Free Never Mind The Botox: Rachel by Penny Avis Page A

Fisher, one of the lawyers acting for Beau Street, and her companion as Dan Furtado, another lawyer. Rachel nodded politely at them.
    Also joining Tom and Charles was a female doctor whom Rachel recognised from the doctors’ profiles they’d been given as Stella Webb. She didn’t seem to know many people in the room either and Rachel wondered what her role in the deal was. It soon became clear: she introduced herself as the doctor who would be in charge of bringing together the medical side of the two businesses should the deal go ahead.
    The meeting kicked off with a rather long and tedious discussion about the timetable. Rachel wasn’t paying too close attention until Meredith suddenly put a speakerphone into the middle of the table and announced that the project leader from the Equinox Practise was going to be joining them on the phone. No one had mentioned the other side being at the meeting! She’d be pretty unpopular if she told Equinox that there were no major issues and then came up with a load of problems late in the day. She didn’t have much choice, though, without any evidence that there was actually anything wrong.
    Before she could think about it any more, she heard Meredith mention her name.
    ‘Thank you for that update, Alex,’ she said, nodding at the lawyers. ‘Rachel Altman from Payne Stanley is now going to give us an update from their side.’
    ‘Oh, yes, th-thank you,’ Rachel stammered.
    She looked down at her notes for a few seconds as she gathered her composure. Carl began to look a bit concerned but soon Rachel looked up again and started talking.
    ‘We’ve been on site now for two weeks and the company has been extremely helpful in getting us the information we requested. I’d say our information request is now about ninety per cent complete, with the last few items expected in the next few days. We’re still going through our analysis, but preliminary results show that the business is growing steadily in the core business and there’s strong growth in many of the newer procedures, such as the lunchtime facelift, eyebrow transplants and toe tucks.’
    The assembled mass of serious faces quickly killed her urge to laugh.
    ‘We haven’t identified any material issues to date, but as I said we still have quite a bit of work to do. We expect to be able to report on time, assuming that all goes well from here on.’
    The voice on the end of the phone blasted loudly into the room. ‘Hey, Rachel was it? It’s Ryan Miller here from Equinox. Thanks for that update; that’s exactly what we want to hear. We’re pretty sure that it’s a smart business over there.’
    Rachel winced. He was clearly only wanting to hear good news. Let’s hope that’s what we deliver, she thought.
    Meredith closed the meeting. ‘The Equinox Practise will be over in the UK in three weeks and they’re looking forward to getting final reports from each of you then,’ she said. ‘Please make sure that you let Alfred…’ she gestured at her colleague, ‘… or I know straight away if you’re having any problems meeting the timetable. Thank you all for your time.’
    Rachel wasn’t sure many people would be calling Meredith and certainly not with bad news: she was far too intimidating. She was pretty sure that it would be Alfred getting those types of calls.
    After the meeting, Carl had a taxi waiting.
    ‘Right, got to go. That all seemed to go pretty well and Tom was on good form. Keep up the good work and let’s speak soon on next steps, okay?’
    ‘Okay,’ said Rachel.
    Once Carl had left, Rachel suddenly felt rather worn out and wasn’t sure she really had the energy to look into Lloyd Cassidy’s records any further. It would be much simpler for the project, and for her promotion prospects as well, if she just ignored what she knew.
    She decided she needed a break and rang Shali.
    ‘Hi, how’s it going?’
    ‘Not bad actually, for once I’m just about on top of things. You?’ Shali