The Prudence Tempest Chronicles

Episode 2

The jolly voice pulls me out of my thoughts, and I peer up from my highly polished walnut desk into the face of Clive Carsten, my colleague, and unfortunately, also the bane of my existence. You see, Clive is insufferable. Why? Because he is so goddamn jolly all the time. Handling the portfolio of family homes, Clive has a track record that is outstanding. One simply has to look into his barely-legal-good-boy face, complete with curly brown hair and sparkling coffee-toned eyes, to be won over by his angelic charm.

He didn’t win me over, though; far from it. Clive could be so... positive, it grated on my nerves. He would put the Lego Movie’s UniKitty to shame with his ‘no negativity’ stance. I always thought this must be a facade, because, for God’s sake, how could someone be so happy and upbeat all the time? Either he must be really daft...or he hid a very, very dark side inside him...and I really didn’t want to test the theory of the latter.

But worse—Clive also seemed to have this huge crush on me. It gave me the shivers. Being with Clive would be like shacking up with a choir boy, all pure and so pristine, you had no hope of ever feeling clean, let alone normal, around him. And the boyish look? Not my type.

“I think Marie is gonna pair us together for the Vaulmann deal. Big family that one, and their twin daughters are looking for a chic apartment near the campus," Clive said.

I almost expected him to bounce around my desk like one of those bouncy balls gone haywire; you know, the ones that never stop rebounding once you set them on their course. Exhausting, to say the least.

And having to work with Clive? Did I just throw up a little in my mouth? He’s wanted nothing but this since I started at the agency.

“You're sure?” I must have grown pale. I’d always managed to steel my features around potential clients, but the rest? A hopeless case. They read me like an open book.

But that proved the least of my worries. He’d said the dreaded name—Marie.

Marie ran the agency. A cinnamon-coloured woman coming straight up from South Africa, she spoke with a quirky, thick accent. Everything about Marie was strange, from the hypnosis-like hold she seemed to have on her husband, the original owner of the agency, to the way she pronounced her name—Ma-ree-ay. She embodied the employees’ collective nightmare with her hand of steel in a glove of iron approach. If she told me to work with Clive, no way could I worm out of it.

I shook my head to ward off the dismal fog that had enclosed me upon Clive’s disclosure. The upper hand; I needed it fast! “What makes you think she'll split the acquisitions? It'll be a single account. You could handle it all.”

Clive smiled. I braced myself for what reason he would invent for us to work together—knowing him, he could very well have asked Marie to put us both on this deal. But he had no time to say anything as the door opened and Marie walked into the office. I lost my breath when I saw she wasn’t alone, and right across from me, Clive swore softly. See? I told you; all that positivity hid utter darkness, evident in the curse and the naked hatred on his face right then.

My reaction? A whole other matter.

Why did we react this way? With Marie was a man. His name? Malcolm Gainsborough. What he embodied? Pure sex on legs.