Slave in the City

by Caroline King

Genres: Erotic & Steamy Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

It's tough for a woman in the masculine world of high finance - there's no hiding the pleasure men take when a girl falls from grace. Like Ruth, a high-flying Relationship Director for a City bank. In the week her sadistic new boss takes over she loses an important client. If she wants to keep her job she'd better get the client back - quick.

Deserted by her colleagues, Ruth turns to a well-connected family friend for help. But there's a price. David organises erotic entertainments featuring submissive young women. This is more than the sexually naive Ruth has bargained for. Now she finds it's not just her job that's on the line . . .

Release date: January 15, 2015

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 224

Sample

Ruth looked up from her papers and studied the faces grouped around the boardroom table. Her team were all looking more than a little nervous; however well they thought they were doing there was always the possibility that business targets had gone up, or that a client relationship had cooled off. She smiled, breaking the ice.

‘Well done,’ she said, to a general easing of the tension around her. ‘Things are looking good for this quarter, and the Directors are very pleased, or at least they were when they last spoke to me – and that was only this morning so things must be all right.’ There was a little ripple of nervous laughter at the in-joke of the week, since with the axing of several senior managers for unspecified failures everyone was jumpy about the security of their jobs. The current story about the sackings was that the unfortunate managers had, in the time-honoured tradition of the banking industry, been utterly unaware of any problems or failings on their part. Except for the fact that none of their senior directors had been available to discuss anything with them for the full twenty-four hours prior to them receiving their P45s. Currently, unless you could stay in contact with your boss, you felt vulnerable and exposed to danger.

Ruth looked around the table again as the team started a brief run-through of dealings with their individual clients, pleased with the way things were shaping up and the easy way the group were interacting together.

‘Mind you,’ she thought, ‘not that I’d actually choose to spend time socially with most of them.’ It wasn’t that she didn’t like them personally, but she knew that however pleasant they may be, and however well they worked, they were all constantly on the look-out for failure. Her failure.

Whilst Ruth certainly worked hard, and was highly competent at her job as well as being highly remunerated, there was an ever-present danger of loudly voiced criticism from within the office if she put a proverbial foot wrong. A large number of the men at work, both old and young, were highly dismissive of all the women in the office, and actively looked for a slip-up in their work. At twenty-eight years of age, Ruth had a well-paid and responsible position at Western Bank as the only female Relationship Director in the business, and as such, she was a prime target for critical observation. Therefore she had to be constantly on her guard against a potential ‘palace revolt’.

‘Truth to tell,’ she thought with a weary sigh, ‘most of them would probably murder their grandmothers given the opportunity for a move up in the bank’s hierarchy.’

Ruth’s main role at the bank was to lead and guide a ‘relationship team’, a group of well-qualified individuals whose job was to develop and enhance business relationships with corporate clients, primarily in the telecommunications sector. Teams like these had been created about ten years ago as a response from the bank to the rise in the number of specialist management consultancies, and in essence they acted as a user-friendly link between the client and the bank, supplying expert information on the market, competitors and trading conditions. By using the bank’s resources they were able to provide important clients with information to which they might not otherwise have had access. However, at the bottom line was the unspoken necessity to make themselves indispensable to the client and to ensure that the relationship continued to evolve, giving the bank ‘favoured banker’ status whenever the client needed assistance, such as in selling debt, using new financial instruments or developing take-over plans.

Ruth had joined the telecoms relationship team in Western Bank around four years ago. With a wealth of experience gained from several years as a trader in the telecoms sector she was well placed to understand more about the market than some of the client companies, and her natural ease of character and sociability, combined with her intellect, meant that she rapidly moved out from the pack, becoming noticed by her boss and made a team leader and a year after that, a Relationship Director.

That last promotion had been nearly three years ago and, under her direction, the team had changed dramatically, increasing in size and taking on talented new people from outside the Bank. They rapidly moved up in the Bank’s league table of success and Ruth’s clients now generated over $100 billion worth of trading each year. Of course, all that hadn’t been achieved without ruffling some feathers. She had been personally responsible for sacking some of the old guard; executives with non-specific roles who had hung on to their jobs and the gravy-train for as long as they could, even though they rarely managed to generate any serious income. That hadn’t made her popular in some quarters.

Tough, was her answer to that. She wasn’t there to be liked. Her job was to provide the best service possible for her clients, and if that meant hard decisions, so be it.

