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Teresa clapped her hands. “Fantastic. Thank you.”
“You are most welcome. I’ll talk to my attorney and have him draw up the contract. Where are you staying?”
“The Love Shack Hotel.” Alejandro spoke for the first time, a wry smile on his face.
“Excellent. You two go rest and Something Borrowed will handle everything.”
As the two left her office, Kelly spun around in her chair, her phone in her hand. A new text message from Hank waited for her, but still nothing from Chris. Stabbing at the letters on the phone, she tapped out a message for him.
Can we talk? She added a prayer emoji and a crying face emoji, and hit send.
With a sigh, she laid her phone face down on her lap. She couldn’t force Chris to talk to her, but it made no sense for him to ignore her. They were still friends.
At least, she hoped so.
Chapter 8
On Wednesday, Chris was ready to pick Mr. Kenneth Bruch up by the back of his expensive suit and toss him out on his rear. As the owner of Bruch Grocery, he was ruthless and sharp. As much as he respected the wily old man’s head for business, his social skills left something to be desired.
Especially when it came to women.
“As your attorney, I would strongly recommend that you apologize to Ms. Langley and we settle out of court.”
“I didn’t do anything but speak the truth.”
Chris calmly sang “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to himself as a calming mechanism, holding onto his patience by a hair. “No. What you did was tell a nursing mother that if she wanted to”—Chris picked up the official court documents and read them verbatim—“milk her udders like a dairy cow, she could do so on her own time.”
“That woman chose to have a child and come back to work six weeks later. She was in the break room every hour with that machine hooked up to her…” Mr. Bruch held his wrinkly, liver-spotted hands in front of his chest. “You get my meaning. She’d be in there for twenty minutes every hour. It wasn’t fair to the rest of the employees or me, for her to be sitting around on company time.”
Chris didn’t try to reason with the man’s common decency or sense. Instead, he set the papers down and leveled the old man with a hard stare. “Ms. Langley has multiple witnesses, employees at your store, who are willing to testify on her behalf that she clocked out for the ten extra minutes she took on top of her ten-minute break, so she did not waste company time. They also maintain that she pumped every two hours, not every hour as you claim. And, there are several sworn statements that you sexually harassed and bullied Ms. Langley in front of other employees and customers.”
Chris stood up, getting into his speech. “Now, if you don’t settle and decide to take this to court, you will be going up against a nursing mother trying to do best by her child. You will be the big, bad corporate giant who bullies and harasses women. This is not the kind of image your company needs now. So, as your lawyer, I would suggest that you apologize to her, offer a generous pension package, and I will draw up the non-disclosure agreement for her to sign. Or you can take your chances and have your company’s name splashed through the news.” Chris sat on the edge of the desk, leaning over Mr. Bruch. “How sure are you that if this complaint goes public, other women won’t come out of the shadows? You know what they say. If one person says it, then it’s just a rumor. Two and it’s gospel.”
Mr. Bruch stood angrily, picking up his briefcase from the floor. “I thought I was paying you to be my lawyer and get me out of these things.”
“You pay me to give you the best legal advice I’m able, and that is exactly what I am doing. If you do not value that advice, you can fire me and try your hand with someone else.”
For a half a beat, Chris thought the old coot was going to go through with it. In the end, Mr. Bruch just mumbled, “Get an offer and agreement drawn up and I’ll sign it.”
Chris nodded as Mr. Bruch shuffled out the door. The minute Chris closed it behind the man, he let out a shaky groan.
For the most part, his client list consisted of kind, fair-minded businessmen and women.
And then there was Mr. Bruch, who made Ebenezer Scrooge look like Gandhi.
Chris went around his desk and picked up the phone, dialing out to the receptionist for Ryan and Parker Law Office. Although, at this point it was just Chris; Alan Parker was semi-retired and came back every two weeks to check up on things. Otherwise, he was down in Mexico at his beach house, soaking in the sun.
Maggie Crane picked up on the second ring. “Yes, Mr. Ryan?”
“Hey, Maggie. You can knock off for the day. I’ll be heading out myself.”
“Sounds good. Have a good night, sir.”
Even though Maggie was only a
few years younger than Chris, she still insisted on calling him sir. It made him feel old.
Chris packed up his papers and closed the office, pulling the shades and locking doors. It was a little after six and Chris was ready for drinks with a few of his lawyer friends. Although, he did feel guilty for bailing on Kelly, he needed one night to not think about what had transpired between them over the weekend.
