Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe?

by Hazel Osmond

Genres: Family Life; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

Ellie Somerset's high-flying job as an advertising copywriter is hard work, but she's got it under control. Her sexy, devil-may-care new boss, on the other hand? She'll try her best...A perfect romantic comedy for fans of Holly Martin and Cathy Bramley. Ellie Somerset loves her career-obsessed boyfriend Sam and she loves her job as an advertising copywriter. But Sam is always at work and her fresh ideas keep being overlooked. Her life gets more complicated when new boss Jack Wolfe - Heathcliff in jeans - arrives at the agency. With his brooding good looks, trademark scowl and plans for change, he challenges Ellie to smarten up and prove herself. To Ellie's horror, she finds herself both repelled and attracted to the sexy and dangerous Jack. But this particular wolf has an awful lot to hide . . .

Release date: March 31, 2011

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 497

Sample

‘… and then the knickers are going to sing,’ Ellie said.

‘Sing,’ Hugo repeated slowly, running a finger between his thick neck and his stripy shirt collar.

‘Yes, and if possible do a little dance. It’s meant to be funny.’ She grinned. ‘Very tongue in cheek.’

Across the room she heard Lesley, her creative partner, snigger, a surprisingly large noise from such a petite person. That was one joke they had missed during the two days spent kicking around the singing-knickers idea.

Hugo made a huge ‘Puhh’ noise and loosened the knot in his tie, pulling it downwards aggressively.

‘They’ll be little models of knickers, of course,’ Ellie added.

That fact didn’t seem to make Hugo any happier. He frowned and his piggy eyes, already alarmingly small, disappeared altogether.

‘And Gavin’s cool with this?’ he snapped.

‘Loves it,’ Ellie said, and then instantly hoped that Hugo hadn’t picked up on her little mistake. Gavin, her boss, was too icily sophisticated to love anything. He was a creative director who prided himself on stamping on everything that wasn’t arty or filmed in black and white. Luckily, at this moment he was shooting an ad for suntan lotion on an island somewhere in the South Pacific.

Ellie’s mind flitted back to the telephone conversation during which she’d tried to tell Gavin about the knickers idea. Hugo need never know that it had consisted of huge bouts of static and Gavin shouting, ‘Pardon?’

Her advertising guts told her this was a good idea; her writing guts told her this was a good idea; she wasn’t backing down.

‘Gavin thought it was really … cutting edge.’ She crossed her fingers under the desk.

Hugo continued to eye her suspiciously and a little red spot appeared on both of his cheeks. He threw his pen down on the desk.

‘I can’t believe this,’ he said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘You really think that the San Pro market is ready for your idea? While our competitors talk about “peace of mind” and “wings that won’t let you down”, this agency is going to throw a load of singing knickers at the client?’

‘Not literally,’ Ellie said.

‘And besides,’ added Lesley, her short, spiky crop bobbing as she got into her stride, ‘you’ve let the client motor along nicely for too long. It’s time for a radical departure. All this stuff about wings, it’s like they’re selling model aeroplanes, not panty-liners.’

Ellie yet again thanked whoever the god of advertising was for pairing her up with Lesley. Designers came in all shapes and sizes. Ellie could have got a monosyllabic one who only knew how to draw and work an Apple Mac. Or one who viewed themself as a personal reincarnation of Michelangelo and thought that Ellie, a mere writer, was pond life. Instead she’d got lucky with Lesley, and three years down the line their creative brains were spookily in tune. Now they couldn’t always remember whether a good idea had started with Lesley’s images or Ellie’s words.

Hugo rubbed a hand over his eyes in a weary fashion and Ellie saw that the wet patches under his arms were spreading rapidly. He was in danger of disintegrating into a puddle of sweat and hair gel.

She looked away and kept her lips firmly sealed; a little trick she had picked up from Hugo and knew unnerved him. Anything that unnerved Hugo was fine by her. He had always been her least favourite account executive, or ‘pig in a suit’, to give him his proper title. Apart from actually looking like an overfed pig stuffed into a pinstriped suit, he had a public-school bray that made her fillings vibrate. The important thing with Hugo was not to be browbeaten by his assumption that, being a man and owning half of Shropshire, he was predestined to get his own way.

To him, females came with an Alice band and a trust fund and they stayed at home and pushed out heirs to the family seat. He was unable to cope with any deviation from that norm, and as far as he was concerned, Ellie and Lesley were way off the scale. Particularly Lesley, who, as a ‘gal who liked other gals’, was practically a witch in his eyes. Like Queen Victoria, Hugo obviously doubted whether lesbians actually existed at all.