Ruth dragged herself back to the present as the previous speaker fell silent.

‘Good,’ she finished, once again taking command. ‘Well, I think we can all see room for improvement, particularly in the South American and Asian markets. Our emerging markets information is generally OK but not top-notch at present, so I’ll want some action on that front as well. Any questions?’ There was a pause. ‘Right then,’ she continued, ‘Paulo, you focus on the emerging markets, and Karen, you focus on Dellane International for the time being. I want to work on that area. We can talk about their business strategy decisions later today. So are there any comments? No? OK. You all have your new assignments on the schedules and if there are any other issues you can always come to me to discuss them as they arise. So, if there’s nothing else . . . then we’re done.’

She walked back to her office and dropped into her chair, exhausted. The job needed a lot of hours and although it was only ten-thirty she felt as though she had already put in a full day. She had started at around six forty-five this morning, clearing up some queries for a personal client and assisting in the completion of the final stages for a deal in the South African market, before setting up some work for her team to review prior to their group meeting. She had even managed a brief study of the previous day’s business figures before her assistant, Jan, had arrived at eight. The rest of the morning had been typical of her days; panic in some markets, with companies ringing in to ask for a quick response to an unexpected change in their portfolios; questions and requests for advice from the team; aggression and tempers from some of the traders working in conjunction with her team in some way, and regular calls from the Bank’s Trading Directors as they monitored developments in the telecoms sector whilst the markets around the world opened and closed. Then, as a welcome relief, there had been the team meeting at ten o’clock.

She stretched out in her chair. ‘Sometimes,’ she thought, ‘it seems that all I do is work and sleep. I haven’t even been out to dinner with anyone interesting for weeks. Mind you,’ she continued glumly, ‘I don’t know who I’d go out with if I did have the time.’

With the restrictions that the job placed on her life Ruth hadn’t had an active social life for months. She had finished with her last boyfriend when she realised that as she was running around the world on Bank business, he was screwing her secretary, having discovered he ‘liked’ her voice when he was trying to get hold of Ruth. Since then, the only people she had seen outside of normal working hours were her team, some of the other managers and directors during evening business meetings and some particularly important, if dreary, clients, whilst playing her part in the endless round of corporate entertainment.

One of Ruth’s golden rules was not to get involved with anyone associated with the job or the Bank – and that meant clients as well as co-workers. She had been down that road before, years ago, and it hadn’t led anywhere except to misery and a paranoid conviction that the whole bank would know what she was or had been doing and with whom. She had heard the results of the office gossip machine too often. If anyone was seeing anyone else the whole place knew within days, and a lot of the men were sexist enough to think that where one had gone, the rest only had to stand in line to get selected.

‘No thanks,’ she thought, coming out of her reverie and checking the time on her computerised diary. ‘Bugger,’ she said out loud. Five minutes to go and the new Managing Director would be making an appearance. She went into the bathroom to check her appearance. Thank God she looked respectable. Even if she knew she had still been at the office at ten o’clock last night, at least no one else would be able to tell. There was a knock at the door and Ruth’s secretary put her head around it.

‘Ruth,’ she said, ‘Mr Nelson-Phipps is here with Mr Anders.’

‘Fine,’ she replied, returning to her desk to greet her visitors. ‘Show them in please, Jan.’

Although she was a Director and Anders was the new Managing Director for Client Banking, and as such her immediate boss, this was the first time she would meet him and she wanted to make a good first impression. His appointment had been a surprise and had happened very quickly, and in addition he appeared to be something of an enigma in the business. This was strange because in the global banking community someone usually knew something about the person you were meeting, or at least could offer an opinion. On this occasion the people she had contacted for a little information on this new arrival had appeared to know as little as she, or else they had been unusually reticent about his character. What she had been able to find out was that he had been a ‘turnaround’ manager in several ailing US banks – in other words, a hatchet man – and that he would mercilessly weed out anyone responsible for bad trades or poor performance. In Ruth’s opinion that attitude was quite reasonable in a business sector still reeling from the trauma of collapsed banks and the bad publicity of dubious management practices. So, despite the aura of mystery about his past experience she was reasonably confident about their business relationship. She and her team were in good shape and had been successful to date; as far as she knew all of the clients were happy with the advice they had been receiving. No, she thought, if there was a target for Anders to deal with, then she and her team shouldn’t be it.

The door opened to reveal Justin Nelson-Phipps, the jovial and rotund Vice President of the Bank.

