Practice Makes Perfect (5 page)

“At work, you can sometimes . . . have a bit of an edge,” Laney said carefully. “Like this thing with J.D., for example.”

Payton tried to decide whether she should be offended. But as much as she might not want to admit it, a part of her knew that what Laney was saying wasn’t completely off base.

“I suppose this ‘thing’ with J.D. has gotten a little out of hand,” she sniffed reluctantly. “You’re right—I should be the better person in this.” She smirked. “That shouldn’t be too hard in comparison to J.D.”—she caught Laney’s look— “is
exactly
what Edgy Payton would’ve said. But the New Payton won’t go there.”

Laney tipped her coffee mug approvingly. “Good for you. To the New Payton.”

“The New Payton.”

Payton clinked her mug to Laney’s, wondering what she was getting herself into.

Five

BE THE BALL.

J.D. focused intently. His eyes never left the tee.

Be the ball.

He pulled back, then—
swoosh!
His swing was effortless. With one hand raised to block the sun’s glare, he watched as the ball landed on the green 240 yards away, within inches of the hole.

J.D. smiled. God, he loved this sport.

Hearing the whistling and clapping coming from behind him, he turned around to face his companions.

“Nice shot,” Jasper called out in his lazy Southern drawl. “A man who bills three thousand hours a year shouldn’t have time for a swing like that.” Their three companions, representatives from Gibson’s legal department, nodded in agreement.

J.D. walked over and took the beer Jasper held out to him. “Does this mean we’re talking business?”

Jasper grinned. He had the bold smile of a man completely at ease with the power he held. He glanced down at his beer, then took in the beautiful tree-lined scenery of the eighth hole. “Tell you what. Wait till the fifteenth hole. Then we’ll talk.”

Following Jasper’s lead, J.D. soaked in the warmth of the blue-sky summer day while admiring the view of the river that flowed just beyond the green. He tipped his bottle at Jasper. “Make it the seventeenth.”

Jasper chuckled. “A man after my own heart. But are you sure you want to wait? I heard the back nine of this course brings a man to his knees.”

“Maybe a lesser man, Jasper.”

Jasper laughed heartily at this. “I like your style, Jameson.”

Grinning, J.D. took a sip of his beer. So far, his afternoon with the Gibson’s team had been going very well. He was comfortable here, in his element—which undoubtedly was one of the reasons Ben had chosen him for this assignment. J.D. had grown up around men like Jasper all his life and was familiar with the “good-ole boy” routine. He understood the lingo, the game, the role he was supposed to play. Ben wanted to do a little showing off—that’s why he had specifically asked J.D. to bring the Gibson’s team to this course. He was trying to impress them, but didn’t want to look like he was trying to impress them. The fact that J.D. just so happened to have a membership at one of the most exclusive clubs in the country was the perfect way to accomplish this.

The only blemish on the afternoon was the nagging feeling he got whenever a vision of Payton sitting back at the office popped into his head. He kept trying to brush these feelings aside. Why should he feel guilty that she had been left out? After all, he was just doing his job, what Ben had asked him to do. And, had the shoe been on the other foot, he was quite certain Payton would’ve had no problem leaving him behind.

There was another image J.D. had a hard time shaking: the look Payton had given him when he’d told her that the club didn’t allow women. For the briefest moment, he’d seen something in her eyes he hadn’t seen before. A slight crack, a falter in her usual armor of confidence. For some reason, it had bothered him, seeing that.

Realizing that one of the Gibson’s lawyers was asking him a question about the course, J.D. pushed all thoughts of Payton from his mind. He couldn’t be distracted right now. He needed to be on, to be charming and professional. And, no less important, he needed to mentally prepare for the upcoming ninth hole—a ruthless par four that was one of the narrowest holes he had ever played.

Besides, as he knew full well, Payton Kendall could take care of herself.

PAYTON SAT AT the bar, waiting. She had agreed to meet J.D. and the Gibson’s team at Japonais restaurant at seven thirty. She was familiar with the restaurant, as was pretty much every other single woman in Chicago over the age of twenty-five. Trendy and expensive with a modern, ambient-lit decor, it was one of the most popular locales in the city for a first date.

Not that she’d had all that many first dates lately. It took time to meet people. It took time to date them, to get to know them, to figure out whether you liked them and whether they liked you. And time was something she didn’t have a lot of these days. So unless the mythical Perfect Guy fell out of the sky and landed smack-dab on her doorstep, dating was something she needed to put on hold until after she made partner.

