Doukakis's Apprentice (7 page)

‘I haven’t seen anything.’

‘But you always research companies so carefully.’

‘Well this time I didn’t.’ His tone was irritable and Ellen looked at him calmly.

‘We’ve worked together a long time, Damon. Do you want to talk about this?’

‘No.’ Damon shook his head and lifted a hand. ‘
Don’t
ask.’

‘I’m guessing this has something to do with your sister.’ Her tone was sympathetic. ‘She’s lucky to have you looking out for her.’

‘I wish she felt the same way.’

‘That’s because she takes your love for granted. Which is a compliment. It means she feels secure. Trust me, I know. I have teenagers. You’ve done a good job.’

It didn’t feel that way, but the prospect of discussing it horrified him almost as much as the situation itself. ‘About this company—’

‘It’s not all bad news.’ Fortunately Ellen took the hint and changed the subject. ‘There is a creative brain at work there. You just need to harness it.’

Damon opened the file and slowly flicked through the pages. Pausing, he lifted a glossy advert featuring a teenager in a nightclub. ‘That’s clever.’

‘It’s all clever. And creative. The customer profiling is spot on. Their use of social networking is astonishingly astute. My eldest has been nagging me to buy this for months, all based on the pester power generated by their campaign.’

His interest piqued, Damon flicked through rest of the folio. ‘The creative thinking is original.’ He frowned down at the tagline under a famous brand of running shoes. ‘
“Run, breathe, live.”
It’s good.’ Staring at the work, he remembered Polly’s words.

‘Clients love us. We’re very creative.’

‘Their sales have quadrupled since that campaign went live. They tapped into the whole lifestyle thing. There is no doubt that Prince Advertising is a mess, but there’s at least one person in the company who is exceptional. I’d go as far as to say they’re afloat purely because of the talents of their creative director. Who is he?’

‘His name was Michael Anderson and I fired him.’ Damon was staring down at the pages in front of him. ‘And there’s no way these ideas came from him. The man didn’t have an original thought in his head.’

‘Maybe it was Prince himself?’

Just thinking of Peter Prince sent Damon’s tension levels shooting skyward. ‘He’s in his fifties and he’s notorious for abandoning the company when it suits him. From what I can gather he treats it more as a hobby than a business. This stuff is young. Fresh. Visionary.’

Ellen smiled. ‘And fun.’

Fun.

Damon thought of the skull and crossbones on Polly’s nails. The hot pink tights. The fish on the desk. The party atmosphere that hit him every time he went near the staff. ‘They certainly have an interesting work ethic.’

‘So if it wasn’t the creative director, who’s coming up with the ideas?’ Ellen gathered up the papers. ‘Thanks to their
creativity they have some major pieces of business. Their billing is haphazard, their cash flow is a nightmare, but we can sort that—’ she shrugged ‘—and absorb them into our business. Just make sure we don’t lose the brain behind these campaigns. We need to find out who it is and lock them into a watertight contract. Any idea who it could be?’

‘No.’ Mentally scrolling through the people he’d met, Damon closed the file. ‘But I intend to find out immediately. And I know just the person to ask.’

By seven o’clock Polly was the only one left on her floor of the office. She’d spent the latter half of the day juggling problems and soothing frayed nerves while taking endless calls from anxious clients who had seen news of the takeover on the TV.

‘Mr Peters, I think we should be reviewing the whole media mix.’ Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she talked into her headset so that her hands were free to unpack the last of the boxes, ‘Yes, it’s true that Mr Anderson has gone.’ She retrieved a packet of balloons from the bottom of the box and slid them into her desk. ‘But there are other people more than qualified to advise you on the best strategy.’
Like me
, she thought, rescuing the charger for her BlackBerry and adding it to the stuff accumulating in the drawer. ‘I’m going to schedule a meeting in your diary, get the team to put together some ideas and then we’ll present them to you. I promise you will be blown away by our ideas … Uhuh … mmm, definitely … absolutely top priority.’

When she finally hung up, she keyed in the task to the ever-growing to-do list in her BlackBerry and carried on sorting out her desk area. The rest of the staff had gone home hours before, all apparently excited by the prospect of riding down to street level in the glass elevator.

