Free Never Mind The Botox: Rachel by Penny Avis

insists he doesn’t want to go.’
    Rachel tried not to think about Carl being in a hotel room somewhere above her head as she and Rowan ate. They finished lunch late and as a result Rachel drifted through the remainder of the afternoon in a rather pleasant haze.
    The following Monday Carl arrived at Beau Street half an hour before the all-party meeting was due to start, by which time Rachel was feeling pretty flustered. It was hardly the time to ask him if he was having an affair with a client. It really worried Rachel that he’d dismissed her concerns that directly involved someone that he was almost certainly sleeping with. She hadn’t mentioned Audrey by name, but she’d referred to Lloyd Cassidy’s assistant nurse. Carl was bound to know that was her and probably therefore assumed she must be telling the truth. He’d also specifically told her not to mention it at the meeting, making it hard for her to raise it again later on.
    ‘Right, all ready?’ Carl asked.
    Rachel tried to keep her voice steady. ‘Yes, my plan is to run them through the information we’ve had so far and explain that our preliminary analysis is that the business is showing steady growth in its core business and strong growth in some of the newer procedure types. Also that we, er, haven’t identified any major issues to date.’
    ‘That sounds about right. Are we going to make the report deadlines as per the timetable?’ Carl asked.
    ‘Yes, just about. It’s tight, though, so we’ll need the rest of the project to go smoothly.’
    ‘All right, good. Can you talk me through how you plan to put our report together? I want to make sure I’m happy with the structure.’
    Rachel spent the next fifteen minutes talking Carl through their report outline and then they both headed up to the boardroom. Tom was already in the room when they arrived and Carl went over and shook his hand. They stood chatting and laughing while Rachel sat down and placed her papers in a neat pile in front of her. Did Tom know about Audrey? she wondered. If he did then it didn’t seem to worry him. After a few moments Carl sat down too and a few people she didn’t recognise started to enter the room.
    Rachel instinctively got up and held out her hand. ‘Hello, Rachel Altman from Payne Stanley corporate finance,’ she said to a tall, dark-haired, rather Amazonian looking woman who seemed to be in charge.
    The woman shook her hand briskly. ‘Good afternoon, Meredith Romaine, Clinton Wahlberg, but I suggest you sit down as we’ll do the introductions when everyone’s here.’
    It was like she was being told to sit down at school.
    ‘Oh, I see, we just…’
    But before she had a chance to finish, Meredith had already turned away as Charles Sutton, the chief executive and founder of Beau Street, had come into the room, shortly followed by Tom Duffy.
    ‘Charles, hello,’ said Meredith. ‘Please do sit here.’ She gestured to the chair in the middle of the long table. ‘And Tom, why don’t you sit next to him.’
    Rachel was beginning to worry that there was some sort of invisible table plan for the meeting and that they were bound to have sat in the wrong place. Carl seemed oblivious to the implicit pecking order being established and was leaning back in his chair with his hands behind his head and his papers spread messily about in front of him. He certainly seems relaxed, thought Rachel.
    Movement at the door caught her attention. She looked round just in time to see an attractive, smartly dressed woman trip into the room and almost squash a timid-looking bloke from the Clinton Wahlberg team who was sitting at the table. The woman caught herself at the last minute, looked momentarily mortified, and then managed to smooth her expression into a polite, professional look. Behind her in the doorway, her colleague – a tall, dark-haired man – looked like he was trying to suppress a smile. Glossing over her dramatic entrance, Tom introduced the woman as Alex