‘Ruth,’ he called out cheerfully, as if she was his favourite niece. She wasn’t fooled. Nelson-Phipps was definitely one of the old guard and she would gladly have seen him straight out of the bank and onto the golf course if she had been in charge. He was an ‘old-school-tie’, old-time buffer, who clung to his position by virtue of his long service and family connections. These days his main function, on the few days he actually appeared, was to be charming to the visiting foreign dignitaries and clients who were always impressed by his pedigree and breeding.

‘Good morning, Justin,’ Ruth replied, in a similarly cheerful tone.

‘Meet your new boss,’ he continued, standing aside to let his companion into the office.

Stefan Anders followed Nelson-Phipps into the office and paused, surveying the area around him with a quick, sharp glance that started at the walls and finished with Ruth. She shivered inwardly at the icy, yet interested eyes that slid over her. Without introducing himself, and ignoring her outstretched hand, he walked over to the window and turned to review the room.

‘Interesting choice of decoration,’ he commented sardonically.

‘Do you think so?’ queried Ruth, lost for words. ‘I simply thought of it as plain. Functional.’

‘Exactly,’ he replied. ‘Very plain.’

There was an uncomfortable pause whilst Ruth tried to work out what was going on and why a man she had never seen before should be so eager to put her on edge and at a disadvantage. The awkward silence was broken by the sound of Justin Nelson-Phipps coughing discreetly.

‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, either oblivious or uncaring about the atmosphere in the room, ‘we have lots of people to see, and I’m sure you two will have plenty of time to talk at the group meeting.’

Ruth glanced over at him, but before she could reply Anders moved, walking across her line of sight to the door. ‘Not that much time,’ he threw over his shoulder as he left the room.

Ruth sank back into her chair feeling sick to the pit of her stomach. Whatever this man was made of he didn’t seem to like her much, and that couldn’t be good for her future. What the hell was going on?

She thought back to their meeting. There had been no physical contact – he had deliberately snubbed her attempt to shake his hand – and very little eye contact either. Except, she thought, for one moment when he had looked her straight in the eyes and she had realised, despite the palpable air of tension, that he was eminently fuckable.

She shrugged the thought away. ‘Now is not the time,’ she thought. ‘You have got to find out what the problem is – because something’s up and you clearly don’t know about it.’

She picked up the phone to call her team back together – someone must know something . . .

An hour later, as the time for the departmental meeting approached, she still had no idea what the problem was and was beginning to wonder whether she was seriously overreacting. Her team members had been as astounded as she, since although some clients had not been in contact for a few days, there was nothing new in that.

At the appointed hour they all filed into the boardroom, along with the other industry sector teams, to find Anders already waiting for them, his features grim as he stood on a dais above them. Ruth looked around and made a mental note; there were people from all ten of the major sector relationship teams, making a group of around sixty people in total. ‘Quite a gathering,’ she thought, turning her attention back to Anders, to find him looking straight at her. She swallowed and tried to smile as she felt her stomach erupt with butterflies, and then collapse as he deliberately looked away.

‘God,’ she thought, ‘what is it about him and me? Under different circumstances I could really go for him in a big way.’ Anders was just her sort of man. Tall, slim, and good looking in a casual sort of way but with hard, sexy, ‘fuck-me’ eyes. As if she had overheard, Jan sidled up next to Ruth.

‘Sexy, isn’t he?’ she muttered out of the side of her mouth. ‘And he seems very interested in you for some reason.’

‘Thanks, Jan,’ Ruth muttered back. ‘That’s very comforting, I must say.’

Her assistant flashed a knowing smile and turned away as Anders stood up to address the group. A hush fell over them.

‘Oh-oh,’ thought Ruth, ‘something’s definitely up.’

‘Good morning, everyone,’ Anders began. ‘I won’t bother with platitudes since we have a situation that needs to be resolved. A situation that precisely demonstrates the reasons why I have been brought into the bank.’ He paused and his expression changed. ‘To kick your lazy butts into first gear,’ he shouted out, shocking the group arranged in front of him. At first there were a few scattered and nervous giggles, and then as the realisation that he was deadly serious dawned on them, they slowly reverted to a shocked and tense silence. With the sound of a communal drawing-in of breaths, people began to surreptitiously edge away from anyone that might possibly be in the firing line. In the midst of them all, Ruth stood, unmoving, riveted to the spot by Anders’ authority and the power of his personality. Her eyes remained fixed on him like a bird in front of a venomous snake, whilst a feeling of foreboding washed over her like a cold sweat.

