Bad Boy's Honor: An MMA Bad Boy Romance

by Ashe, Jessica

  “Everything okay?” she asked as she walked in. “I heard you slam the phone down.”

  “I had a call from Zach,” I said. “He mentioned something about you sending him photos.”

  “He called you as well?”

  “Yes. Now, what’s this about these photos.”

  April laughed, but said something that didn’t sound at all funny. “He demanded that I send him a picture of my breasts, so I sent him one.”

  “You did what? Why did you do that?”

  What the hell had she been thinking? Did Zach really have something that big on her?

  “Calm down. Look, here’s the picture I sent him.”

  April handed me her phone and I stared at a picture of what was definitely not her breasts. “These are your knees.”

  “Yep. I’m glad you know the difference. Zach doesn’t appear to. I take a strange satisfaction from knowing that he’s probably knocking one out to a picture of my knees.”

  I forced a laugh, but I didn’t take this matter as lightly as April clearly did. Zach was demanding one of my clients. Not just any old client; my biggest client by far. Some years we billed them a million dollars. They’d be hard to replace.

  “Why is he trying to blackmail you?” I asked. “At the networking event he mentioned having dirt on you, but I don’t understand what he means.”

  “That makes two of us,” April replied. “I don’t know and I don’t care. He’s just bluffing, but I figured I’d string him along for a bit.”

  “Okay, well let me know if he calls again.”

  He will. I know he will. Whatever he’s playing at, he’s not yet finished.

  “Will do.”

  “Not that I’m complaining, but why are you in my office?” I asked. “And why are you fully dressed?”

  “I’m fully dressed because your office is freezing as per usual. And I’m here for business, not pleasure.”

  “Ugh. Okay, what is it?”

  “It’s about PorTupe.”

  First Zach, and now April. What was the obsession everyone had with that client? Oh yeah, the massive amount of legal bills they paid every year.

  “What about them?”

  “I’ve been doing some research online, and it turns out that there are loads of stories of people being discriminated against by PorTupe. People have even lost their jobs because of race or gender.”

  “There are also stories online about UFOs, Bigfoot, and the Star Wars prequels actually being good movies. Don’t believe everything you read.”

  “You’re a Star Wars fan?”

  “I like to think I can handle a lightsaber.”

  April smirked, pursing her lips together tightly, and I thought back to how she’d had them clamped around my cock a few days ago. How would I ever get any work done with her across the hall?

  “These aren’t just silly stories,” April continued. “There’s a pattern. People make claims, but then drop the suit. In some cases it sounds like there were threats made by the company against the former employees, but other cases just settled. The details are a little thin because there are non-disclosure agreements involved.”

  “And if this is true, those NDAs are being broken by talking about the cases online.”

  “That’s what you think is important here?” April asked incredulously. “A broken NDA?”

  “My point is that perhaps people who are breaking a legally binding confidentiality agreement shouldn’t be considered all that trustworthy.”

  “Where there’s smoke there’s fire,” April replied.

  “No, where there’s smoke there’s smoke. Smoke is generated by many different chemical reactions, not just fire.”

  April groaned through gritted teeth. “You’re impossible sometimes, you know that?”

  “What do you want me to do, April? They’re my client. I do the work they ask me to do. And you know what, if they ask me to defend them on a discrimination lawsuit then I’ll do that as well.”

  “Don’t expect me to help you,” April replied. “I just can’t do that kind of work.”

  “You’ll do the work you’re given.”

  April pouted and crossed her arms over her chest. I did my best to look mad and not aroused, but she made it fucking difficult sometimes. She could act like a petulant child, and I still couldn’t be angry with her, not really.

  “Speaking of work,” I said. “Mom thinks it’s a good idea for you to give a presentation to the firm. Most of your work has been for me, but I won’t be making the decision about whether or not to offer you a job after the summer. You need to impress the partners.”

  “Fine, I can do that. As long as I don’t have to give a speech arguing the merits of discriminating against people.”

  “I’ve picked out the topic for you. The Delaware Court of Chancery has handed down a big decision on poison pills used to prevent hostile takeovers. I want you to compare it to the current leading authority and talk about what might change with this new precedent. I’ve emailed you all the details.”

  “Thanks. Guess I better get going.”

  “Oh April,” I called out just as she was about to open the door. She turned to glare at me and I blew her a kiss. When did I become a soppy romantic?

  April stared at me for a few seconds, but finally smiled and blew me a kiss in return.

  I did feel a little guilty about setting her up with this presentation, but I’d put the wheels in place when she’d dumped all that pro bono work on my plate.

  April had a sense of humor, but she also embarrassed easily. This might get me in a lot of trouble.

  ~Twenty-Six~

  APRIL

  I’m going to kill him.

  Preparing the presentation had been easy. Both the cases were written by a judge capable of writing in clear English, and even the ‘old’ case was only written ten years ago. There was no archaic language and no difficult concepts to grasp.

  It also helped that I’d taken a Corporations class this year, so the law on poison pills was still fresh in my mind. We’d even read an abstract of the old case in class, although my professor hadn’t gone into much detail on it because it involved points of law that were deemed to be beyond the syllabus.

  I found the law firm’s template for PowerPoint presentations and put together a basic slide show. The presentation was only twenty minutes plus ten minutes for questions, so I stuck to ten slides with everything in large font.

  I took the project seriously, but I didn’t kid myself into believing that any of the partners would really care about what I had to say. They would be listening in to make sure I understood the core concepts and could talk about it without sounding like a nervous schoolgirl. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what I was.

  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 cons
isted 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.

  ~Twenty-Seven~

  FOSTER

  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.