Wrangling with the Laywer

WRANGLING WITH THE LAWYER

By

Fran Louise

AMAZON EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Fran Louise on
AMAZON

Wrangling with the Lawyer

Copyright © 2011 by Fran Louise

Wrangling with the Lawyer
Copyright: Fran Louise
First Published: 15th October 2011
Publisher: Fran Louise Romance
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Adult Reading Material

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WRANGLING WITH THE LAWYER

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Chapter 1

Gabriel Stahl was, by all accounts, the best in the business. As Harper followed her lawyer along the plush hallways to Stahl’s offices, she had to agree his habitat was certainly impressive. Her eyes struggled to take in the activity bustling around her. They were right on Sixth Avenue on the fifty-fourth floor of an impeccable art deco building; she’d seen plenty of luxurious law firms in the last five years but nothing matching this for affluence. She adjusted her grip on the handle of the leather laptop case and smiled at the blur of passing faces, reminding herself to breathe.

Stahl
’s private conference room occupied a full corner of the floor. The expansive view of downtown Manhattan brought her to a mental halt inside the door. She turned towards the table, counting twenty-three empty chairs in split-second concession. There was a discreet masculinity in the stylish and understated decor; discreet, but evident enough to remind her she was female. Even the air had an unmistakable virility about it. The nerve-endings under her skin rippled like water as she became attuned to her surroundings.

Don, her lawyer, broke the silence, switching her attention back to the meeting at hand. “How are we doing?”

“Good.”

The door opened again before she could think about elaborating on her monosyllabic response. She turned, and her heart beat with a noticeable thud as her eyes rested on a tall blond man with dark features. He was checking a brief, his face downturned. His profile could have cut glass.  Her eyes trailed the length of him. His suit was clearly an original; she noticed a double pocket on the left side, a strange affectation in an otherwise no-nonsense ensemble. She knew a suit like that ran to thousands for the material alone, not to mention the additional cost of the kind of workmanship that indulged in superfluous pockets. That haircut probably could have paid her lawyer’s fees for at least an hour.
             

It was a second or so before she actually noticed a younger man almost hopping on the spot next to him, struggling to point as many things out in the document as possible. Words were streaming out of him as though his life depended on it, but they stopped as soon as the blond man lifted his head from the brief and frowned.

She knew without a doubt this must be the infamous Gabriel Stahl. He certainly looked like he was the best in the business.

He spoke. “Give it to Hannah and ask her to rewrite this clause.” Though his tone was low and discreet, it carried clearly. The pitch of it seemed to reach across the room and murmur in her ear.  It carried confidence rather than arrogance. She felt a glimmer of hope out of nowhere; confident and competent was exactly what she needed. She’d started to wonder if there was a successful man left in the world who didn’t trade in pure arrogance.

Passing the document to his subordinate, his expression was preoccupied. He turned to the room and its occupants. His gaze went to Don first and Harper second, but lingered on her. She had the immediate sensation of being under a spotlight.

She stilled, registering that he was very good-looking. Not her type – too polished and corporate – but good-looking in that hotshot-lawyer type of way. Next she took in the surprisingly dark eyes; they seemed luminous in the morning sunlight, going from molasses to caramel as he frowned into the brightness. The symmetry and precision about him drew her eye pleasingly; from the clear-cut bone structure the side parting in his dark blonde hair. A roguish indentation to one side of his mouth was the only imperfection in an otherwise perfect whole. That and the well-worn creases that appeared easily around his eyes. On another man it would have been warm and friendly. On him, it was... maverick.

She looked away, suppressing an inappropriate surge of heat under her skin. Maverick? Had she really just thought that?

Gabe inwardly cursed the delay in court this morning. If he hadn’t been delayed, he would have been prepared for what lay ahead of him. As it was, this was the first time he was setting eyes on Harper Green and it was in full view of both her and Don Koening. Strategically, and he lived his life strategically, it was terrible move. Firstly because he felt a stab of awareness low in his stomach for no apparent reason that he could immediately ascertain other than the fact that she was female. She was... overwhelmingly female. He forgot where he was for a moment as he studied her. Dark hair and pale skin, slim and wide-eyed in a too masculine suit, he could only stare for the first few split seconds. He felt pinioned by a primal urge to... to what? Have her? Protect her?

He didn’t have time to analyse the feeling. His brow became heavy. This was the woman who’d brought Wall Street to a halt a few weeks ago with the news that she was handing over day-to-day management of her company to a deputy? This... half-pint? He knew from the file that she was thirty-nine, but she didn’t look it. To his unprepared eyes she looked barely twenty. She seemed fragile. He had to clamp down on the instinctive protective response that roared inside of him uncontrollably. He also had to stop staring; he could see she was growing uncomfortable.

Secondly, he found himself at a strategic disadvantage because Don knew him far too well. He turned to his friend, confirming that he was indeed being closely observed. His old college buddy clearly hadn’t missed a beat of Gabe’s reactions if the growing amusement in his expression was anything to go by.

Harper shifted her weight; even though Stahl had only been in the room a couple of seconds, she felt as though he’d been staring at her with a kind of shocked silence. Had he noticed her blushing? She cut a cautious eye at Don, wondering immediately at the smile that was growing on his lips.

“Good to see you, Gabe. Actually, I was surprised you agreed see us at such short notice. I hear around town you have a three-month waiting list.”

