It was approaching the time for the annual office calendar shoot at Neufville and Co. This year, nearly everyone -- well nearly all the gentlemen at Neufville and Co. - were looking forward to it, because of the arrival in June of the new girl in the public relations office, Saffron Sloane. Saffron Sloane was delightful to look at: smooth cocoa-coloured skin, chiselled features, statuesque at 1.83 metres, big-boned and nicely-padded in all the right places. Certainly she wore a suit well, and some wondered aloud why she didn't work in front of the camera instead of behind it; but whatever her reason for hiding her charms, everyone wanted to see her nude. Tastefully done nude calendars were the norm in the advertising industry, and though Neufville and Co. served as opinion leaders, they'd never actually done a nude calendar before; no one thought it seriously worthwhile until Saffron Sloane showed up.
*****
"Definitely not!" Saffron had said when the suggestion was first made to her that she appear in the annual calendar for Neufville and Co. "I'm a married woman! What made you think that I'd even consider such a thing?"
It was news to the people at Neufville and Co. that Saffron Sloane was married. Somehow, human resources had not picked that up about her; nor had anyone else, since she arrived early and left late every day, and though very affable when one caught her in the hallway or car park, she was generally too busy to spend time gossiping about her personal life, or socialising after hours. She was also available to travel at short notice, and was a natural at entertaining old Laurent Neufville's most distinguished clients, a job that he seemed to share with her most of the time. No one could see how any husband in his right mind would tolerate a thing like that.
Not surprisingly, Saffron Sloane's path wasn't strewn only with rose petals cast there by her adoring public. She'd managed to make an enemy or two in her short time at Neufville and Co. These well-connected tabbies didn't like fresh-faced upstarts, and Saffron Sloane's face was the freshest anyone had seen in a while. In particular, Saffron Sloan's rise didn't sit well with Ruth Mollison, the head of the marketing and communications department of Neufville and Co. Ruth Mollison had worked for the company for nearly thirty years. She had comforted Laurent Neufville after the death of his first wife, staying by his side as he built the company from the ground up to its present place as the main rival of Saatchi & Saatchi on the global scale. She expected that as the principal turned 65 in the next three years, he would begin to think of semi-retirement and settling down again.
Of course, there was nothing in his behaviour that suggested that Laurent Neufville was thinking about retirement or settling down or returning to his family's vineyards in France after a distinguished corporate life in exotic Jamaica. Quite the contrary, the man had seemed to have taken on a new lease on life in the past year after returning home from some mysterious spiritual sabbatical that he had insisted on taking.
He had begun to travel more, a thing that had not happened in ten years since he had been leaving a lot of that kind of work to his band of young-and-upcoming brand managers, reserving only the very highest challenges for himself. All of a sudden, however, the man was taking the corporate jet the way lesser men took taxis! He was even rumoured to have started visiting the company's gym! Always a workaholic, he had never been a man to take his work home with him, so to speak, but and a few people had been overheard talking about what a lovely home he had, and a few others had made reference to good time that they had had on his boat!
He wasn't exactly a ruthless, cold-blooded, sulky psychopath in the office. He couldn't have succeeded in this industry if he were, but suddenly, the man seemed more grandfatherly; more gently patient, as if he were genuinely concerned with leaving a legacy beyond his impressive collection of clients and accolades for the next generation of young professionals who worked for him. He'd become more hip, younger in his outlook, more interested in what people with the yuppie demographic profile and the millennial generation thought about life.
Ruth Mollison didn't like it one bit! She was from the old school, that felt that the millenials should have been seen but not heard; and she didn't like it that Laurent Neufville had given up the black Armani suits that went so well with his pale skin, his silver mane of hair and his startling blue eyes, for clothing made by a place called Topman Design, polo shirts and trainers! She had nearly fainted when she found herself at an Expo where he rolled up his pink sleeves, removed his tie and held what could only have been described as a master class for a group of advertising students from the media school at the University of the West Indies. True, the man's smile was beautiful, and even girls who were more than forty years younger than he were flirting with him, but one had to draw a line somewhere.
Ruth Mollison blamed Saffron Sloane for the alarming change in Laurent Neufville. She wasn't sure how the woman had done it, but she felt that her appearance in the company and Laurent's rennaisance were too proximal to have been coincidental. She had watched how Saffron had stood to the side of the room and watched the proceedings with a gentle mother-hen smile on her face. She had heard how Saffron had introduced Laurent! True, all the glowing accolades were true, but it was her come-hither tone of voice; her possessive pride in a man whom she had known for only the past year and that Ruth herself had known for thirty! She had noticed how Laurent Neufville kept glancing at Saffron, apparently to gauge from her reaction how things were really going with these youngsters. She noticed when he winked at Saffron after making a little double entendre joke that had gone down well with the students! He had looked at and smiled at Ruth as well, to be sure, but by then she was so angry with the situation that she had seen him frown slightly, apparently puzzled, and wrap up the event quickly.
"Is something wrong, Ruth," Laurent Neufville seemed genuinely concerned, when he finally managed to shake off the last of the students.
