Save Her by Abigail Osborne (novel books to read .txt) 📗

out when she reached secondary school and could spot like-minded kids that she could trust to work with her. Soon she had a network of sellers all reporting back to her. She could sense the trends before the other kids and was supplying a vast array of yo-yos before they even became cool. She manipulated teachers and situations to stop the teachers from tracing anything back to her. Sophie liked to think dealing with the tantrums of the kids that worked for her had made it easy to deal with the tantrums of adults in the business world.

Alistair was like a child, really. He was the female version of Melissa, thinking that his money gave him a power and status higher than everyone else. He thought he was the top dog and that he could not be manipulated. But his money was his weakness.

Coming from nothing, Sophie had had to struggle and fight to get to where she was. She had earned every penny that she got and that gave her skills and strengths that Alistair would never have. His money had been handed to him on a plate simply because he had the luck of coming down the birth canal of a woman who belonged to a family that had done the graft and hard work already. Alistair didn’t work because he needed the money, he worked because he enjoyed the power of lording it over everyone; of playing with the lives of those who didn’t have money.

If there weren’t laws against it, she knew he’d have gladiators in a ring fighting to the death for his entertainment. Alas, he had to make do with the tame, modern-day version where people vied for positions within the company, sabotaging other colleague’s business deals as they battled to impress him.

Her first day, Sophie had become a new player in his games. Egged on by Cecelia, he had called her into a business meeting along with seven other new starters and announced to the group that he wanted to invest in a company but that he needed to have at least an eighty per cent share for it to be worthwhile. Whichever person got him the best deal would be returning to work tomorrow. Everyone else was fired. He smiled around at the graduates who had gone pale and shaky at his words. No wonder, as no entrepreneur would give up eighty per cent of a company that had cost them blood, sweat and tears.

Thankfully for Sophie, after years of convincing greedy school children to give her four pounds of every five pounds that they made and have them think it was a good idea, she was not worried. All it took to get by in business was to find what made people tick. Make them think you had a connection and then they were putty in your hands.

The owner of this particular business had, like her, come from a broken home and worked hard to get himself to where he was. He also happened to have a daughter with severe autism. This was fate once again, giving her a helping hand. Using some of the sob stories Flora had told her, he really believed she understood the condition and the strain he had faced. Stroking his arm gently, she promised him that the company would provide his daughter with a year’s worth of classes at Flora’s art centre as a goodwill gesture whilst the business was still growing. Squeezing his leg gently, looking up at him from beneath her lashes, she assured him that once they were done with the company, his ten per cent share would be enough for him to open his own autism centre if he wanted to.

The only sign of Alistair’s true feelings was the pulse of the vein in his temple as he congratulated her.

Cecelia and Alistair had both done their hardest to bring about her failure; to make her give them cause to get rid of her. When that didn’t work, they tried to drown her in work so that she would want to leave. They could have fired her easily enough with the right ammunition, but Sophie was exactly where she wanted to be. When you’ve lived in a house with no running water and vomit filling up the broken toilet, the office was a place of luxury and she did not mind spending every minute of her day there.

Sophie had created relationships with almost everyone in the company, made herself known to everyone, garnered respect from her colleagues, to the point that her absence would be noticed. When Cecelia and Alistair realised that they weren’t going to find cause to legitimately fire her and that Sophie would not go quietly, they had given up and watched begrudgingly as Sophie rose through the ranks.

Greg had soon lost interest in her. His delight at their mutual ambition had afforded her his attention temporarily. He used to play this game with Sophie: they’d show each other the contracts that they had signed and the revenue they had generated, sitting in his office with a glass of wine. She’d be wrapped in his arms on the leather couch, until they both couldn’t resist tearing the other’s clothes off. The high of business success an aphrodisiac.

But with Alistair setting her what he thought were impossible tasks, the opportunities were getting bigger. Tasks engineered to exhaust and overwhelm her were causing her to outshine Greg. Funnily enough, after her third win in a row, he no longer had time for ‘childish games’ anymore. It was a ‘family business’ after all, so really ‘anything she did’ was helped by his ‘family name’. According to him, she’d get nowhere on her own.

He didn’t have a clue. Did he really think she was here because he made it so?

Having risen as far as she could, Sophie now had her own fancy office and a bunch of assistants. She could realise her ambition and passion for making money. Any attempts that Alistair and