Payton swirled her wineglass as she sat at the bar, thinking back to the last first date she’d had, with an investment banker she’d met at a local wine tasting. It had been at this very restaurant, in fact. Her date had polished off eight of the restaurant’s Mukune sakes by ten. By ten fifteen he’d fallen over in his chair while standing up to go to the bathroom and by ten fifteen and fifteen seconds—when Payton ran over to help—he’d slurringly confessed that he was having “a bidge of trupple” weaning off of his manic-depressive medication.

Nice.

“And
these
are the guys who are out there,” she had later groaned to Laney. Her friend had no such troubles, having of course married her frat-boy college sweetheart.

It was as a result of that disastrous last first date that Payton had vowed to temporarily cease all dips into the dating pool. At least until her professional life was in order, that is. It was kind of funny, and maybe a tad pathetic: she had realized earlier that evening as she’d been getting dressed that it was the first time in weeks she’d worn something other than a suit outside of her apartment. Not wanting to look too formal—or as if she was trying too hard to impress the Gibson’s reps—she’d ditched her standard suit jacket and gone instead with a fitted button-down shirt, pencil-thin skirt, and heels.

Having by now polished off her drink, Payton checked her watch and saw that her dinner companions were twenty minutes late. Truth be told, she was a bit worried about this dinner with the Gibson’s reps. She had done plenty of pitch meetings before, and she was sure J.D. had, too, but because their practices rarely overlapped, she and J.D. had never done one together.
Alone
together. These meetings required a certain finesse and cohesiveness between the lawyers doing the pitching—they needed to present a united front.

Unity.

Cohesiveness.

These were not exactly qualities that she and J.D. possessed together. Hence the slight jitters of apprehension she felt that got worse with every moment she sat alone at the bar.

When five more minutes passed, Payton reached into her purse for her cell phone. She figured she should check her voice mail, just to make sure J.D. hadn’t left a message. She was mid-dial when she looked up—

—and saw J.D. standing in front of her.

For a second, Payton was struck by the fact that something about him looked different. She realized that like her, he had dressed more informally for the evening. Instead of his customary suit and tie, he wore an open-necked black pin-striped shirt and perfectly tailored charcoal gray pants.

It was strange, because for whatever reason, what popped into her head at that very moment were Laney’s words from the other day about how good-looking J.D. was. Payton had seen J.D. pretty much five days a week for the past eight years, but right then she found herself looking him over more closely. She tried to see him the way a stranger might. Someone who hadn’t ever actually spoken to him or anything.

He was tall (as previously mentioned, all the better to look down on people), he had light brown hair with warm golden streaks (probably highlights), his build was lean (undoubtedly from all that tennis or whatever else he played at his I’m-so-cool sexist country club), and he had blue eyes that, um . . .

. . . Well, fine. There wasn’t really anything negative Payton could say about J.D.’s eyes. Speaking in a purely objective sense, she kind of liked them. They were a brilliant, bright blue. Such a shame they had to be wasted on
him
.

Having finished her assessment, Payton supposed that, if pressed, in that upper-crusty, Ralph Lauren-y, sweater-thrown-over-the-shoulders, have-you-met-my-polo-pony kind of way, J.D. was pretty damn good-looking.

Misinterpreting her look, J.D. cocked his head and pointed to her phone. “Oh, I’m sorry, Payton—I didn’t mean to interrupt you in the middle of your important business,” he said with just that right tinge of mocking.

Deciding it was better to go about with the business as usual of ignoring J.D., Payton turned her attention to the group of men he had arrived with. She immediately recognized Jasper from the pictures of him she had found on the Internet while researching his company and the lawsuit.

She stuck out her hand in introduction. “Payton Kendall. It’s very nice to meet you, Jasper,” she said warmly. With a firm handshake, she greeted the other members of the Gibson’s team—Robert, Trevor, and Charles—being sure to look each man directly in the eyes.

“I hope you haven’t been waitin’ long, Ms. Kendall,” Jasper said. “It was Charlie here’s fault—how many strokes did you take on that last hole?” He turned to Charles, who clearly was the most junior member of the trial team. “Fourteen? Fifteen?”

“I’m not much of a golfer,” Charles admitted to Payton. She liked him instantly.

“I’m a bit of a novice myself.” She smiled. Then she turned back to Jasper. “And please, call me Payton.”

