Author's note:
Here we go again with a short romance of roughly 15k words. Have fun and please don't forget to vote or even make my day with a comment, be it positive or critical but please be polite.
My thanks go to my editors. Stattion for his help to make the storyline consistent and fluent and Joffa for his spelling, grammar and punctuation expertise. I can't stress enough how valuable their input and effort is. Most of the perceived improvement from my early stories is down to them.
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Chapter 01
During the final weeks of my studies at university, I had received an offer for the role of a junior manager in a precision engineering company's Research & Development department, subject to my successful completion of both Masters I was vying for. As I had been on course to successfully finish close to or even at the top of both the IT and engineering classes, I never doubted meeting this stipulation.
On top of what felt like an insanely high starting salary, but wasn't unusual in that industry, I was allowed to hire a personal assistant. The standard procedure was that at first, employees from within the company could apply for the job and only if none of them met my needs, the job would be advertised in a paper. The applicants would be assigned testing periods during which they would introduce themselves and show what they were capable of. On my first day at work, I had eleven applications from ladies currently working in the secretary pool on my desk. Human Resources, which was responsible for the process had prepared the order in which the candidates presented themselves, based on the date of receipt of the application.
Each one would stay with me for a week before the next one would come. I could put a stop to this at any time if I came to the decision that I wanted to employ the one currently with me. As the advancement from the pool to a personal assistant was accompanied with a substantial pay-rise I was promised that they would all do their very best.
I would later jokingly accuse Debbie, the head of human resources, that she had consciously sent me the worst candidates first. Because they were terrible. Really dreadful. The stuff that horror movies are made of. Only in a company of this size could employees get away with that sort of performance. In smaller companies, they were usually weeded out quickly.
The first girl, barely out of high school, was more concerned with keeping up with her friends than her work. I sent her back to the pool when her testing period was over because she was busier texting on her mobile than doing any of the actual work I asked of her. She had obviously been hired for her looks, not her brains.
The next one was so busy flaunting her admittedly ample female attributes in front of me and making sure I understood that her focus would be on 'personal' if she got the job that I barely got any of my work done. I didn't touch her, though, as I was afraid of both blackmail and a sexual harassment suit. At least, she seemed somewhat competent when she actually did something work-related.
The third one boasted about her achievements for half a day before I found out that she was seemingly incapable of handling the documentation system, even after I had explained it to her repeatedly during the week. Whoever had hired her for the pool had clearly been deluded by her vapouring.
When I asked the fourth to type up a test report I was told by her that it would have to wait until her nails had dried as she had just applied a fresh coat of polish. I ordered her to let them dry on the way back to the secretary pool. She hadn't even lasted a full day.
Debbie made it possible that her replacement, candidate number five, started her testing period the next day. When she made more typos in the report than I thought possible with today's autocorrecting and spelling support options, I was getting impatient and maybe a bit louder than necessary when I sent her back to her desk to set up a meeting with Debbie during which I expressed my dissatisfaction about the quality she had sent me so far.
News of my complaint leaked out and caused me to get the reputation of a stickler, something I really didn't feel I deserved. I didn't think that my demands were outrageous and had always thought I was easy to get along with. Rumours started to spread that, apart from being impossible to please, I was also gay. Apart from being totally irrelevant, the gossip was also false as several ex-girlfriends would have been able to confirm, but four of the five girls had obviously expected me to hire them based on their looks. This notoriety caused all but one of the remaining candidates to withdraw their applications and I had resigned to having to place a job advert to fill the vacancy.
When I arrived at the office the following Monday at seven thirty I was greeted by a woman three or four years my junior, I was twenty-six at the time, who introduced herself as 'Sarah, with an h at the end'. She was very shy, dressed conservatively to the extreme with grey slacks and a long-sleeved white blouse which she had buttoned up to the top. My very first impression of her was that she probably wouldn't speak loud if her life depended on it.
"I was told you take your coffee with lots of milk and three sugar cubes. Is that right or were the other girls trying to put one over me?"
I raised an eyebrow. A girl capable of critical thinking? That was a clear improvement over the previous candidates.
"They tried to play a prank," I replied pointing to the machine. "Just get me a regular with a splash of milk."
I went to my office intending to sort through my mail which, of course, Sarah - with an h at the end - had not yet delivered to my desk. I sighed and started up my computer in order to check my calendar. It was still booting when Sarah entered my office with a tray in one hand and a folder in the other. She put the folder down in front of me before intuitively placing the coffee in the spot I had reserved for it and then laid her hand on the folder.
"You're meeting James Mettle from Sales at nine and have a working lunch appointment with Jim Raider from finance. I don't know what the meeting with Mr Mettle is regarding but the figures that Mr Raider wants to discuss are in the first compartment. I have divided your mail into three groups, important, nice to see and what I thought was rubbish. I'll have the report I found on the desk typed in maybe half an hour. Is there anything else?"
I looked at her, my eyes wide from surprise. In thirty seconds she had done more and better work than any of the other candidates had managed over their entire testing periods.
"What's your family name?"
"Mason. But I'd prefer it if you called me Sarah."
She didn't look at me while she spoke or rather she didn't look me in the eyes. Her gaze was directed somewhere between my chest and my nose. I smiled.
"Is there a reason for that?"
"Yes, Mr Bergman," she replied in that quiet, wallflowery voice of hers.
"One you don't wish to share. Right?"
She smiled back, shyly. It didn't change much, she was still a plain Jane. She wasn't ugly but she wasn't beautiful either. She kept her eyes downcast and had a very unobtrusive personality. Her whole body language seemed designed to her being overlooked. I barely heard her when she replied.
"Right."
I clapped my hands which caused her to jump a little.
