Charu spoke first; 'Follow us.' She indicated a different door, adjacent to the one through which Claire had entered a few minutes earlier, and Claire rose obediently, picked up the contract and followed the two young women out of the office.
The room they entered looked like any other office in the building: there were six workstations, two of which were occupied by two further girls, dressed professionally and working away at laptops. Both looked up and smiled when Claire and her two companions entered.
'Hi, I'm Tara' -- the closest was a slim Asian woman with her hair tied back in a neat pony tail. Claire immediately warmed to the open look on her face, '..and I'm Sophie,' smiled the other girl, a slightly stocky brunette wearing a strikingly translucent white blouse that emphasized the promise of her generous breasts.
'This is our work space,' continued Charu. 'Put your papers down there and I'll show you the other rooms.'
Claire dropped the contract onto the desk opposite Tara, and as she did so both Tara and Sophie stood up and started to pack away their laptops.
'We'll see you again later,' Tara responded to Claire's unvoiced question. 'Sophie and I are off to help Paul do a pitch to some US investors.'
'Enjoy yourselves!' Anna waved across the room as they left.
'Does Mr Garth let us pitch direct to clients?' Claire asked. She'd heard the bank's policy was not to let new starters out in front of clients until they'd spent at least two years learning the ropes.
'Ah,' replied Anna, 'Tara didn't say pitch, she said 'help Paul'.
'He'll do the actual pitching. We do the research and prepare the materials, and brief him; but the fun bit is that he likes a good fuck to get him in the right frame of mind before he performs, so either Tara or Sophie -- and sometimes both -- will probably be spending most of the trip to the clients with their legs open wide and Paul's cock or tongue or fingers up their cunt in the back of his limo.'
Claire's eyes widened.
'I think he enjoys having one or two freshly-fucked women with him in the meetings too -- clients can't usually put their finger on why they feel unsettled -- but this apparently induces some kind of subconscious reflex among male clients -- and some female ones too - and makes us more likely to win.'
'Then on the way back, depending on how the meeting went, he usually gives us feedback on our performance. The last time I went with him I'd made a spelling mistake on one of the slides.' Anna smiled at the memory. 'He put me over his knee, lifted my skirt, pulled down my panties and gave me a good spanking. Then he fingered me and made me lick Charu's pussy until she came while he fucked me from behind. I probably won't get to do another client presentation for a while, but I did at least enjoy the punishment.'
'Actually, I suspect Tara and Sophie will miss out a little today.' Charu interjected. 'I have a feeling Paul will be saving himself for more interesting things later.' She smiled knowingly at Claire, who felt herself blush.
'I haven't decided whether to accept or not yet.' Claire felt slightly offended at Charu's presumption, although perhaps not quite as much as she ought.
Anna smiled again. 'Let us finish showing you around then.' She pointed towards another door.
'How many of us....' Claire stopped herself and her blush deepened. She took a deep breath. 'How many of you are there?'
'About 30, I think.' Anna opened the door into a large and comfortable suite, with sofas and occasional tables and open doors leading onwards into what were clearly bedroom and dressing areas.
'We're split between bases in Europe, the Americas and Asia. There are at least ten and sometimes twelve girls in each continent at any time. We split our time between the offices, where we have separate residential quarters like these,' she waved her arm, 'and some kind of rural retreat -- here there's a castle and estate about 20 minutes by helicopter; in the US the bank owns an island just off Florida; and in Asia we live in a converted monastery somewhere near the Himalayas.'
Anna was in full flow now, so Claire just nodded, as if this were an induction into a completely normal job.
'We rotate between continents regularly, so you'll get to see the world as part of this.' Anna paused and smiled. 'If you decide to join us of course?'
Claire nodded again, and tried to look business-like and as if she were still undecided. Inside, all she could feel was intense curiosity, and she knew really that unless there were something really troubling in the contract, she would have trouble not saying yes immediately.
'There must be someone co-ordinating all this,' she ventured?
'Mrs. Garth.' Charu answered immediately. 'She's the Queen Bee, and keeps us all in the right place at the right time. You'll doubtless meet her later, if all goes well.'