Left alone, Polly removed her boots and settled down to an
evening of hard work. Darkness spread slowly over the city as she worked her way steadily through her calls. After a few hours she glanced up at the towering panes of glass and saw that the view had changed from daytime city-slick to nighttime sparkle and she paused for a moment, captivated by the wide-angled view of London at night. The moon sent a sliver of light across the River Thames and for the first time in a horrid, hideous week she felt peaceful.

Maybe, just maybe, this could turn out to be a good thing. Damon Doukakis was probably one of the few people with the talent to turn the company round, providing he didn’t fire all of them first.

Romeo and Juliet seemed happy enough in their new surroundings and Polly had discovered that there were enough workstations for everyone without having to operate the Doukakis ‘hot desk’ system. She wondered how his employees must feel, coming to work every day and sitting down at an empty, featureless surface, greeted by nothing more than a power point and a phone socket.

Damon Doukakis was focused on the success of his business to the exclusion of everything else.

She paused in the middle of deleting an e-mail.

Well, not
quite
everything else.

Her cheeks burned and she stared down at her hands, remembering. The attraction had been like a searing blade, driven straight through her. And she was pretty sure he’d felt it too.

He’d looked horrified, she remembered, which should have dented her ego except that she was a realist. There was no way he would sully himself with a mongrel like her. She’d seen enough pictures of him in the gossip columns to know that the women he chose were sleek and groomed. Elegant. Dignified. Controlled. Everything about his life was ruthlessly controlled, from work to women.

Polly looked down at herself. The women he dated would no more dream of sitting shoeless and cross-legged on the floor unpacking a box than they would be seen in public without perfectly blow-dried hair.

Wondering why she was wasting time thinking about what sort of women Damon Doukakis dated, Polly finished emptying the box and put it ready for recycling.

Her desk was covered in pink sticky notes with various phone messages taken by Debbie while she’d been on the phone to other people.

Urgent. Call Vernon White about the Honey Hair campaign.

Ring the media buyer at Cool Campaigns about the media strategy for Fresh Mouth mints.

David Mills from Fox Consumer wants to talk urgently …

Urgent, urgent, urgent. It was all urgent. She felt a rush of panic as she contemplated all the work she still had to do. Everyone had heard the news of the takeover and was wondering whether Prince Advertising was going to exist in a month. And she couldn’t give them an answer. She had no idea what Damon Doukakis intended to do so all she could do was sound positive and up-beat.

Knowing that if all her clients walked in the opposite direction then the staff would definitely lose their jobs, Polly peeled off the notes one by one and added the calls to the list. Then she settled back into her cross-legged position on the floor and worked out a priority for the morning.

She was wondering whether it would be any help to get a second phone, when she heard the swish of a door opening and saw Damon Doukakis striding towards her.

Her confidence melted away like chocolate held in a child’s palm.

When it came to work she was more than ready to fight her corner but she had no idea how to fight these other feelings
that squirmed inside her whenever she was in the same room as him.

Once glance at the exquisitely cut black dinner jacket and bowtie told her that his plans for the evening were infinitely more exciting than hers and she held her breath as he approached. His startling good-looks made it impossible to do anything but stare when he was in the room. It didn’t help that he carried himself with that inborn confidence that seemed genetically embedded in people born into wealth. It had been years since she’d felt that awful creeping sense of inferiority but she felt it now as she stood trapped by those glittering dark eyes.

Polly’s head began to spin and suddenly she was glad she was sitting down, because at least sitting down didn’t require strength in one’s legs. It was just the tiredness, she told herself. Nothing more. He wasn’t
that
gorgeous.

As he stood looking down at her from his formidable height, she was forced to revise that opinion. OK, so maybe he was gorgeous. To look at. But it was all on the surface.

Feeling out of her depth, she made a vague attempt to defuse the crackling tension. ‘Nice outfit. I didn’t know you had a second job as a waiter.’

There was no answering smile and she felt a flash of relief. There was no way she could ever find a man without a sense of humour remotely attractive, even if he
did
have an incredible body that did miracles for a dinner jacket. She told herself that the flutter of nerves in her stomach was down to the ominous look in his eyes as he scanned her appearance.

