‘I’m fine,’ I said, taking a sip of the water and waving the file away. ‘I was just gathering my thoughts.’

‘Come up with anything useful?’ Chris asked.

He didn’t sound very hopeful and I knew he was desperate to get home. We all were, but we needed to have a damage limitation strategy firmly in place before we thought about our plans for the weekend. Not that I was particularly looking forward to mine.

‘Possibly,’ I nodded. ‘Meet me in conference room one in twenty minutes.’

*

As usual, I was the last to leave and it was almost midnight before I let myself into my apartment, kicked off my heels and poured a glass of restorative wine. Had anyone believed that being the boss’s daughter came with perks I could have quashed their assumptions with any one of my time sheets from the last few months.

I couldn’t remember the drive home. My mind had been miles away from the road – not at the seaside this time – but trawling through the atrocious pics in the red-tops which had sent my week into a tailspin. What had the guy been thinking? I ignored the sharp knotted-up pain in my stomach and flopped down on the sofa.

When I had interviewed for the job in Dad’s public relations firm, after graduating with a first in marketing seven years ago, I could never have foreseen that I would be trying to untangle anything like the mess which had descended during the last few days.

When I had been tasked with nothing more taxing than the morning coffee round and the daily sandwich order (Dad was a firm believer in learning the business from the bottom up), I had dreamt of working with prestigious clients on million-pound projects and taking on the unusual role of matching their specifications to the perfect ‘celebrities’ to endorse their brands, but had I known that my biggest project to date was destined to go belly-up just weeks before it was due to launch, I would have stuck to ordering the egg and cress.

‘Shit,’ I muttered, spilling some of the wine as my mobile began to trill, dragging me back to the present and making me jump.

I picked up my bag with my free hand and shook it out on the sofa, scattering the contents and at the same time praying it wasn’t more bad news. I shuddered as I recalled the graphic images of my high-profile footballer with his tongue down the throat of some scantily clad girl, splashed across the front pages.

The clever journalist had put them alongside the studio image of him with his wife and daughters which I’d ensured was released just days before to further bolster his ‘reformed character’ image ahead of the family values advertising campaign my client had employed him for. It had been the ultimate humiliation, and not just for his wife and girls.