Free Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? by Hazel Osmond Page A

once seemed like a brilliant idea.
    It had taken Ellie and Lesley quite some time to pull themselves together enough to make it back to their office. Ellie was still shaking when she got there, and Lesley wasn’t saying a word.
    Ellie put her head down on her desk and wallowed inthe shame and embarrassment of failure. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t been able to think of anything to say when Hetherington had shouted at her. The way Jack had looked at her like she was a complete idiot hadn’t helped. He was probably planning to fire her now.
    Ellie heard Lesley pick up the phone and then she was talking to Megan. Her conversation was peppered with swear words and negative comments about men who should have retired long ago. When she finished the call, Lesley stared down at her desk. She’d toned her hair colour down for the presentation, a dark black-blue, and sitting there like that, she bore a strong resemblance to a depressed crow.
    If the knickers idea hadn’t been so brilliant, perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt so much.
    As the afternoon ground on, a steady stream of visitors dropped in. Some, like Juliette and Mike, had come to offer genuine support. Others, like Jon and Zak, had come to gloat. Jon had at least kept a straight face, but Zak had barely been able to stop himself from laughing out loud. When he’d stuffed his hand in his mouth theatrically, Ellie had hoped that his black nail varnish would chip off and choke him.
    Zak had also managed to drop two little bombs into the conversation that even now were blowing holes in Ellie’s brain. The first was, ‘Don’t worry. I’m sure you won’t have single-handedly lost the agency the account.’The thought of what that might mean for people’s jobs was horrendous. The second comment, ‘Hmm. Wonder what Gavin will have to say about all this when he gets back?’ was making her feel sick. Who was going to remember that Jack had thought their idea was good?
    Gavin was going to really go to town on them. They’d never been his favourite team anyway. They probably came a very poor third after Juliette and Mike. Whichever way you looked at it, today had been a bad day at the office.
    Eventually there was a noise in the corridor and Jack was standing in the doorway.
    ‘Panic over,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t talk him round on the knickers idea – he still hates it – but he’s going to give us another chance. I tweaked Zak and Jon’s idea a bit and ran it past him and Hetherington wants us to work that up and re-present it to him before he retires.’
    Ellie didn’t know whether to cry with relief or take bites out of the carpet at the thought of Zak and Jon’s idea making it on to the TV. The way Lesley was digging the point of her pencil into the desk suggested that she felt the same.
    Jack came right into the office, bending his head to avoid hitting it on the slope of the ceiling, and Ellie could see that he was carrying a bottle of champagne.
    ‘Are you going to club us to death with that?’ she said.
    He gave her a lukewarm smile. ‘Don’t think I’m nottempted. But really, it’s not your fault. It was a good idea, a brilliant idea. Sometimes you just don’t get the clients you deserve. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool, don’t-stick-your-head-above-the-parapet guy. You could have taken your own knickers off and waved them at him and he still wouldn’t have liked it.’
    As he finished talking, Mrs MacEndry arrived with two champagne flutes. She gave them a sympathetic smile and patted Ellie on the hand before going out again. Jack took the wire cage off the top of the bottle and opened the champagne, spilling some down his suit but not appearing to care.
    ‘Tomorrow we’ll have a bit of a post-mortem,’ he said, putting the bottle down on Ellie’s desk. ‘There were places we all loused up, Hugo included, and I was at fault for assuming you’d had more experience of presenting to clients than today’s performance indicated.’
    That