Page 5 of Daddy's Christmas Elf
Eli lunged at the coat, and dragged it towards him. It was heavy, the wool silky soft, everything about it was expensive. A bubble of doubt burst in his stomach. What the hell was he doing? No way could he do this. He let the coat drop from his hand, but a sudden loud scraping noise, and voices, burst from the opening door, the one the security guard had slammed shut on him.
Panic seized Eli and he froze. The Jag’s back door was wide open, he was more inside it than not, his arse sticking high in the air. And he was in full view of the tall, thin man standing in the doorway, and dressed in a chauffeur’s uniform. The guy was side on to him, and all it would take would be a slight turn of the head and a few strides and Eli would be caught red handed.
“Thanks, Sergei. Have a happy Christmas.” The chauffeur waved goodbye, and began to turn.
It was too late to scramble out and run. Eli did the only thing he could. Throwing himself head first onto the back seat, he pulled the door to a close a split second before the chauffeur made his way across, as Eli slipped into the footwell and rolled himself into a ball.
CHAPTERTHREE
Grey set his face in neutral and stared. He didn’t have to say a word, or move a muscle. All he needed to do was stare. The trick had been perfected years before and most times Grey was barely aware he was using it. But he was aware now, as Murray squirmed, as he protested he was the innocent party, as he stumbled out his pathetic excuses for being a drunk, lecherous bully before falling into a cowed silence.
Just a couple of months before, Murray had been a less than stellar appointment to Gillespie Associates and he was hanging on by a thread. Or he had been until this evening. Now the thread had been cut and the only reason he would return in the New Year would be to remove his personal belongings in a small cardboard box.
“I suggest, Murray, that you get yourself cleaned up and leave.”
Grey had no need to raise his voice to make his point, the icy hard edge beneath the calm, level words did more than a good enough job. He smiled, and Murray’s face blanched, making him as pale as the cream that continued to drip down from his head. The little elf, who’d since fled, had made sure he’d tipped every drop out.
Murray nodded, and all but ran from the function room. If one good thing had come out of tonight’s events, it was that he didn’t have to see Murray ever again; a brief email to his Director of HR would see to that.
With Murray’s departure, the chatter and the chink of glasses resumed, as though it were a collective exhale of breath. The piped music, which had been playing in the background during dinner, was turned up as though to plaster over the crack in the evening.
“I must apologise, Mr. Gillespie.”
Grey had forgotten about the event planner, who hovered at his elbow.
“What for?” His words were blunt, and she jerked back.
“The… the seasonal member of staff. He’s a casual—”
“I fail to see what his employment status has to do with what happened.”
The woman — Grey couldn’t recall her name, if he’d known it in the first place as the party had been delegated to his PA to organise — inclined her head a fraction and clasped her hands together.
“I wish to assure you that Jolly Eventful would never, ever, have somebody who was so volatile on the permanent staff. At Jolly Eventful, we expect our employees to handle all and any situation with calm professionalism. The person who was the cause of this unfortunate incident is no longer working for us, in any capacity.”
Grey was about to return to the table where his senior team sat, but her words stopped him. She was smiling up at him, if her scrunched expression could be called that.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The casual employee,” she said, emphasising the words, as though distancing herself and her party planning company from the whole affair, “will not, I can assure you, be undertaking any further work with us.”
She was still scrunching her face up at Grey.
“You mean you’ve dismissed him? When he was clearly the injured party? From what I saw, he was sorely provoked into taking action. A casual, seasonal worker or not, don’t you think Jolly Eventful had a duty of care towards him?”
“I—yes, but—”
The woman squirmed, as Grey knew she would.
“I… Of course. Jolly Eventful takes very seriously—”
Grey turned away, uninterested in anything else the woman had to say, leaving her to bluster and stumble out her excuses into thin air.
Grey had seen, too late, what had been going on, pushing to his feet just as the elf had grabbed hold of the jug of cream and up-ended it over Murray. He’d been ordered away and was no doubt long gone, the ridiculous costume left behind as he’d got changed and fled. The awful Ms. Jolly may have been the one to do the firing but it had been Grey’s now former employee who’d been the cause of him losing his job. Grey let out a long, deep sigh. The little elf who’d all but run for his life was owed compensation, if not by Jolly Eventful then by Gillespie Associates, and he made a mental note to instruct his PA to make it happen.
A band was setting up on the small stage, marking the next stage of the evening. He’d only intended to stay for the dinner, not that he’d wanted to attend even that, but as the CEO of Gillespie Associates, one of London’s most up and coming private banking firms, it had been expected; the band’s appearance, however, was his cue to escape. Making his goodbyes, and wishing his senior team with whom he’d shared a table a Merry Christmas, Grey slipped out of the function room, closing the door behind him just as the MC for the evening began to introduce the band.
Grey puffed out a long breath, and leaned against the door. His dark blond hair, which now, he’d noticed in the mirror recently, was increasingly threaded with silver, flopped over his brow. Grey pushed it away and rubbed his forehead in an attempt to massage away the faint beginnings of a headache. Tonight had been a strain, even without Murray’s drunken exploits. Grey was out of practise when it came to socialising, not that he’d been much of one for parties and other large social gatherings to begin with.
