Perfect on Paper Gillian Harvey (free romance novels .txt) 📖

‘YOU ARE EXCEEDING THE SPEED LIMIT!’ Claudia suddenly barked at her, when she rounded the corner and headed towards the town centre. ‘YOU ARE EXCEEDING THE SPEED LIMIT!’

Clare looked at the dial. She was doing twenty-four in a twenty miles per hour zone. The car couldn’t really do twenty without stalling. She tried lifting her foot even further from the pedal and was rewarded by a series of bucks and starts. A light flashed on the dashboard – a little car with an ‘x’ through it. That couldn’t be good.

Instead, she accelerated again, wound her windows up and tried to cover the sound of her on-board computer having a near-breakdown with the radio. By the time she parked the car, she had a headache and had treated half of Hatfield to the delights of a nineties pop compilation.

‘Meeting in twenty minutes!’ Ann said as she entered Clare’s office with a big bunch of files an hour later, her nose wrinkling slightly as she took in the ‘old shoe’ smell that refused to leave. ‘Nigel and Will to lead it, apparently.’

The two women exchanged a look.

‘Fabulous.’

‘Thought you’d be pleased!’ Ann smiled. ‘It’s more of a training session, apparently.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. Goal setting and motivation.’

‘Right.’

Ann’s face creased again. ‘What’s that smell?’

‘Nothing, I don’t think. Ancient shoes?’

‘Yeah, it smells like a locker room in here. Can’t you open the—’ Ann stopped, remembering that for an office that was meant to have all the mod cons, Clare’s new ‘work cupboard’ had rather a shortage of windows. ‘God, I’m sorry Clare.’

‘All these years, waiting to be promoted to the corner office, eh,’ Clare smiled, blinking away the tears which threatened to come once again.

‘You have to say something.’

‘I know.’

Half an hour later Clare was sitting in the meeting room, with a steaming mug of coffee. She’d actually arrived first, taking advantage of the large table and wall of windows to make a call and top up her no-doubt rapidly declining vitamin D levels. Others had arrived in dribs and drabs and there were now eighteen of them there in total: two other conveyancers who worked solely on residential properties; Ann and three other secretaries, and an assortment of people from litigation and criminal law whom she rarely saw. They nodded hellos and exchanged basic news about family. ‘Do wish your husband well done for me, won’t you,’ said Brian, the semi-retired head of criminal. ‘Bloody good show, the other night. Who knew street lights were such complex machines?’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

Then the door opened, hitting the wall opposite with a bang. In the doorway stood Nigel and Will, side by side, both clutching clipboards. There was an awkward moment when they both tried to get through the door at the same time, collided, then spent longer than was absolutely necessary trying to wave each other through. ‘After you!’, ‘No, no, after you!’

In the end, Nigel walked in, and stood with his legs so widely spread apart that Clare wondered whether Will was going to skid through the gap and strike a pose. But instead, Will stood by his side, legs also in a bizarrely wide stance.

‘Good morning,’ Nigel said, looking round his staff with a benign smile. ‘Lovely to see you all here.’

‘Yes,’ Will said, graciously, as if he was also employing and paying all of them, ‘thank you so much for coming.’

Ann caught Clare’s eye for a brief second and they glanced away to avoid giggling. They’d made that mistake in a training session before when asked to act out a ‘difficult client’ scene during some customer relations training. ‘I don’t think people usually find this sort of thing funny,’ Nigel had remarked crossly, as the two of them had clutched each other, shaking with laughter.

‘You may wonder,’ Nigel continued, ‘why we’ve called this meeting. Well, as some of you know, Will and I have been working closely together for the past few weeks and we’d finally like to roll out our plans to the rest of the firm.’

‘Yes,’ Will said, stepping forward. ‘Nigel and I have been exploring the philosophy of Hans Hankerton, the world-renowned motivational coach.’ He held up an enormous book with the picture of a smiling, moustachioed man on the front. The man was standing in a prayer position, looking up at money which appeared to be falling from the heavens. ‘His philosophy is that we should all look to ourselves before we look to our business – look at what motivates us, what makes us feel good, powerful at work … Basically make ourselves more corporately sexy.’ The last two words were emphasised by finger quotes.

Corporately sexy?

Nigel, to whom the word ‘sexy’ had never been applied before, stepped forward. ‘Being corporately sexy,’ he said, with no flicker of a smile, ‘is being self-assured, attractive in business – and just as confidence might attract a new partner in a discotheque, so corporate sexiness should lead to new business connections.’

Ann was staring at her pad, face fixed, cheeks flushed. She looked up, caught Clare’s eye and mouthed the word discotheque, her shoulders shaking.

Clare looked at her boss with a mixture of amusement and despair. ‘But how?’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘Of course,’ Will stepped in, ‘Nigel and I are much further along the path to corporate sexiness than the rest of you – we’ve been working together on this for some time now. So please don’t feel bad if you don’t reach our level for a while. But we’d like to introduce you to some of the basic principles this morning.’

‘Lesson one,’ Nigel said, stepping forward again. ‘Power stance.’ The stepping forward was proving difficult in the small space they had at the front of the room. Evidently, wherever they’d rehearsed had been more spacious. Nigel’s crotch was now only inches from Brian’s face.

The two widened their legs even further, until Clare worried that they might drop into the splits.

‘Power stance is one of the core pillars of corporate sexiness,’ explained Will. ‘At the Mann Company, we stand erect, we