A Summer Fling Read Online Free PDF

properly and for that we need coffee and biscuits,’ said Christie and she marched off in the direction of the stairs, the others trailing behind her like little ducks behind their mam.
    Twenty minutes later, the five women were halfway down their coffees in the canteen. Five women working together could be a disaster or a joy. Christie was determined it would not be the former and for that she needed to know the personalities involved.
    James McAskill had told Christie that he thought he had the ideal mix in his department now. It hadn’t been a deliberate ploy to exclude men, that’s just the way it had worked out. But still, Christie thought, he couldn’t have found a more varied selection of females if he’d tried. The older one, Grace, was fifty-five and very well named too, with her lovely white-blonde hair that fell in a delicate swoop of silver to her jawline. She had, apparently, been especially keen to take up the position, even turning down the chance of early retirement for it. She looked too regal to be working in an office, exuding all that quiet class, thought Christie. She seemed more suited to being the manager of an old-fashioned, exclusive dress shop than working behind a desk. Then there was Anna, thirty-nine, quiet and unsmiling, hiding behind her twin curtains of long chestnut hair with the odd silver root poking through. She twiddled constantly with a small, diamond-studded ring on her wedding finger and her eyes looked dull, as if she hadn’t had a top quality sleep for a long time. Then there was Dawn, thirty-three, a young woman with an outward smile on her freckly face, but too many worries behind those large, toffee-coloured eyes. Last, but not least, the ‘baby’, Raychel, twenty-eight – a beautiful girl with gentle, grey eyes and gypsy-black curls, who, Christie suspected, hid her light well and truly under a bushel. She doubted she had them wrong, she rarely did. She shook her head at herself in exasperation. She’d inherited her psychologist father’s genes and was constantly analyzing people. It could be an annoying habit.
    ‘James has great plans for Bakery, were you aware?’ smiled Christie, mainly to Grace, who was to be her second in command. ‘He wants to launch his flagship Suggestion Scheme from here. We will be in charge of administrating all the ideas that come in from colleagues in the field about Bakery. If it works, he’ll be rolling the scheme out to other departments.’
    ‘That’s good news,’ said Grace. Her job was safe for a while longer then. No one had been more surprised than she had when they had offered her the position of Deputy Manager. She knew that James McAskill talked about fair opportunities for all sexes and ages, but to find out first-hand that he practised what he preached had been very refreshing.
    ‘What was the last boss like then?’ asked Christie with a twinkle shining in her eye.
    ‘Brian? Very nice man,’ returned Grace.
    ‘He was all right, was Brian,’ added Dawn. ‘Think he was getting tired though by the end. He left most of the running to Malcolm.’ She gave an involuntary shudder when she said his name, which Christie couldn’t help but notice.
    ‘Malcolm Spatchcock, that would be?’ Christie asked. James had warned her about him. Not that he was one for gossip, he hated it in fact, but he felt it fair to tell her that Malcolm had not been very pleased to be forcibly removed to Cheese, even though it was a promotion. Christie had picked up from that conversation that Malcolm Spatchcock was not one of James’s favourite people, although he would never have said as much, not even to her. But Christie Somers liked to make her own mind up about people. Different dynamics between personalities sparked off different sorts of relationships. She might even find that she and Malcolm got on like a house on fire.
    ‘He’s gone to be the Business Unit Manager of Cheese,’ said Dawn dryly, adding under her breath,