After allowing the group a moment to shuffle about and try to compose themselves into a state that would imply innocence of any misdeed, Anders continued.

‘It was a joy,’ he drawled sarcastically, ‘to join you here on my first day and find that one of our major clients has not only withdrawn our “favoured banker” status, but withdrawn completely from dealing with us. Why? Because the relationship managers they were assigned to assist them in advising on investments and business developments in the Far East were found to be, and I quote, “deeply unsatisfactory”.’ He paused for effect. ‘That company is Colchess Incorporated.’

Ruth shivered as her team drew in their breaths and shuffled from foot to foot, desperate to be excluded from Anders’ wrath. This was what had scared her before, the growing certainty that there was something that he knew and she didn’t.

‘I believe that you are the Relationship Director in charge of this client,’ he continued, drawing Ruth into his gaze. She took a deep breath.

‘I am.’

‘And do you have anything to say about this debacle?’ Anders asked, coming down from the dais to approach her, people scattering out of his path as he moved.

‘Not until I can talk to the managers and the company,’ she replied. ‘Everything was fine when I discussed the state of things with the two Far East managers, Paul Turner and Andrew Brookes, and that was, at most, three days ago.’

‘Well, it’s not all right now,’ he sneered, his face close to hers. ‘And it’s going to be difficult to talk to them when they won’t take our calls.’

‘I’ll sort it,’ she ventured.

‘You’ll have to,’ Anders replied. ‘I don’t intend for this bank to be humiliated because a little slut got caught with her knickers down in the wrong bedroom.’ There was a gasp as the audience absorbed the implications of his insult. In an instant Ruth flushed deeply and in an instinctive reaction went to slap his face. Instead, she found herself with his hand restraining hers, forcing it back to her side. She felt the power of his grip and gasped as his fingers bit viciously into hers. The rest of the room stared, transfixed at the events happening in front of them.

‘I wouldn’t do that again if I were you,’ he hissed in her ear.

Ruth gritted her teeth and dragged her hand out of his. ‘I suggest we continue this in private,’ she began, but Anders cut her off in an instant.

‘You are the one in charge, and you are the one responsible,’ he barked at her. Ruth bit her lip in humiliation and his hand reached out to her once again. This time he gripped her chin, and used his forefinger to tip up her head and force her to meet his gaze. It lacked any element of sympathy. Ruth shivered and swallowed heavily, as she finally registered through a haze of embarrassment that this was actually happening in full view of everyone she worked with, and that she was almost ready to faint, with shame, terror or desire – she wasn’t sure which.

Suddenly Anders dropped his hold on Ruth and abruptly turned away, almost tipping her over as he released her from his grasp, as though the sight of her revolted him.

‘This isn’t over,’ he warned as he returned to the dais, ‘not for any of you. It’s unfortunate that this is the way I have to start my tenure, but it’s symptomatic of the prevailing slack attitudes in this organisation. However, I’m here now and I’m going to get you into shape.’ Anders paused once again and surveyed the crowd in front of him, all busily staring at their shoes, or the floor, anywhere but at him. His voice dropped to a low, dangerous tone. ‘You people had better realise that this is the way it’s going to be from now on,’ he finished, and turning on his heel he strode out, leaving the rest of them to shuffle from the office under the cover of a rising tide of worried voices.

Ruth watched everyone go, passing her by as quickly as possible as though they thought they might pick up a deadly infection if they stood too near to her. A few people made eye contact and shrugged their shoulders, but no one wanted to stop and talk.

As the last people filed through the door, she finally came to life again and, straightening her shoulders, she marched from the boardroom, along the corridor and through the general office, feeling the silent gaze of sixty pairs of eyes upon her, until she finally reached her own solitary office.

Once inside Ruth closed the blinds and shut the door. No need to lock it, no one was going to come near her, not now she had been marked with such displeasure. She sat down behind her desk and leant her head back on the back of the seat, her mind whirling in confusion. What was going on? Just two hours ago everything in her life had been fine and now it was all in tatters – and for what? What the hell had those idiots been up to in Hong Kong and Singapore that she didn’t know about? As far as she knew the client had been perfectly happy, but perhaps that meant she had been giving the managers too much leeway instead of pushing them for more input. But the figures. . .