

If Foster liked rude case names, then that’s exactly what he was going to get—a motion full of rude case names. He sucked at doing citations, so now he’d have to spend the entire weekend in the office with his Bluebook fixing it all. Served him right.

My mind might not be as filthy as Foster’s, but I still knew enough dirty terms to litter the twelve pages with enough profanity and sexual innuendo to make a porn star blush.  

Revenge was sweet.

April was up to something. She had to be.

Ever since Friday’s unfortunate presentation, I’d been keeping a keen eye on April to see how she would act around me. I prepared for a volley of verbal abuse, but instead she just stayed in her office hard at work.

I couldn’t spend any time with her at the weekend, but that was probably for the best. Gave her time to cool off. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. I should probably stop being such a jerk to her, but it takes time to change twenty-nine years of habit.

We finally met up on Monday, but instead of getting an earful from her she just smiled and spoke to me as if nothing had happened. She kept that up all week. I decided to test her resolve by inviting her to dinner on Friday night, but much to my amazement she agreed.  

This out-of-character behavior made me suspicious, but other than making my own coffee and not eating any of the food she offered me, there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it.  

April had even stopped giving me grief about PorTupe, or at least, she didn’t give me as much grief about it. She’d turned her attention instead to the
pro bono
case we were working on. I’d told April a hundred times that Doris’ case wasn’t going to go anywhere fast and that the motion would take time to be processed, but she still kept asking.

Just as I was about to head out for lunch, the phone rang from an undisclosed number. Unknown numbers had me on edge at the moment, because I was still waiting for another call from Zach. He’d been worryingly silent for too long, however this wasn’t him.

“Foster Arrington,” I said, as I answered the call.

“Hello Mr. Arrington, my name is Terrance Castle and I’m an intern for Judge Whiteman.”

I knew that judge’s name. Where did I know if from?

“How can I help you Mr. Castle?” I asked, as I typed ‘Judge Whiteman’ into the search bar on my emails. Bingo. He was the judge in Doris’ case.

“I’m calling about the motion you filed recently with this court.” He reeled off a document number, but we’d only made one filing so I didn’t bother taking a note of it. “The judge would like a conference with you.”

“Really?” I asked, not bothering to hide my surprise.  

We’d requested that the case be expedited, but that meant we wanted to cut a few of the deadlines down from ninety days to thirty. We hadn’t been expecting a conference with the judge.

“Yes,” the clerk responded. “And he would like the conference to be tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” If I’d had a drink in my mouth, I would have spat it out. “That’s most unusual, Mr. Castle. Can you tell me what it’s about? You’re not exactly leaving me a lot of time to prepare.”

“I can’t say, Mr. Arrington, but as one professional to another, I would strongly recommend that you turn up. You’re going to want to be there to speak to the judge.”

“Uh, okay, sure.”  

I made a note of the time, and called April into my office. I didn’t make that many court appearances, but I worked with plenty of attorneys who did. I knew that you rarely just showed up to court on less than twenty-four hours notice for a meeting with a judge. Other than refamiliarizing myself with the facts of the case and the motion we’d submitted, there wasn’t a lot we could do to prepare.

“You rang, m’lord,” April said, showing up in my doorway and giving a sarcastic curtsy. I wouldn’t mind lifting that skirt up a little higher and having her call me sir, but right now work had to take precedence.
Although, we could sneak in a few hours… no, not now. Think about Zach. That’s it.

“I just got a call from the judge in Doris’ case,” I explained. “He wants us to go to the courtroom tomorrow for a meeting. And before you ask, no, I don’t know what it’s about. It’s highly unusual to have a meeting at such short notice.”

“I suppose he just wants to talk about our motion,” April replied. “That’s a good thing isn’t it.”

“Maybe. You should come along as well. It’ll be a great experience for you, especially if you keep insisting on protecting the small fry instead of the big fish with money. You’ll be spending a lot of time in court if that’s the case.”