When he couldn’t argue his way to a victory, he would use silence, on the assumption that nobody had as stiff an upper lip as he did. The opposition usually caved in, if only to avoid any more embarrassment.

Ellie found this all the more irritating because of the fawning and toadying he lavished on those higher up the food chain in the agency, such as Gavin. As she remembered one particularly vomit-inducing display, she glanced across at Hugo, still rubbing his eyes, and gave a little cough. Hugo lowered his hand and stared at her. She opened her mouth as if to say something and saw a look of triumph start to spread over his face. A silent count to three and she closed her mouth again. She was pleased to see from the expression now on his face that Hugo realised she was baiting him.

Then they were all back playing the silence game.

Ellie distracted herself by looking around at the way Hugo had decorated his office. A large framed photograph of a gun dog dominated one wall. It was the famous Stumpy, who, Hugo had once proudly informed her, had survived having his tail accidentally ‘shot orf’ by his father. On the other wall was an aerial view of Hugo’s family home, strategically placed, no doubt, to cow any visitor with its size. It looked ancient and crumbly and cold, very much like his parents, whose photograph was displayed on the third wall. On Hugo’s desk was a snapshot of Cicely, his girlfriend, who had a lot of forehead and even more jaw. Ellie noticed that her picture was much smaller than Stumpy’s and drew her own conclusions from this.

Other than that, there was nothing in Hugo’s office to hint that he had any kind of inner life at all. Except Ellie knew that he had a drawer stuffed with soft porn. Rachel on reception had told her, although how she knew was anybody’s business.

Ellie preferred not to think about Hugo sweating over those magazines and hoped to God none of them featured a ‘bitch of the month’.

Hugo jutted his chin out, what little there was of it. ‘Now listen, you two. I have looked after the Sure & Soft panty-liner account for three years. Three good years.’ His tone of voice reminded Ellie of the one teachers employ to talk to not very bright children. ‘It is a product that needs our finest work and delicate, delicate handling, so when the account came up for review, I knew I should let all three of the creative teams have a sniff of the brief.’

Ellie wondered if that had been an intentional pun on Hugo’s behalf, and then remembered that this was ‘Hugo the humourless’ and went back to listening to his little speech of reasonableness.

‘I decided I would give you all a chance, as it were,’ he was saying, ‘and then I could take the best concept forward to the client. It isn’t rocket science.’ Hugo turned an accusatory look on Ellie. ‘Two of the teams have given me some lovely stuff.’

Ellie knew that across the room Lesley would be thinking the same as she was: the other teams had probably gone down the tired old route of subtle treatments featuring pert women wearing white trousers. Thanks to the product, their lives were carefree, their world transformed.

Ellie sensed that it was time to break her silence. ‘Sorry to correct you, Hugo, but it’s not you who’s deciding on the best concept. It’s not even going to be Gavin – he won’t be back.’ She ignored Hugo’s poisonous look and carried on. ‘I’d heard we were all going to pitch our ideas to Jack Wolfe. He’s the one making the final decision about what goes forward to the client.’

Hugo gave a nasty, dry little laugh. ‘And you think Jack Wolfe is going to like your idea any more than I do? You must be mad.’

Ellie decided not to respond to that.

‘I should have known you two would come up with something difficult.’

Lesley gave a groan. ‘It’s not difficult, Hugo, it’s different.’

‘I’m their account executive,’ Hugo shot back. ‘I handle their account week in, week out. I listen to what they want from their advertising. I sort out their problems. This isn’t what they expect.’

‘Hugo, that’s the whole point. We don’t want to give them something they expect.’ Ellie could not help letting her exasperation show. ‘We’ve come up with something new and memorable that will make the client stand out from their competitors.’

While she had been speaking, the small red spots on Hugo’s cheeks seemed to have taken over his whole face. He was a very peculiar colour. Ellie was absolutely certain that she wasn’t going to give him mouth-to-mouth if he keeled over. For a second or two Hugo locked eyes with her and it was like ‘Lord of the Manor meets peasant wench’. Ellie held her ground and saw Hugo’s shoulders start to sag. The next time that he spoke, his voice had a pleading tone.

‘You don’t honestly want us to go in and see Jack Wolfe and pitch him this idea, do you?’

It was no surprise to hear that Hugo was scared of Jack Wolfe. If Hugo was Lord of the Manor, Jack was the gamekeeper who could break your leg with a look and then shag your wife in the shrubbery.

