It seemed to inspire a teaching moment in Bob.
“Look, Angie, maybe you don’t have anything else to do. Maybe this is your only client for all I know, but I’m a busy man. Jed is a busy man. He has phone calls he has to take, meetings he has to get to, and instead he’s sitting here having to listen to you carp on about this little crap.”
“I’m fine if Mr. Worth doesn’t sit in on the negotiations.” More than fine. In fact, I wished he wouldn’t even come back. “You’re the one who invited him.”
“I wanted him to see how much trouble you’re causing your client! And if Jed walks away from this deal because of it, well, I’d call that malpractice and I don’t mind telling your client that.”
I shook my head in amazement. “Do you ever argue the merits of anything, Bob, or do you always substitute throwing your weight around for legal reasoning?”
Jed came back into the room, pocketing his cell, and sat right back next to me. So no luck on the not-coming-back thing.
“What was the last offer on the table?” he asked me.
When I told him, Bob smiled that crocodile smile of his, sensing that a take-it-or-leave-it was coming up. But Jed just nodded and said, “Keep going.”
With a scowl from Bob and a supreme effort on my part to keep my cool, we did. Jed stayed silent for a few more minutes or so of me and Bob fencing over provision after provision of the contract. Not that I could forget Gorgeous Guy’s, er, Jed’s presence next to me. He sat silent at first, stretching those long legs of his underneath the table, and then later turned to his phone, texting or emailing or maybe just playing Angry Birds to pass the time.
Mid-Bob-tirade over a perfectly reasonable point I had just made, Jed stood up and said, “I’ll give your client double.”
That silenced the room.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Double the last offer. Somebody type that into the purchase price and I’ll sign.” All of his lawyers, including Bob, were stunned silent. “If I do that, will you stop haggling over this and let me take you to lunch?” he asked me.
I allowed myself to meet his blue eyes. “It’s not even ten.”
“Brunch then. Whatever.”
Bob slammed down a file and stood up. “Jed. A word.”
“No Bob. Not a word. You there,” he directed the kid across the table. “Go on. Type that in and print it and I’ll sign it.” He took my elbow and urged me up, but I resisted, staying seated. “Then you can send it to your client and he’ll sign it.”
“I don’t believe this,” Bob muttered, shaking his head. “A pretty face, a whiff of you-know-what and you lose it.”
My mouth thinned. Par for the course for Bob. Every dirty trick in the book was our Bob. Of course it didn’t help that in this instance it was probably true. And for that, I blamed Jed for making it so blatant, as much as I did Bob for calling it out in a roomful of my fellow professionals.
“What difference does it make?” Jed asked calmly. “At the rate I’m paying the twenty lawyers in this room, by the time she got through with you it’d come to about the same by my rough calculations. How many Ivy League degrees does it take to handle a ‘pretty face’ from— What firm are you from?” he asked me.
The kid across the table outright laughed, but the rest of them were frozen, afraid they’d never make partner just for even witnessing this.
I named my firm, which I’m sure the Jed Worths of this world had never heard of, and added, “And for your information, I went to Yale.”
“That makes it a little better, Bob, doesn’t it? But you’re a Harvard man, so I don’t know what that says about you.” Jed was very congenial about it all, but I had the feeling Bob’s brain was going to explode.
In any case, if Worth Industries was going to pay my client double, who was I to argue? I stood up. “My client accepts that offer.”
“If you want your bill paid, Bob, I’d get that figure typed in then. You have about ten seconds before I take my business elsewhere.”
Bob nodded at one of his associates, not the one who had laughed and who would never make partner now, and she scurried out. The room was totally quiet as I gathered up my papers.
“What’s a good brunch place, Bob?” Jed asked casually.
There was a long silence. Then, “Valerie’s in Midtown.”
“Great.” Jed signed the contract as soon as it was brought in a second later and I jotted down a cover note to my client as it was scanned and sent to me so I could forward it on.
Jed’s hand was at my elbow as we left the conference room, and he nodded at the still-hassled receptionist on the way out, but it wasn’t until we were in the elevator, alone, that he pulled me to him with a laugh. I pushed him away.