Free Naughty Bits: Too Hot to Print by Rebecca Chance

fingers sweaty on the handle of her bag, Jodie staggered out of Victoria’s office. Skinny Jeans, aka Davinia, was sitting at the desk that would be Jodie’s in a
month’s time.
    She looked up at Jodie and drawled, ‘Do tell me you got the bloody job, won’t you? She’ll be even more of a bitch if I have to line up six more girls for her to rip to
pieces.’
    Jodie nodded, wordless with shock.
    ‘Oh, thank God ,’ Davinia sighed in relief.
    ‘Only now I’m called Coco,’ Jodie managed to get out.
    Davinia didn’t even blink at the news. Looking at her – slim, confident and off to the dizzy heights of the fashion cupboard – Jodie wondered whether Davinia, a year or so ago,
had also been a size 12 girl with a bad haircut, called Nadine or Cheryl or Kimberley, with a much less posh accent than she had now . . .
    ‘Well, good luck, Coco,’ Davinia said dryly to her replacement. ‘You’re going to need it.’

 
Victoria
    Victoria Glossop had never spared a thought for other people’s sensibilities. Not her parents’, not her three brothers’, not a single person with whom she had
ever come into contact. Feelings were messy and unpredictable, a swamp in which you waded around, not knowing what you’d step on next or what would wind itself around your legs and try to
pull you down into the fetid depths. Victoria had always had her own feelings very firmly under control, the more vulnerable and sensitive ones shoved down so far that she would have had great
difficulty accessing them. Not that she had any wish to do so. Even when she got angry, threw a tantrum, rampaged around the office shouting at her terrified staff, she knew exactly what she was
doing, was able to measure the precise level of fear and trembling she wanted to induce in her victims.
    An indifference to other people’s feelings was one of the principal reasons Victoria had been so successful. The other was her world-class ability to charm and flirt with powerful men,
honed by years of practice on her father and brothers. A brilliant lawyer who had climbed the career ladder smoothly from QC to judge, Victoria’s father was the incarnation of an
authoritarian paterfamilias who bullied his sweet fluffball of a wife and ruled his sons with a rod of iron. He had never realised how much he wanted a daughter until Victoria was born, the last
child and by far the most indulged one. From the moment she could walk and talk, Victoria’s sharp little brain had identified her father as the one with all the power. She had quickly been
able to wrap him round her little finger. Judge Glossop had chosen a pretty, feminine woman to marry; if Victoria had been a different kind of girl, she might have considered it very unfair of her
father to pick an adorably ditsy, scatty wife and then spend the marriage criticising her for precisely the qualities for which he had proposed to her in the first place.
    But Victoria had always been on her father’s side. The side with the money, the control, the intelligence. Having worked out how to manipulate her father, she used the same techniques on
her brothers: charming, beautiful Victoria, always dressed, by her mother, in the kind of pretty clothes that her father considered appropriate, cut a swathe through her entire family from an early
age. Her mother was dazzled by her, openly admiring Victoria’s ability to do what poor downtrodden Mrs Glossop couldn’t – get exactly what she wanted from the judge.
    Victoria could easily have been a politician or a lawyer, if her father hadn’t emphasised how important he considered femininity in a woman – and if she hadn’t hugely enjoyed
the process of choosing clothes, dressing up and then twirling in her new finery in front of her besotted father. The only items in poor Mrs Glossop’s household budget which her controlling
husband never questioned were the huge sums spent on Victoria’s outfits. Her brothers, all competing constantly to please