Ellie folded her arms and saw out of the corner of her eye that Lesley had done the same. Hugo treated them to his full repertoire of angry and disappointed expressions, so Ellie simply turned and stared innocently out of the window. Hugo’s office had one of the better views and if she leaned slightly to one side, she could see the spire of a Hawksmoor church, the tops of some trees and the edge of a wall of glass that formed part of a trendy art gallery, but today it was all uniformly dull, with the rain slashing down and the sky a low, unremitting blanket of grey. A single, bedraggled pigeon was sitting on the windowsill blinking in at them. It reminded Ellie very much of Hugo. She turned back to look at him and saw he had progressed to drumming his fingers on the desk.

If Ellie had to abseil down the side of the building and break into Jack Wolfe’s office to make sure he saw their idea, she was going to do it. Even in the rain, even with her fear of heights.

With Gavin out of the picture for a few weeks, the singing-knickers idea just might make it through to the client. It had a fighting chance of escaping Gavin’s ‘Net of Immaculate Taste’. While the thought of pitching the idea to Jack Wolfe was already setting up all kinds of palpitations in Ellie’s chest, it had to be better than seeing their idea suffer death by sarcasm courtesy of Gavin.

Ellie chanced another look at Hugo. He couldn’t physically stop them from pitching their idea to Jack, but he could drop a few poisonous words in his ear beforehand. Never mind that the little runt would have to stand on a box to do it.

She had to be realistic, though. Locking horns with Hugo didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Ellie plastered her best smile on her face – this was going to hurt.

‘Hugo, I appreciate that you understand your client better than we ever could, but really you have nothing to worry about … if you play this right. Why not put the other two teams on before us with their nice ideas and Jack will see that you know your stuff? He’ll be very impressed.’ Ellie widened her smile. ‘Then you slip us on last with our wacky idea and Jack will give you points for having the guts to suggest something different.’

She tried to ignore the impressive eye-rolling and fingers-down-the-throat actions that were coming from Lesley. She couldn’t blame her: flattering Hugo was making her feel a bit queasy herself.

Hugo stopped drumming his fingers on the desk, but he still appeared to be weighing up the risks. ‘What about when Gavin comes back?’

Ellie fired up her encouraging smile again. ‘When Gavin comes back, it will all be sorted. Either Jack Wolfe will have strangled us with his bare hands or he’ll have chosen our idea. And Gavin’s not going to reverse any decision that Jack’s made, is he?’ She didn’t add that nobody in their right mind would change a decision that Jack had made. ‘It’s a win-win situation for you, Hugo.’

There was a beat of hesitation and then Hugo tightened the knot in his tie and sat up straighter. ‘OK,’ he said slowly. ‘OK, we’ll give it a go.’

She had judged his level of cowardice correctly; he would stick a neck out as long as it wasn’t his own.

‘Great,’ Ellie said, jumping to her feet and gathering her papers. ‘All we’re asking is that you give us a good build-up in your little introductory patter to Jack and don’t make any “I don’t like this idea” faces behind our backs.’

Hugo opened and closed his mouth, a picture of hurt innocence.

‘Come on, Hugo,’ Lesley said, standing up too. ‘If you get behind us, we’ll get behind you.’

There was a loud barking noise that confused Ellie until she realised that it came from Hugo. ‘You’ll get behind me?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so. Personally I think it would be better if we all got behind something solid, like a table on its side.’ He put the top back on his pen with an unnecessary flourish. ‘You know what Jack’s like if he takes against something.’

‘Oh well,’ Ellie said lightly, trying to mask the very real panic that was rising in her at the thought of being on the receiving end of Jack’s temper. He had a reputation for not suffering fools or foolish ideas gladly. The swirl of panic in her stomach did another couple of revolutions before she got control of it.

‘See you, then, Hugo,’ she said quickly, and headed for the door. Prolonging the meeting might give Hugo the opportunity to change his mind. Or even worse, he’d try to make small talk, which in Hugo’s case was absolutely miniscule and made him sound like one of the Royal Family desperately trying to bond.

As she reached the door, Lesley was right behind her. ‘Run,’ she heard her whisper, and they both shot out of the room and raced past the moody black-and-white photographs of London to get to the stairs.

