Chapter 1.1 I’ve got my eyes on a man! I’m determined to get my hands on him!

By the time Bai Duanduan arrived at the “Liquor Point 30”, she was already ten minutes late than the agreed time. As expected, Duan Yun and Xue Wen were already waiting for her.

Bai Duanduan walked quickly towards the two of them. Her steps on the ground in her stiletto heels made her posture sway. Several men in the bar couldn’t help but steal a look at her.

“Duanduan, you are finally here!” Duan Yun, who has always been extroverted and outgoing, couldn’t wait to pull Bai Duanduan over. Even Xue Wen, who was quiet and introverted by nature, couldn’t help but grin.

Duan Yun and Xue Wen were Bai Duanduan’ two best friends since College days. All three of them were from law school, but after graduation, they chose different career directions. Bai Duanduan went to ZhaoHui Law Firm and became a prosecutor where as Duan Yun and Xue Wen were in the same company, Shengjian Technology, but Duan Yun was in the Personnel department and Xue Wen was in the Legal department.

The three of them hadn’t seen each other in long a while. After chatting about each other’s life, Duan Yun finally remembered the main purpose “Right Duanduan, why did you come back from B City? You said your branch office in B City was doing well in business after expansion, didn’t you? According to your income generation, you may not be able to rise to the top position in a few years, but you can be promoted to a junior partner position, right? You can’t even bring back so many cases to the main office in A City, so are you just throwing them away? Isn’t that a shame?”

Bai Duanduan took a deep breath, suppressed the raging fire in her heart, and tried to calm down “I miss home and I  wanted to come back to A City.”

After graduating from college, Bai Duanduan joined the ZhaoHui law firm founded by Lin Hui, her teacher at University. After staying with Lin Hui for one year, the business volume at ZhaoHui law firm increased and its scale expanded rapidly. He acquired another small firm in B City. As a result, in addition to the head office at A City, B City has ZhaoHui’s first branch office.Unfortunately, there was a serious struggle among the personnel factions at that small company. After the merger and acquisition, Lin Hui needed to reshuffle his staff.

He can’t trust others, so under the disguise of ‘Business development’,  he sent Bai Duanduan, a new lamb who was not afraid of tigers, for three years to the B City branch office. In the past three years, Bai Duanduan has fulfilled her mission, expanded the business, and reported on the factions and personnel situation at the branch. In fact, at the beginning, she was reluctant to leave her hometown to go to B City. Now finally after struggling to gain a firm foothold in the legal circle of B City and rooting her contacts and the source of the cases, she did not want to leave. But Lin Hui demanded she transfer back to the head office immediately.

When she first went to B City, her professor helped to build her ideology and worldview face-to-face. Now, when she had to come back, she didn’t even receive a phone call. There was only a cold email addressing her in a very bureaucratic way.

If one really sees through it, this was just like casting aside the bow once the birds were gone or kicking the hound out after the rabbits were caught. Thinking about it every time leaves Bai Duanduan with a sense of sadness. Bai Duanduan thought of the rumors she heard about Lin Hui in B City, and her mood got even more worse.

Although Duan Yun’ recommended “Liquor Point 30” was clearly a bar, the three of them were here for the first time. The atmosphere was quiet and elegant and the crowd was good. Even though Bai Duanduan was disheartened by the thought that she had to return to A City completely reluctantly, she didn’t want to affect her friends’ mood, so she had to drink and listen to Duan Yun and Xue Wen chat.

As they chatted, Duan Yun’s topic finally caught Bai Duanduan’s interest.

“Let me tell you, Ji Lin is really the oddest man I’ve ever met, there’s no one like him!” Duan Yun couldn’t help but spit it out as soon as she talked about her job, “I’ve really never seen such a man with no manners in my life! He is so good-looking, but he is a total trash with such a heavenly rewarded face which is as good as five-star, high-class meal!”

“Who is Ji Lin?” Bai Duanduan put down her wine glass, “The man you’re interested in? Give me the gossip! Duan Yun, you’re so unfaithful, you didn’t even tell me! How far have you two progressed?”

“Yuck, what progress?” Duan Yun gritted her teeth at the mention of Ji Lin’s name, “Believe me, I don’t want to make any progress with Ji Lin.”

Bai Duanduan laughed, “You gave Chen Xudong, the face of the male idol group, only a four-star rating, so a man with a five-star rating in your standard is a god, right? How can you not have any thoughts about him?”