'There's actually quite a lot of entirely normal banking work to do. It's only the girls in the same continent as Paul who are 'on duty' so to speak, at any time, and we'll be told which four or five of us need to be actually in the office with Paul each day. You'll get used to it very quickly. We have a pretty comfortable life -- even if it does have some periods on intense hard work and no opportunity to socialise for a while -- but it only lasts for a year. It's not so different from taking a year out and going travelling, just with more comfortable accommodation, or at least that's how I think of it.' She motioned around the large room they were now standing in.
Claire followed Charu's gesture, and let her attention shift from the two girls to their surroundings. They were in well-furnished a lounge area, with sofas and occasional tables, and half a dozen doors leading off the side.
'Those are the doors to our bedrooms,' Charu said, and then anticipating Claire's next question, 'Paul never comes in here, so we have private spaces at every base. I treat my US room as my home, so to speak, and the rest as temporary. We all do the same and support each other so I have a 'home' team in Florida. You'd have one in the UK, like Anna here.'
Anna smiled and opened one of the doors and Claire saw what looked like a luxury hotel room with a further door opening into a large ensuite bathroom. She nodded.
'OK. Make yourself at home in the living and office area then and treat this as a normal working day. You've got the contract to read and you're free to come and go as you wish if you want a bit of fresh air, but please don't take the contract out of the suite -- we don't want any accidents.
'The two of us will take you for lunch about 1 o'clock and you can ask any other questions you have. Tara and Sophie should be back by early afternoon too -- they'll probably want to lie down but you can have a brief chat to them too before we get ready to see Paul at 6.'
Claire started to ask a question, but Anna anticipated her: 'The two of us will need an hour or so to get ready to give Paul what he wants, and then if you decide not to accept he won't be too disappointed.' She smiled. 'You'll only need to do some preparation and freshen up if you decide to accept, because I can tell you now that he'll start the contract immediately.
'But I'm pretty sure he likes you a lot, so you can probably get away with as little prep as you want!'
She ended with yet another smile, and Claire did at least feel she was among friends. She smiled back, went over to the desk where she'd left the contract, and sat down to read it.
--
She'd made her mind up to accept before lunch. The money was breathtaking; the other girls all seemed content and happy enough; and so long as she told no one outside the group itself the terms were very reasonable. The bank provided a complete cover story for her friends and family, she would get sufficient days leave during the year to stay in touch with her friends and cover events like Christmas, and she was not particularly well-settled in London yet anyway: she wouldn't be missed by her friends any more than any new graduate joining a high-powered bank would be.
The sex seemed a price well worth paying -- the others confirmed her rough guess that if Paul had 30 girls and he was broadly equitable then he couldn't sleep with any one more than 15-20 times a year. Claire didn't have a boyfriend, but she'd had a number of not-particularly-satisfying experiences as a student; it might even be educational to have a more experienced partner before she got too old.
She told Anna and Charu at lunch and they both smiled. 'We thought you were up for it,' said Anna immediately. 'I don't think you'll regret it.'
Claire tried to smile coyly, but felt her insides do a somersault at the same time. What had she let herself in for?
She spent the rest of the afternoon preparing to meet Paul for the second time, to tell him what she'd decided, helped by Anna and Charu, who suddenly seemed to have nothing better to do. They left her soaking in a lovely warm and scented bath while they selected an outfit for her, and she emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a thick cotton bathrobe to find an elegant skirt and jacket set laid out on the bed for her.
'I love the outfit, but what about the bra and pan...?' she asked a beaming Charu, standing nearby, but Claire's voice trailed away as the penny dropped. She was suddenly conscious of her nipples and breasts against the bathrobe, and she blushed again.
'You can still change your mind,' reminded Charu, still smiling, but Claire was already picking up the blouse and facing the mirror to see how it might look against her prim figure. She was nervous, but doing her best not to show it.
Sophie and Tara had returned early in the afternoon, and as Anna had predicted both were flushed and wore the slightly distracted air of two girls who'd been briefly on another planet. Claire could smell a musky undertone to their respective perfumes that she knew was the unmistakable scent of female arousal. Both smiled broadly at her as they headed for the bathroom.