“I do.” Stahl nodded towards the conference table. “My secretary has a thing for you, Don. You know it and you take advantage of it.”

“Marlene’s just got a knack for effective scheduling.”

Stahl glanced towards the young man who was still hovering outside the doorway. “Get some coffee for us, Jamie. Speak to Hannah straight away after that. I’m back in court in an hour.” Closing the glass panel after him, he ensconced the three of them in silence. Outside the dusk was bringing the internal workings of the surrounding skyscrapers alive. Stahl strode past the panoramic view. “I’ve got half an hour. Shall we get started?”

“I guess I should introduce
Harper.” Don turned to her with a smile.

The sense of ceremony in the pause that followed was palpable.

Harper switched into professional mode. She smiled evenly and outstretched her hand towards Stahl, trying to distance herself from what seemed to her a predatory stare. “Hi.”

“Gabe.” He leaned across the table and clasped her hand.

Despite the fact that they’d been in the same room for only a minute, the expectation of his touch was so overwhelming that she felt a jolt of concentrated pleasure when their hands slid smoothly together. She had to sort through a jumble of mental short circuits before she could locate something else to say. “Nice to meet you finally.” She cursed the faint breathiness of her voice.

Gabe sat down and watched her do the same. Had he imagined that... spark? He felt irritation rash across his patience as Don began to embellish on a particularly well-worn college anecdote. He and Don had roomed together during their freshman year at Harvard Law School; Don’s stories invariably involved female conquests, an invariably Gabe’s female conquests, which he admitted had been many back then. His tastes had run to tall, statuesque blondes in those days, and well beyond, he supposed, with the focus on beauty rather than brains. He got the challenge he needed in life from his work, not from his women. Though he liked it this way, he had a feeling Harper Green would probably disapprove. Most women did. He really didn’t need that kind of complicated background tension during this meeting. He really didn’t need to be wasting time on small talk, either.

He cut a glance at
Harper again. Had she been embarrassed earlier by his staring? She had a politely amused expression now. Despite himself he got caught up in watching her profile again. Again he felt that dizzy urge to... what was it? Possess her? He stamped down on the compulsion. Was she aware of the fact that her ponytail made her look ridiculously young? He had to run her portfolio of achievements through his head just to remind himself who she was. He felt a frisson of excitement flicker in his blood for the first time in a long time; she was clearly staggeringly intelligent to be so accomplished. Physically she couldn’t have been further from his type, but he was damned if the excitement was building with each second he watched her. Her features were neat and symmetrical, with an understated feline quality. He wondered if she was sexually inhibited or aggressive. She looked innocent, but no woman who had achieved her level of success was all that innocent.

Indentations appeared in her cheeks as the story reached its amusing end. Gabe had returned his gaze back on Don before she had time to catch his second bout of observation. He felt her narrowed eyes on his profile; was she creating a poor picture of his character based on that stupid story?

He frowned, leaning his elbows on the table and reminding himself he didn’t give a damn what she thought about his character. He had to get his head back into the game. “Charming as always, Koening. As I said, I’ve got a half an hour, so maybe we should cut to the chase.”

Don exhaled slowly. “We’re looking for a consultant. For a patent case, not the civil suit against Nemei Corp. The civil suit is on hiatus for a few months while we wait for the remaining development studios to complete due diligence, but our patent case just got moved up a notch. They want to fast-track it, and we haven’t got the time to become patent experts.”

Gabe took all of this in. Since he’d won a landslide victory a year earlier against a well-known corporation and their attempt to patent a contentious household appliance, he’d been referred a bucket-load of similar cases. All of which he’d refused. Patent law didn’t interest him; the case had interested him as a one off. It had stretched his comfort zone and now it was over. He would refuse, of course. It was ridiculous that Don would even ask him to consult.

“What’s the patent request?” He heard the question coming from his lips even before he’d properly formulated the reason for asking it.

Harper chose to answer this. He turned the second he felt her tense in preparation to speak. Acute anticipation started to build; he had half-expected her to let her lawyer do all the talking. He was unaccountably pleased that there would be some interaction between them.

“Last year we launched a middleware application that runs across several platforms.” She remained seated with her back straight. Her voice was low and feminine all at the same time. “From PCs and tablets, to home video game consoles and
smart phones.”

“What does it do?”

“It allows programs to run on any of the supported platforms without too much modification of the code,” she said. She sat forward, leaning her elbows on the table and mirroring his pose. He noticed she wasn’t wearing any jewellery. “Porting these programs to run across all platforms would otherwise be pretty time consuming and costly. Most programs we use nowadays as a result are platform specific. It’s very restrictive, and it’s not sustainable as these platforms start to converge, and we start using them for more or less the same thing.”

He was no software expert, but he knew that opening up platforms like this would challenge the current business model. Anything that challenged an industry’s business model upset the status quo and that was when things got nasty. She seemed to be good at upsetting the status quo if her reputation was anything to go by. Fortunately for her he made his livelihood out of resolving these large-scale corporate upsets.

Her expression remained guarded. “Most people tend to think of emulators as a temporary solution, one that doesn’t usually result in very good performance. Our application comes with a number of software development kits that allow developers to tune their programs optimally. They run as if they were developed for that platform. It’s quite a spectacular concept. I won’t go into the details right now, but really it’s revolutionary.”