Back in their office, Lesley shut the door firmly behind them. ‘Bit sticky back there in places, but I don’t think it went too badly – tit-head was almost happy at the end.’ She plonked her papers on her desk and caught the side of her pencil pot, sending the contents cascading over the desk and on to the floor. ‘Oh bugger,’ she said, getting down on her hands and knees to pick them up. Behind her, a small blow-up Elvis drifted off the bookshelf and bounced across the floor.

Ellie bent down to scoop up Elvis and tried to balance him back on the shelf. When that didn’t work, she pulled open a filing-cabinet drawer and shoved him in there. As she closed the drawer, she automatically reached out to steady the mini-fridge, which was wobbling on top of the cabinet. For a little space under the eaves their office certainly held a lot of stuff. If they didn’t have another good tidy-up soon, they were going to disappear under piles of paper, pens and Post-it notes. It was now touch and go whether Lesley’s Elvis collection or the tower of paperbacks Ellie had never got round to taking home would win the battle for domination of the office.

Ellie looked over at Lesley as she put her pencils back in the pot and couldn’t help smiling – unsharpened ones in the middle, sharpened ones round the outside; always the same. Hard to believe that this woman, now humming away contentedly as she made order out of pencil chaos, had once seemed seriously intimidating. Or that, in the days before they were partners, Ellie used to give her a wide berth if she saw her in the pubs and bars frequented by the advertising mob.

Everything about Lesley had made Ellie feel like some gangly, over-ripe frump just up from the country. She had a trim little figure poured into something edgy, her hair colour changed almost every week, and always, always there was a slightly spaced-out girl hanging around her. Ellie had invariably reacted by saying very little and trying to poke her own hair back into whatever half-arsed version of a French plait she had cobbled together that morning.

Ellie had been forced to remove Lesley from the ‘trendy and heartless’ pigeonhole into which she’d shoved her when they’d both ended up judging a student advertising competition. They had agreed right down the line on the marking, chucking out anything that was so far up its own backside you couldn’t tell what product it was selling. They ended up giving the prize to the dorkiest guy in the room, reasoning that he needed more encouragement than the rest.

When Lesley had revealed later that she felt music had died along with Elvis, Ellie realised that all the cool and scary stuff about Lesley was simply a layer of armour that allowed her to appear tougher than she was. This was something Ellie could relate to, having used her sense of humour in a similar way for years.

A few weeks after that, when Lesley suggested they get together and persuade Wiseman & Craster that the company needed another creative team, Ellie didn’t hesitate. Now, between them they managed to present a united front against the waves of testosterone that powered the rest of the agency.

Lesley finished arranging the pencils and Ellie knew that the next thing she would do would be to polish her glasses. Sure enough, Lesley reached for the faux leopard-skin case and was soon rubbing the lenses vigorously with a cloth.

Ellie switched on her computer and dragged her mind back to the tricky subject of Hugo. They’d have to keep an eye on him. He couldn’t be trusted further than you could throw him, which, with so many expense-account lunches under his belt, wasn’t very far at all. She knew he was going to drop them in the poo somehow.

She was aware that Lesley had stopped polishing and was now looking at her. ‘Quit worrying, Ell,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be fine. No one’s going to stamp on our idea this time.’ She got up, went over to the mini-fridge and pulled out two bottles of Italian lager. ‘And may I say congratulations on that excellent bit of massage you did on tit-head’s ego? Have yourself an Oscar.’ She placed one of the ice-cold bottles in Ellie’s hand and then scrabbled around in her desk for a bottle-opener. ‘Little swine, making us jump through all those hoops when he’s not even the one we’ve got to impress. He’ll agree with whatever Jack thinks.’ Having found the opener, she leaned over and took the top off Ellie’s bottle and then her own. ‘Cheers.’

Ellie raised her bottle, tapped it against Lesley’s and there was silence as they drank.

‘Well, that should get the creative juices flowing,’ Lesley said, sitting back down. She glanced at her watch. ‘There’s a fair bit to do to get these knicks knocked into shape. You need to ring Sam, tell him you’ll be late?’

‘No, he’s out again entertaining the Germans. Doing his bit for whatever “entente cordiale” is in German. However late I’m going to be, he’s bound to be later.’ Ellie took a long drink and then opened an art pad. The paper glistened up at her, white and inviting.

‘So … no good trying to busk it with Jack. We’ll need to set it all out clearly – why we think it will appeal, how much it’s going to cost. One slip-up and Jack will tear us apart.’ Ellie took the top off a fine liner and started to write a list of things that they had to cover in the pitch. Then she stopped: Lesley was staring into space, her glasses hanging from one of her fingers.