‘
Theé mou
, why are you sitting on the floor? Where are your boots?’

‘Under the desk. I was emptying boxes and my heels kept catching in my hem—’ Realising that his eyes were fixed on her legs, she felt her body heat. ‘Never mind. I promise to wear shoes when I see a client, so save the lecture.’

‘You have absolutely no—’ He broke off in mid-sentence, his attention snagged by the dramatic transformation of his previously ordered office space. ‘
What
happened here?’

‘You told us we could do what we wanted with the space.’ Knowing that she sounded defensive, Polly scrambled up from the floor, acutely conscious of his height now that she wasn’t wearing her heels. She followed his appalled gaze and saw the calendar of half-naked firemen someone had stuck to one of the steel rods that supported the ceiling.
Oops.
‘That was a project we did for one of our clients. It’s a photographic masterpiece, don’t you think? We put it up because it helps us to think creatively.’

A dark brow lifted in mockery. ‘The more I discover about your creative process, the more fascinated I am.’

Polly shrugged awkwardly. ‘I accept we’re a bit more—er—informal than you, but to be honest the whole “hot desk” thing doesn’t really work for us. I think we’re very possibly cold desk people. Or maybe lukewarm desk. We like knowing where we’re going to sit instead of playing musical chairs when we come to work every day. We like having a
home
. A little space to call our own.’

‘The place looks like a Sunday market.’ He picked up the pink fluffy pen she always kept on her desk, his gaze incredulous. ‘What do you do with this thing?’

‘I write with it. If I’m brainstorming ideas I need to doodle on paper. It helps me think.’ Exhausted, her head throbbing, Polly wished she’d hidden the pen. ‘It’s my happy pen. I like it. It makes me smile and I’m more creative when I’m happy.’

‘Well, that’s good, because obviously your happiness is my first priority.’ His silky-smooth tone held a deadly edge. ‘Talking of happiness, how are the fish settling in? Are they homesick? Enjoying the view? Anything I can get them to make them feel more comfortable?’

She decided to ignore the sarcasm. ‘Just don’t get too close. They’re afraid of sharks.’

‘I am
not
a shark, Miss Prince.’

‘You just gobbled up my father’s company in one mouthful so forgive me if I disagree with you.’

‘We both know I have no interest in your father’s business.’

‘Which is a shame, because you’re stuck with us now.’ Suddenly she appreciated the irony of it. ‘You’re stuck with our pink, fluffy, fish-loving approach to business and we’re stuck with your empty-desk-eyes-forward-don’t-anybody-laugh ethos. Interesting times ahead.’

Suddenly, Polly was too tired to fight and she surreptitiously slid her pink notebook under a file in the hope that it wouldn’t draw his attention. ‘Can I please have my pen back? It’s a lucky pen. All my best creative ideas have come while I’m holding it.’

The bold curve of his brows came together in a frown and she wondered what she’d said this time. He obviously thought she was a complete numbskull. ‘Could you stop frowning? It’s so unsettling. We’re used to working in a positive atmosphere.’

He studied her for a long moment and then dropped the pen back on her desk. ‘Have you heard from your father?’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t the man ever call you?’

With that single sentence he unwittingly dug a knife into the most vulnerable part of her. Afraid he might see the hurt, Polly kept her eyes down. ‘We live independent lives.’ And not for anything would she betray how much this latest episode was upsetting her. She wasn’t going to give Damon Doukakis the satisfaction of knowing she was as miserable about the whole thing as he was. ‘Was that all? Because I’m pretty busy.’

There was a brief silence and then he surprised her. ‘You look exhausted. You need to stop for the day.’

The fact that he’d noticed sent a flicker of warmth through her body and that feeling frightened her more than the power he wielded. The last thing she needed was to think of him as sympathetic. ‘I can’t stop for the day. My boss thinks I’m a lazy slacker and I have another million phone calls to make before I go home.’

‘You can’t go home.’ He picked up a stuffed bear she kept on her desk and studied it with an air of baffled incredulity. ‘There is a mob of journalists outside just waiting for one of us to leave so that they can bombard us with questions.’