Duan Yun straightaway shook her head ” His face is really okay, I like it. Although his face is good and his body is comparable to Brazilian male models, acting skill is the real strength to dissuade.” Duan Yun  looked at Bai Duanduan enviously and said, “Duanduan, I have told you before, you are the only female I have met who looks stunning and has an unforgettable beauty. That Ji Lin has the same kind of thrilling beauty as you. He is so good-looking that I couldn’t take my eyes away at first glance. I felt exactly the same feeling when I first saw you. But once you interact ……ugh, forget about it. You can ask Xue Wen, she also knows, he is one of his kind”

Bai Duanduan looked at Xue Wen, Xue Wen could only purse her lips for an explanation “Ji Lin is our Shengjian Technology’s Legal advisor. Like you Duanduan, he also specializes in the field of labor law, but he and you are just the opposite of each other. He only entertains corporate clients, has expertise in employment termination cases, and he is very famous. So far there hasn’t been a single person whom he can’t fire, and that’s not even the important part. He’s famous in the business circle because it’s basically impossible to win any financial compensation against him. It is considered a nightmare to have him as the defending lawyer” Xue Wen paused, then continued, “Of course, his fees is quite expensive too.”

“Not only he is expensive, he is really stingy to the point where even I’m dumbfounded. I understand that lawyers charge by their hour rate, but he is completely impersonal. Last time I consulted with him on behalf of the company, and when I received the bill afterwards, my God, billing hour do you know? Precise to the seconds! To the seconds! Every second of his time was actually charged as per his rate! I have really never heard of this kind before.” Duan Yun drank a mouthful of water and continued, “At first, our finance department didn’t take it seriously, so we settled the bill according to the exact minute, only to have their assistant come over and remind them that the bill was incorrect and that Lawyer Ji still had 21 seconds to settle! We have to make up for those 21 seconds!”

Now Bai Duanduan finally couldn’t help and say, “My God, how can there be such a man! Even though you are all legal advisors and considering the pursuit of a long-term corporation relationship, he still wants to settle it to the seconds ……” she also desperately shook her head, “You don’t have to mention how high-class his face is. Those 21 seconds….even if his handsome point shoots beyond the sky and he has an amazingly exploding body, he can lay naked in my bed, kneel down and offer me a hundred million dollars and beg me to sleep with him, I will still reject him. Men, if they are stingy and cheap, they should die!”

“Right.” Duan Yun felt like she finally found an ally, “It is really horrible, of course, this is not the most absolute. At first I admit I got carried away by his look, and took the initiative to find him for dinner under the pretext of talking about work. At the meal, I felt full just by looking at his face. He is really handsome, professional, lean, sexy body, sexy face with an equally sexy mind. I almost fell in love with him. When we were paying, I wanted to leave a good impression, so I motioned that we could split the bill fifty-fifty. You know that I don’t mind these money matters. I was hoping once he said we didn’t have to split the bill, I’d have the excuse of owing him a meal and then being able to invite him on another date. Well, he smiled at me, and said, we don’t need to split it in half…. “

Bai Duanduan had stopped drinking completely. She intuitively thought the man in question had definitely said something ridiculous. “Then what?”

Duan Yun made a dog-like face and said, “He said, no need to split in half, given that he ate slightly more than me, to be fair,he asked the cashier to separate the bill into sixty-forty, he six and I four ……”

“……”

“Also, before I knew his true nature, I once went on a business trip to Rome with our General Manager Sheng to poach a senior engineer from a Roman company. We took Ji Lin with us to see if the engineer’s non-compete agreement could be circumvented. Then we passed by a wishing pond and everyone tossed a coin to make a wish, but he didn’t. I thought he didn’t believe in wishing and thought his fate was in his hands, so I asked him why he didn’t toss a coin with a hope to flatter him after his response. But what he said to me was so deafening that I still remember it to this day!”

“He said he had already used his one cent coins and only euro coins were left.”

Duan Yun said with an expression of ‘I need some fresh air’, “Can you imagine! He arrived at the wishing pond in Rome, but he was not even willing to spend one euro to make a wish for good fortune! He couldn’t bear to part away from his coins! It was so heartbreaking for me.”

！！！

Duan Yun’s expression was so heartbroken that it was as if she wanted to die on the spot “Can you imagine, such a top-notch handsome man can have such an unspeakable character ……”

Bai Duanduan was also truly shocked, this was really the first time in more than twenty years of her living that she had heard of a 360 degree deathless oddball who was extremely stingy without a doubt.

In her heart, she doubted whether Duan Yun’s aesthetic has been abnormal recently. It is said that one’s face is a reflection of one’s heart, how can such a stingy man be so good-looking? Even if the facial features are okay, the temperament is definitely not.

Bai Duanduan was born in A city and stayed here for more than twenty years. She has always felt that there was no handsome man in A city. She thought Duan Yun and Xue Wen had probably stayed in A city for a long time and had not seen the world, that’s why they are confusing all kinds of people with the real pearl gems.