‘Jack tearing us apart,’ Lesley repeated softly, and then gave a low whistle. ‘What wouldn’t most of the women in this agency give to be in our shoes?’

Ellie rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, no, don’t start. Not all that again.’

‘Just think, Ellie, Jack sinking his—’

‘Nooooooo.’ Ellie ripped the page off the art pad, screwed it into a ball and threw it at Lesley’s head.

‘Sorry, Ellie, but come on,’ Lesley said, ducking, ‘you must be a bit excited. You’re a woman, heterosexual, and our first chance to pitch our work to Jack and you get to flash your knickers at him.’

Ellie made a vague noise in reply. Jack Wolfe had been at the agency for just under two weeks and it was as if he were pumping pheromones into the air-conditioning system. Colleagues who appeared perfectly sane in every other way had suddenly taken to flirting and giggling when Jack was about. Even some of the men.

Lesley retrieved the ball of paper and lobbed it into the bin. ‘It’s all right for you – you’re such an old married woman you’re immune to Jack. Either that or you need your eyes testing.’ She took a swig of her lager. ‘Hell, I’m a lesbian and even I can see why women fancy Jack.’

‘My eyes are fine,’ Ellie said, putting the top back on her pen in a manner she hoped said, ‘Can we talk about something else?’ but when Lesley continued to look at her, she held up her hands in mock submission. ‘OK, OK, I admit Jack’s a good thing for the agency, especially if he manages to give Gavin a kick up the backside.’ Ellie took a second or two to savour that image. ‘And I think it’s great, if a little scary, that we get to pitch to him, but I’m not stupid. He’s here to streamline the place and everybody seems to have overlooked what he’s done at all the other agencies he’s ever worked at. Poor Hardy & Wades. By the time he moved on they could have had their Christmas party in a phone box there were so few of them left standing.’

‘Yeah, but they didn’t need to have it in a phone box, did they?’ Lesley was triumphant. ‘They took over the whole of Gordon Ramsay at Claridge’s because they’d won nearly everything there was to win that year. He might have cut them to pieces, but the ones that were left were laughing. Simon Winchester’s driving around in a Porsche now, you know?’ Lesley clutched her lager bottle to her chest. ‘Just think, that could be us come Christmas, sitting on Gordon Ramsay’s lap and counting how many times he says f—’

‘Fairly sure you’re going to still be here then, are you?’ Ellie flicked the top off her pen again. ‘Sure you’re not going to be one of the ones standing outside Claridge’s with your nose pressed to the glass? Simon Winchester might be happy, but Gabi and Paul are still schlepping around trying to pick up work.’

‘Yeah, well, they were pretty rubbish. It’s not surprising he turfed them out.’

‘OK, bad example, but you know what I mean.’

Lesley grinned, put on her glasses and started sharpening a pencil, her ritual preparation to actually getting down to work.

Ellie watched her for a while and then shook her head sadly. ‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Don’t cry on my shoulder when we’re out on the streets selling the Big Issue or we’re one of the few teams left and he’s piling on the work. Jack’s got a seat on the board and his name on the door here. That’s a first. He’s obviously got big plans for the place.’ She took another long drink of her lager. ‘I think we’re going to find that there’s only one way of doing anything around here and that’s Jack’s. You wait until you disagree with him. Then you’ll see him completely lose his temper. I bet he throws back his head and howls.’

Lesley stopped sharpening her pencil. ‘Oh my God, we could definitely sell tickets for that. Do you really think he does?’ Her eyes went misty behind her glasses.

‘No, and I don’t think he gets hairy palms when there’s a full moon either.’ Ellie frowned. ‘The culling is going to start soon. Bet that stops all this swooning and that other stuff … all that going on about him being Heathcliff.’

‘Yeah, that’s getting a bit tedious … Although … although as an impartial observer of male–female flirting, it’s been pretty entertaining. Some women are as subtle as a brick.’

Ellie made a ‘You’re mistaking me for somebody who gives a toss’ face and tried to concentrate on what she was supposed to be writing.

‘Rachel’s the best,’ Lesley ploughed on. ‘Taken it as some kind of challenge, evidently. Skirts getting shorter, tops getting lower every day. Doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere, though. None of them does. He has a thoroughly good flirt and then wanders off.’

Lesley put down the sharpener and gave the point on her pencil a critical look. ‘These ones don’t sharpen as well as the ones from Finland,’ she said thoughtfully, and Ellie hoped that finally, finally they could get on with some work.

