Page 19 of A Legal Affair
Daniela wondered if the same could be said abouther. How long would it take her to win Caleb Thorne’s trust and accomplish her mission?
Wouldshe win Caleb’s trust?
“Here he comes,” April murmured, sotto voce. “The reason God made denim.”
Amen, thought Daniela, watching as Caleb Thorne entered the lecture hall wearing a white Henley and a nice pair of jeans that clung to the thick muscles of his thighs. A matte-black helmet with the Ducati logo was tucked beneath one arm, completing the whole rebel-without-a-cause look he managed so effortlessly.
He walked with a controlled stride, unhurried yet deliberate, a cross between a strut and a prowl that was downright swoonworthy. As he started down the wide stairs, Daniela could almost hear the collective feminine sighs that swept around the hall.
“Good morning, Professor Thorne,” cooed a pretty brunette seated at the opposite end of Daniela’s row.
Caleb nodded a tacit greeting. By the time he reached the lectern at the front, all conversation ceased as an air of hushed expectancy settled over the room.
Daniela silently marveled at the transformation. Nearly ten minutes remained until the start of class, yet the mere appearance of Caleb Thorne was enough to bring the students to attention. She remembered what Kenneth had told her about Caleb’s prowess as a criminal defense attorney. No doubt he’d commanded the courtroom as easily as he did a classroom of sixty-five.
As he placed his motorcycle helmet behind the lectern and began pulling course materials from his messenger bag, April leaned close to whisper, “Why aren’t we sitting in thefirstrow?”
“Because we don’t want to be so obvious,” Daniela whispered back.
As if he’d picked up on her words, Caleb glanced up, his dark eyes sweeping the crowded hall before coming to land on hers. Her breath hitched, her skin tingling as if he’d physically reached out and touched her.
But a second later his gaze shifted away, leaving Daniela to wonder if he’d noticed her at all.
April seemed to think so, seizing her arm in sudden excitement. “Did you see that? He looked right at you!”
“We’re seated in his direct line of vision,” Daniela said drolly.
“And yet,you’rethe only one he looked at.”
Daniela felt a tiny thrill of pleasure. Maybe there was hope after all.
She half listened to a series of announcements made by Caleb’s research assistant, Emma Richter, a mousy-looking brunette in desperate need of a makeover. As she began distributing handouts, Daniela wondered, not unkindly, if she could earn extra credit by offering fashion-emergency services to the drably attired young woman. It would be an act of solidarity, sinceherdays of questionable sartorial choices weren’t so far in the past.
“Emma is passing out copies of the seating chart,” Caleb informed the class. “Study it, memorize it. Starting Friday, and for the rest of the semester, sit in your assigned seat. This not only helps me connect names with faces, but gives me a way to track attendance. I will circulate an attendance sheet every class period. If you don’t sign the sheet, I’ll mark you as absent. As stated on the syllabus, you may miss up to six classes this semester, for whatever reasons you deem necessary. But ifyou miss more than six classes, you would have missed more than thirty percent of the class, which means that you will fail this course, regardless of how you perform on the final exam. Understood?”
The students murmured in docile agreement. April whispered out of the corner of her mouth, “Anyone dumb enough to miss six ofhisclasses deserves to fail.”
Daniela chuckled, then promptly wished she hadn’t.
Caleb’s dark, piercing eyes homed in on hers, and this time there was no mistaking that she was the focus of his gaze. “Let’s recap what we discussed on the first day of class. Miss Moreau, why don’t you tell us what you’ve learned about civil procedure so far.”
Daniela took a deep breath as she found herself in the proverbial hot seat, a rite of passage dreaded by all first-year law students. “Well, basically, civil procedure consists of the rules used by the courts to conduct civil trials. Civil trials, of course, being the judicial resolution of claims by one individual or group against another. As I understand it, civil procedure is sort of like the ‘blueprint’ for litigation.”
“Yes, but why the heavy focus on the federal rules of civil procedure in this class?”
“Because most states modeltheirrules of civil procedure after the federal rules of civil procedure.”
“And?”
She gave him a quizzical look. Hadn’t she answered the question correctly? But then again, she’d heard horror stories about law professors deliberately trying to trip up their students, sometimes subjecting them to sadistic interrogations, all in the name of teaching legal reasoning skills and stimulating “lawyerly” thinking.
Before she could formulate a response, Caleb segued to the next line of questioning, leaving Daniela feeling unbalanced—which, she supposed, had been his intent.
“Talk to me about theUnited States v. Hatahley. Who are the parties, and what are the facts of the case?”
Daniela racked her brain, mentally sifting through the myriad cases she’d read last night. “Um, the plaintiffs are members of the Navajo tribe. Their livestock was grazing on federal land, and they were sued to have the livestock removed. But before the suit was decided, the feds unlawfully sold the plaintiffs’ livestock to a glue factory. As a result, the plaintiffs were awarded damages of almost $200,000 by the federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals.”
Caleb nodded, leaning against the table next to the podium and folding his muscular arms across his chest, as if he had all the time in the world to grill her. “So, what is the rule of law here, Miss Moreau?”
