Bad Boy's Honor: An MMA Bad Boy Romance (46 page)

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.”

“There’s nothing wrong with fighting for people’s rights in court.”

“I meant, you’ll be in court fighting to enforce judgments so that you get paid by all your broke ass clients. We should spend some time going over the motion before tomorrow. It’s been weeks since I looked at it, so you know the facts better than me.”

April’s face turned a shade of pale I had never seen before. She hadn’t even looked that white when she’d found out our parents had got married.

“You feeling okay?” I asked. “If you’re going to throw up would you perhaps mind going to the bathroom?”

“You haven’t read the brief in weeks?” April asked.

“No, why?”

“But you submitted it to the court?”

“Yes. I had my paralegal do it on Monday.”

“So you didn’t check my citations?”

“God no,” I replied dismissively. “I haven’t done that since law school. I have complete confidence in your abilities to properly cite everything. You don’t need me to check that.”

Just when I thought April couldn’t get any paler, she somehow found another shade of white I didn’t know existed.

“I may know why we’ve been called in to see the judge,” April said softly. She bit her lip and tried to smile, but it came out as more of a constipated grimace. “You’re going to laugh when you hear this.”

-*-

“Is that your special ‘court suit?’ ” April asked when we met outside the courtroom.  

I often wore a suit to work, but the jacket would quickly get thrown over the chair and not worn again until it was time to leave. I rarely wore a tie. Couldn’t stand the things.  

“This is my ‘I’m going to get torn a new one by the judge suit.’ I only wear it on the rare occasions when a summer associate thinks it’s funny to put a load of silly case names into a court document.”

“You should have checked it before filing it,” April insisted.  

She’d apologized profusely yesterday, but as time passed she’d clearly decided that perhaps this wasn’t entirely her fault after all. I should have checked the document, especially after I’d just put April through hell with that presentation.

“What sort of stuff did you put in there anyway?” I asked.

“Bad stuff,” she replied. “Naughty things.”

“Hmm, well, in that case I can’t be too mad I suppose. You look nervous.”

“I’m terrified. My heart’s racing a mile a minute. Aren’t you worried?”

“I always try to remain calm. My heart rate only goes up during exercise and certain other physical activities. Look.” I took her hand and pressed it against my chest so that she could feel my heart.

“That’s strangely therapeutic. I think it’s actually helping me calm down.”

She kept her hand on my chest until the large wooden door opened and a man in his early twenties, presumably the court clerk, told us to come inside.  

The judge was sitting in his chair, which meant this was going to be an official reaming. I told April to sit in one of the seats at the side while I went up and approached the bench.  

April had insisted on coming along and owning up to the whole thing, but I’d made it clear she was to keep quiet. The last thing I wanted was to make this look like I was throwing my summer associate under the bus.

“You might as well both come up here,” the judge said, in a deep booming voice. “I’m guessing the young lady had something to do with this as well.”

“No your honor, it was all me,” I replied, motioning with my hand for April to stay seated.  

“Really? So you cited a Supreme Court case as being between the parties of ‘My Tight Pussy’ versus ‘Your Hard Cock.’ ”

“Um…”

“And,” the judge continued, “while I respect the privacy of what two consenting adults get up to in the bedroom, I can’t help but think that you did not write ‘the court held that you must pull my long blonde hair the next time you take me from behind.’ ”  

With pleasure, April.

I turned around and saw her desperately looking everywhere other than at the judge. There wasn’t much I could do to keep her out of it now, so I motioned for her to come and join me.

“Obviously, your honor, that motion should never have been filed. It was intended as a joke. I just filed the wrong one.”

“Clearly. Look, I don’t care what goes on between you two. You wouldn’t be the first pair of lawyers to have an office romance—I can vouch for that personally—however when you took on this case you accepted a significant responsibility.”

“Yes, your honor,” I said, with April repeating it after me. “Obviously I accept full responsibility for this. It won’t happen again.”

“No, it had better not. I do hope you intend to take your
pro bono
responsibilities seriously from now on, Mr. Arrington?”

“Certainly, your honor.”  

“You could prove that by, for example, volunteering at the the local law school to help with the moot court competition. I’m sure two intelligent young attorneys like yourselves could find a way to help.”  

“That sounds like an excellent suggestion,” I said reluctantly, as a weekend spent screwing April disappeared before my eyes.  

“Good. If that’s the case, I don’t see any need for further disciplinary action. Have fun, you two.”  

The judge banged his gavel, and strolled off whistling and clearly feeling rather pleased with his morning’s work.  

“What just happened?” April asked as we left the courtroom.

“You landed us with a weekend spent listening to law students give crappy oral arguments. That’s what happened.”  

“Oh. Well, it could be worse.”

“If you say so. I hate law students.”

“Thanks. No offense taken.”

“You’re the exception. Now, let’s go back to the office and read over this motion you wrote. I have a feeling this one is going to be a lot less dry than usual.”

I considered myself a studious person, but you had to be a special kind of insane to be at law school on a Saturday during the summer break.  

Even so, people were huddled over books in all the common areas, and no doubt the library would still be half-full. I may not have much of a life myself, but I could console myself in thinking that perhaps there were people with even less of a social presence.

Foster had arrived at the school early and arranged for us to both be judges, despite the fact that I would have less moot court experience than the contestants. All I’d done was compete in the mandatory first-year competition, and even though I’d enjoyed it, I’d not signed up for any more competitions. Court appearances were rare for corporate work, so it had seemed like a waste of my energy. Now, I wished I knew what was going on so as not to look completely stupid.