Lesley didn’t appear to be in any hurry, though.

‘Want to hear my theory about why he’s not interested in anyone at work?’ she said, raising and lowering her eyebrows suggestively.

‘Not really, Sherlock.’ Ellie made her voice sound as bored as possible. ‘But is it anything to do with industrial tribunals, impotence, latent homosexuality?’

‘Nope, Watson. Too knackered.’

‘Right.’

‘Rachel’s kept a tally. Started it the first time she spotted him at that awards do in the Festival Hall.’

‘Tally?’

‘Girlfriends, odd dates, one-night stands, that kind of thing. He’s a busy man.’

‘Lovely. Great. Happy for him. Now, see this pad of paper?’ Ellie held it up. ‘See what I’ve written on it?’

Lesley peered. ‘Nothing.’

‘Yup, and if we don’t get a move on, that’s exactly what I’ll be reading out in front of Jack, and I really don’t think me saying, “Sorry, but Lesley insisted on telling me about your sex life,” is going to cut it with him as an excuse.’

‘OK, keep all that hair of yours on.’

Ellie stuck her tongue out goodnaturedly and then put her pad back on her desk. ‘Jeez, all this fuss over a guy who looks like a six-foot-three, permanently scowling, sharp-nosed wolf.’

There was a spluttering noise as Lesley tried to laugh with a mouthful of lager. ‘Blimey, you do need your eyes testing,’ she finally managed to say, wiping froth off her black top.

Ellie could not help laughing too. ‘Perhaps that was a bit cruel, but talk about looking at him through rose-coloured spectacles. You know why?’ She didn’t wait for Lesley to reply. ‘They’ve all read too many of those romances with alpha males striding their way through them. They think that beneath all that granite they’re going to find a tender, injured soul crying out for their healing touch. Whereas I see someone whose mother didn’t tell him to “make nice” enough when he was little. If he ever was little.’ Ellie finished off her lager and threw the bottle in the general direction of the bin. They both watched it miss and roll until it hit a pile of papers. ‘Jack wouldn’t get away with all that scowling if he wasn’t a director and built like a tank. Imagine if we tried it – we’d have to put up with all those premenstrual jokes.’

She paused and gave Lesley a hurt look. ‘And that thing you said earlier, about me being an old married woman. That’s not fair. I’m not old and I’m not married.’

Lesley was looking at the point of her pencil again. ‘I meant to say “settled”. You know, “settled” as in “in a permanent relationship”.’

‘Somehow that sounds even more boring.’

‘No, no,’ Lesley said, waving her hand about but still not looking directly at Ellie. ‘’Course it isn’t. I meant … you know, not bothered by all that …’ she seemed to be casting around for the correct word or phrase ‘… hormonal stuff,’ she said at last.

‘Gee, thanks. Now you make me sound like I’m terminally set in my ways and dead from the waist down.’

Ellie noticed that Lesley didn’t leap in to contradict her.

Well, she probably had a point, besides the one on her pencil. Ellie did feel settled. Good luck to the Lesleys and Jacks of the world, out there playing the field, but when you were happy, the secret was to stick with it.

Lesley saying, ‘Oi,’ very loudly made Ellie jump.

‘Miss Eleanor Somerset,’ she carried on sternly, sliding her glasses down her nose, ‘are you going to sit there all afternoon daydreaming, or are you going to pull your finger out and get this pitch into some kind of shape?’

Ellie made a very rude gesture with two of Lesley’s pencils, but very soon they were discussing the finer points of knickers and how many words in the English language rhymed with ‘gusset’.

‘Which one do you think, Sam?’ Ellie said, holding up two shirts on their hangers. She placed one over her body for a couple of seconds before swapping it with the other.

Sam pulled on his earlobe and then went back to checking through his texts. His blond hair was falling into his eyes and Ellie had the urge to go over and brush it out of the way. She gave a smile and then threw both shirts on to the bed and did a little naked jiggle.

‘Or perhaps, big boy, you prefer the one I’m not wearing?’

‘Yeah, very nice.’ Sam didn’t even look up.

Ellie slowly bent down to pick up the discarded shirts. Time was when she only had to open a top button and Sam would have been all over her. Now she had to practically install landing lights and put a big sign over her head saying, ‘Sex, this way,’ to give him the hint. It wasn’t his fault; it was that ruddy job. He was working too hard, that was the trouble. He had black shadows under his eyes and he was never off his mobile.

It was a rule of life: whenever you were snowed under at work, your libido took a