Page 13 of Here Be Dragons
"There's just one more," Shane said.
His voice was all business now, his demeanor smooth and deliberate. It was nothing like when they were at the restaurant. All the better to set the right tone considering what Ava was about to tell them. Just as she was about to ask who they were still waiting on, there was one more knock on her door and a quick check revealed Dylan Ferguson, captain of the Bay City Bears, on the other side. She let him in and was actually thankful that Shane had invited him. The news she was about to reveal probably affected Dylan more than anyone else here as part of the negotiating process.
"Quite the party, Taylor," Dylan said as he walked into Ava's hotel room. "What are we doing here?"
Shane shrugged and looked at Ava. "Ask her."
The four men in the hotel room turned to look at Ava. No pressure. She had been in rooms like this before. She thought she had already gained their respect by the way she worked with them on the contract negotiations this week. This was just another room where she had to be a professional lawyer, and she would have no problem doing that.
"Please have a seat. Make yourselves comfortable," she told them.
Mark took one of two chairs at the table by the window, Jordan and Dylan took seats on her small sofa, and Shane decided to sit down on her bed. Of course, he would.
Ava took a seat at the table across from Mark and pulled her folder closer to her. It had her notes from her conversation with her brother, notes that she would refer to at some point, but she needed to lay out her case first. So she took a deep breath and started her presentation just as she would in any court. Only this particular courtroom was her hotel room with a gorgeous hockey player on her bed.
"I asked Shane to invite you guys here because something's come up that I need to you to know, especially you, Mark."
The lawyer quietly nodded. He was smart enough to know when to keep his mouth shut and let the opposition talk.
"So during this lockout, per the last contract with the owners and players -- which is what we're operating under for now -- the players don't get paid."
"Oh, we are well aware," Shane said bitterly.
She gave him a small smile and pushed on. "And per the contract, the owners can do whatever they want with that money. They can save it for something later like player signing bonuses or venue fees or even their marketing budget when the season starts up again."
Ava opened the folder in front of her and double-checked the page on top even though she knew exactly what was on it because she had checked that folder four times before anyone showed up.
"This is from that last contract, the one we currently have to operate under." She took out the first page and handed it to Mark before closing the folder up again. "You weren't the players' lawyer for that last negotiation, were you?"
Mark quietly shook his head as he scanned the paper. Then his eyes landed on the middle of the page. She knew he saw exactly what she had found this morning after checking in with her brother.
"Oh crap," he muttered. "Please tell me this isn't real."
"Oh, it's real."
"What's real?" Jordan asked. "Is there a problem?"
"There is." Ava turned to look at Jordan and gave him a professional lawyer smile. "The last contract you agreed to stated that if there was a lockout, the money that would've been used for player salaries can instead be used for anything, quote, 'at the discretion of the owning entity.' Most of the teams aren't actually owned by individuals but by an ownership entity. Sometimes that's an entity just for the team. Sometimes, the team is part of a larger corporation. As long as the money they're saving from your salaries stays with the owning entity, it can be spent anywhere in that entity."
Shane sat up straighter and suddenly looked very interested in what was going on. "What do you mean anywhere in that entity?"
"If the owning entity wants to increase its investment portfolio and use your unpaid salaries to buy an island in the Bahamas, they can do that." She pointed to the piece of paper sitting in front of Mark. "The players' lawyers didn't make sure the old contract specified that the unpaid salary had to be spent specifically on the team."
Mark looked stunned, and Ava knew why. It was just a short section of the contract that had been agreed upon almost a decade ago, but the power it gave to the owners was enormous. No good lawyer for a players union would allow owners to have that kind of leeway with a team's budget. But Mark was starting to realize something that Ava had already figured out. The last lawyer for the players union wasn't a good one, and it was going to bite the players in the ass now. Without a new contract, everyone had to work under the provisions of the old one, and this old one was going to be a bear.
But while Mark knew what was going on, the players weren't lawyers.
"I'm sorry," Dylan said. "I don't want to break up this lawyer thing you two have going on, but can someone explain how this affects us?"
Ava turned and looked directly at him. "Well, it affects all of you, especially you, Dylan."
"Crap," Mark muttered again.
Dylan gave her a perplexed look. "I don't understand. Why me?"
Ava gave him a half-smile, knowing what she was about to do to him. "I've been trying to figure out why the lawyer for your owner, Jason Stewart, has been such a pain in the ass, why it never seems like he's actually interested in negotiating a deal," she said. "So I had my brother do a little digging."
She could see Mark out of the corner of her eye put his face in his hands. "Let me guess. Jason's company needs the money."
