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