“Like one of my favorite quarterbacks,” Jasper grinned.

“Only with an
a
instead of an
e
. And slightly fewer yards in passing,” Payton said. Damn—now she’d already blown one of the three measly sports references she knew in the first two minutes.

Jasper laughed. “Slightly fewer yards in passing—I like that.” He turned to J.D., gesturing to Payton. “Where have you been hidin’ this girl, J.D.?”

Luckily, J.D. was saved from choking on any polite words he was expected to utter by the hostess who appeared and asked to escort the group to their table.

Once seated, the group chitchatted through the standard business dinner preliminaries: Had Jasper and the others ever been to Chicago before? Where were they staying? Were Payton and J.D. from Chicago? They hit only the slightest bump in the road when Trevor, Gibson’s general counsel, asked Payton if she lived in the same neighborhood as J.D. and she realized that despite having worked with him for the past eight years, she had absolutely no idea where he lived. In fact, she pretty much knew nothing about J.D.’s nonwork life. Assuming he had one, that is.

Payton glossed over the question, telling Trevor instead how Chicago was a relatively compact city, how close everything was, et cetera, et cetera. She saw J.D. watching her out of the corner of his eye as he spoke with Robert, the head of Gibson’s in-house litigation department. Presumably, he had overheard her say his name to Trevor and was checking to make sure it wasn’t being taken in vain.

Thankfully, no other questions arose during dinner that required any sort of knowledge of anything personal related to J.D. When their entrees arrived, Payton began to talk about the firm and the strengths of its litigation group. J.D. joined in, highlighting some of the group’s recent legal victories, when Jasper cut him off with an impatient wave of his glass of bourbon.

“I know all about your firm’s achievements, Jameson. That’s why Ripley and Davis is one of the three firms we’re considering. Your firm’s successes are what got me here to this table tonight. But my understandin’ is that you two”—he pointed to J.D. and Payton—“will be the leaders of this trial team, should your firm be chosen to handle the case. So I want to know more about you.”

“Of course, Jasper. I’d be happy to tell you about my—”

Jasper cut him off. “Not from you, Jameson. I’m sure you and Payton both have pretty little prepared speeches you can rattle off about yourselves. But that’s not how I like to do things.” He turned to Payton, commanding. “Ms. Kendall, why don’t you tell me—what’s so special about J.D.?”

Payton nearly choked on the wine she was sipping. Clearly, she needed to buy a moment before answering.

“Well, Jasper . . .” She cleared her throat. Ahem. Ahem. “Wow—there are just so many things I could say about J.D. Well . . . where should I start?”

She was stalling. And as she did, Payton could see across the table to where J.D. sat. When she hesitated, he looked down and fiddled uncomfortably with his silver-ware.

Feeling four sets of eyes on her as the Gibson’s people waited, Payton quickly forced herself to think: What would an
objective
person say about J.D.?

“See, Jasper, the thing about J.D. is . . .” Payton tried to buy another moment. What was “the thing” about J.D.? She had worked with him for eight years, and in many ways she knew him better than anyone. And in many ways she didn’t know him at all.

Be objective, she told herself. The thing about J.D. was . . .

He was good.
Really
good.

Don’t get her wrong, he was still a jerk. But he was a jerk who was
driven
. As Payton knew full well, J.D. was in his office every morning by 7:00 a.m., and—as much as she might not want to admit it—his hard work had paid off. Over the past eight years he had accomplished a tremendous amount for an attorney his age. Laney was right—he was smart and talented. He was a threat. And if she was being honest with herself,
that
was one of the main reasons she didn’t like him.

Payton turned to Jasper. “The thing about J.D. is that he is one of the most successful class action attorneys in this city, probably even in the country. He’s won every opposition to class certification he’s filed—not once has a class been certified in a case he handled. He’s been the lead attorney in multimillion-dollar cases for Fortune 500 corporations since his sixth year. He knows the strategies involved in class action practice better than attorneys twice his age. He’s brilliant at what he does.”

Payton leaned forward in her chair. “And here’s the thing, Jasper: your company is being sued in the largest discrimination class action ever filed. No attorney has ever handled a case of this type and magnitude—so while experience definitely should play a role in your decision, that’s not the only thing that matters. You need someone with raw natural talent. Someone with the right legal instincts, someone who will be your best shot at attacking this case on class grounds. I can tell you this on no uncertain terms—that person is J.D.”