Nikki Rivers - Random Acts Of Fashion

Gillian didn’t get to finish. There was a commotion behind the courtroom doors and then they burst open and an elderly man in a black robe came running out.

“Bees!” he yelled.

“What?” squawked Gillian.

“Bees!” the court reporter, hot on the heels of the judge and gripping her little machine in her hands, yelled.

“Close the doors!” someone shouted, but it was too late. The foyer was already buzzing.

“Oh, my—I’m allergic,” Philo said quite calmly just as a huge bumblebee landed on his nose. “Oh, my,” he merely said again as he went cross-eyed looking at it. “I’m allergic, you know,” he repeated politely.

The bee sat there quivering slightly as if it was trying to choose a pore to plunge its stinger into and Philo just stood there looking cross-eyed, so Gillian did the only thing she could think of. She swatted at the bee on Philo’s nose.

As it turned out, swatted might have been too mild a term because Philo went down like a felled tree with the squished remains of the bee hanging off of his nose.

Lukas rushed over and crouched next to Philo’s inert form. “Did the bee get him?”

“I don’t know! I’m not sure!” Gillian cried, feeling perfectly awful as she peered at her lawyer over McCoy’s hulking shoulder.

Lukas shook him but Philo remained stubbornly inert.

“Do you think he’s in shock from bee venom?” Lukas’s mother asked.

“I think it’s more likely the princess punched his lights out,” Lukas answered. “But just in case, we better get him to the hospital.”

“Somebody call 911!” Gillian shouted, but Lukas was already picking the lawyer up off the floor.

“The hospital is right across the street. I’ll take him.”

“I’ll come along,” Molly said.

Gillian stood there with her mouth hanging open as Lukas carried her lawyer out the door, cradling him in his arms like he was no more than a child.

“Swell,” Gillian said. “There goes my lawyer and the defendant. Talk about odd couples.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the judge said. “No courtroom, anyway. There was a whole damn nest of bees under the bench.”

Gillian panicked. The hearing couldn’t be postponed! Because if it was, it would mean that she was going to fail in business once again.

She grabbed ahold of the judge’s robe. “But Judge, you don’t understand! We have to have this hearing today! I could lose my business if we don’t.”

The judge sized her up, his lined face scrunching and his eyes squinting. “You prepared to act as your own lawyer?”

“Lukas is acting as his own lawyer,” Mr. McCoy said. Mrs. McCoy nodded in agreement.

Gillian, who’d gotten hooked on the courtroom show that gave her the idea to sue McCoy in the first place, figured if Lukas McCoy could be his own lawyer, so could she. “Yes!” she answered, bobbing her head up and down enthusiastically.

“Then find me a courtroom, girlie, and we’re in business.”

Gillian was ecstatic and didn’t wonder until much later at the wisdom of wanting to go before a judge who called her girlie.

She was pacing, trying to come up with an idea for an alternative courtroom when the doors to the main entrance burst open and a group of women came bustling in, each of them carrying a weird-looking plant in their hands.

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