Chapter 1: How it started
My feelings for Louise were for the most part ambivalent. She was, in comparison with most of the girls who work in our office, very attractive, yet her face was probably only average on a scale of one to 5. What made her stand out from the other girls in the office was the way she dressed. The dress code in our Company could best be described as "smart-casual", which always leaves the women, particularly the young ones, with much more
Flexibility than the men. Louise always wore plain tops, half-length sleeves, subdued colours, high neck-lines, and so on. Her skirts and dresses, on the other hand, were nearly always very short, or if not, slit to mid thigh to accentuate the appearance of her extremely long slender legs! Even though the office was well air-conditioned, from May till the end of October she never wore nylons, and she appeared to positively delight in showing off her very sexy smooth bare legs. It wasn't just what she wore, but how she presented herself. She always seemed to find a way of positioning herself so that my attention, and that of every other red-blooded male in the office, was drawn to those alluring long legs. Increasingly often, I found myself wanting to reach out and touch them, and stroke them, but I new this could, and almost certainly would, land me in a whole heap of trouble that I really didn't need.
Then, one Tuesday morning, Louise telephoned me to say that my boss Monica had asked her to check out my availability for a sales conference in Madrid in two weeks time. The conference would entail me giving a presentation on the application of the financial project management software package (FigureSkate Plus) which the Company had been developing. Monica had suggested that, since Louise had been extensively user testing it as a project co-ordinator, she might make a very suitable co-presenter for me.
The assignment would entail presentations on two days, (on
Wednesday and Thursday afternoons and hosting a reception on
Thursday evening. She had suggested that Louise might like to take in a shopping opportunity on Friday morning, and that we return to the UK on Friday evening.
My heart leapt at the prospect, and I could barely contain my delight and anticipation at spending two nights in the company of our leggiest of leggy staff member. I managed to ask Louise if she felt ok about the idea before expressing my own enthusiasm about it, and to my delight she said that she thought it would be really "cool". She said that she had never been to Spain before and really wanted to see Madrid in the summer.
She asked me what I thought she should wear, and I decided to be non-committal, but did add that Madrid could be very hot in July, and that I wasn't sure how wised up the Spaniards were likely to be on air conditioning, either in hotels or in their conference venues.
