couldn’t tell by looking at the place that Beville Holdings hadn’t made a profit lately. You’d think everything was coming up roses.
Pushing through the front door, Leah headed across the deserted reception area straight for the nearby powder room. Her wristwatch said twenty-three minutes past eight. She only had five minutes to check her appearance before she was due to be sitting behind the semicircular reception desk, looking cool, calm and collected.
Despite her self-lecturing, Leah felt anything but.
Jason said good-bye to the factory foreman, thanking him for his help, but brushing aside the man’s offer to accompany him over to the head office.
Jason wanted to think. And he thought better when he was by himself.
He walked slowly along the well-signed path, wondering what he was doing, buying a company that made shower gels, shampoos, sunscreens and moisturisers. What in hell did he know about such products?
Nothing at all.
Still, he supposed retail was retail. Get the advertising right and good sales usually followed.
Judging by their performance over the last two years, Beville Holdings had not got their advertising right. Either that, or they were charging too much for their products. Or their management was less than efficient.
Jason wished he’d done some more market research before plunging in last Friday and buying a controlling share.
Never in his life before had he bought a company because of a dream. A dream, for pity’s sake!
It had happened last Saturday night, the night he’d broken up with Hilary. He’d been upset because she’d been upset, and the last thing he’d ever wanted to do was to hurt Hilary.
They’d met just over six months ago, at a dinner party that Jason had been persuaded to attend, and which had been cripplingly boring till Hilary winked at him from across the table. Later, he’d discovered that their hostess had been doing some matchmaking, Hilary having not long been divorced. She was his age, slim, dark, and very attractive, as well as intelligent and confident. Jason had ended up in bed with her that night, his first woman since Karen’s death four years earlier. His libido had finally bypassed his grief and come to life again, and, having come to life, wasn’t going to stay silent any more.
In hindsight, Jason was amazed that he’d stayed celibate for so long. Sex had always been very important to him.
He’d first discovered the pleasures of the flesh when he’d been sixteen, his partner an older girl of nineteen who knew a thing or two. She’d lived two doors down from him, and she’d spent many a Saturday afternoon during one long hot summer, showing Jason exactly how to please her, and vice versa. When her family moved, Jason had been devastated for a while. At sixteen, it had been impossible to separate lust and love.
Eventually, he’d recovered from his broken heart, and, after that, never been without a girlfriend. Though he’d never fallen in love again.
Till he met Karen.
Jason smiled softly to himself as he thought of his wife.
Another older woman, but this time fifteen years older. Forty-two to his twenty-seven. Yet they’d been perfect together. And so ecstatically happy.
Of course, everyone else thought he’d married his boss’s widow out of cold-blooded ambition. Hilary probably hadn’t believed him when he had said he’d loved his wife.
Jason supposed it was only reasonable that, after sleeping with Hilary every weekend for six months, she might expect him to propose.
In his defence, he’d made it clear right from the start of their relationship that he wasn’t interest in remarrying.
But last Saturday night, Hilary had started pressing for him to marry her and he knew he couldn’t. Because, as attractive as Hilary was, he just wasn’t in love with her, and once you’d been in love—really, deeply in love—you couldn’t settle for less.
After Hilary flounced out, saying she never wanted to see him again, he hadn’t been able to sleep. So he’d popped one of the sleeping pills that the doctor had prescribed for him after Karen died and which were hopelessly out of date. But at the time, he hadn’t cared. He just wanted oblivion.
But his sleep had been full of dreams, mostly of Karen, telling him—as she often had during that final awful week—that he wasn’t to grieve, that, one day, he’d meet someone else, someone more right for him than she’d been, someone who’d give him babies and a wonderful life.
Silly dreams, because Jason knew that wouldn’t happen.
And then, seemingly only seconds before he woke, had come this other odd, startlingly vivid dream.
He was driving out in the country and suddenly, in the middle of a mown paddock, he saw this massive billboard with a blonde on it. She’d been photographed from the back from her hips up, and was naked. The effect was incredibly sexual. She had a slender but curvy shape, porcelain-like skin and dead straight, glisteningly golden hair streaming halfway down her bare back. Her arms were stretched up in front of her, tossing a bottle of shampoo up into a bright blue sky, golden rays coming out from it as if it were the sun. Across the bottom of the billboard were the words: START EVERY DAY WITH SUNSHINE.
Jason had driven right off the road in the dream as he stared at the blonde, the accident jolting him awake. He’d been relieved to find it was only a dream, but the image on that billboard had stayed in his mind all day, tantalising him. Haunting him.
He knew he’d never seen such an ad before. He had heard of a brand name called Sunshine. Vaguely. But he thought it was attached to cleaning stuff, not shampoo.
That evening, he’d rung Harry Wilde—Harry ran an advertising agency he used occasionally—and asked him if he knew of Sunshine shampoo, or of such an ad.
He hadn’t.
Jason had then gone to an all-hours supermarket and found that there was indeed a range of products with the Sunshine label, all made by a company called Beville Holdings. Further investigation via his broker revealed Beville Holdings was a small but well-established manufacturing company, owned by a parent company in England. Their shares were quite low, due to their not making a profit and not declaring a decent dividend for the past two years.
‘And a week later, here I am,’ Jason muttered to himself. ‘The owner of said profitless company.’
Jason found himself standing outside the main door of the head office building, shaking his head wryly up at the Beville Holdings sign. He didn’t really believe in fate, or karma. In the main, he was a practical man.
But he could not deny that he’d been less than practical this past week. That crazy dream had robbed him of his savvy approach to business. As soon as he’d found out there was a real company that made Sunshine products, he’d felt compelled to buy the place, without doing any solid market research, a process that normally took many weeks.
Bob had thought he’d lost his marbles.
Still, if he listened to Bob all the time, he’d never buy anything. Bob was a great PA, but not the most decisive of men. Not a risk taker in any way, shape or form.
Businessmen
