Persuading Annie by Melissa Nathan Read Free Book Online

upstairs. While she was the first to admit that her father’s home suffered from a shocking lack of interior design, the fact was that she found it far more welcoming than her own, because it invariably had her father in it.
    Victoria and Charles had an exquisite, spacious four-bedroom flat near the famed Hampstead village, which Susannah was growing more and more convinced was an unacceptable extravagance, when there was so much unused room in the family home.
    Annie, unlike both her sisters, had insisted on paying her own way and thanks to her mother’s inheritance and her job at the nearby art gallery, had managed to secure a mortgage on a lovely two-bedroom flat with a balconyin nearby Muswell Hill – or Muswell Hell, as George called it.
    As for the rest of the Markham family though, life was rich. George’s beloved late Great Dane, Rufus the Great, had had a Gucci sleeping basket, collar and lead. And they all still holidayed in the best resorts, with or without Annie. Katherine and Victoria had punishing daily workouts and yoga with the very best instructors, weekly massages, reflexology sessions, manicures, acupuncture and one-to-one Pilates classes; monthly leg waxes, eyelash curls, colonic irrigation, sunbed and trichology sessions and bi-monthly seaweed wraps. If they had a headache, they popped to their cranial osteopath, a pimple, the country’s best beautician, a fat day, lymphatic drainage. And then there was the morning make-up and hair session with the country’s top professionals. Priceless beauty didn’t come cheap.
    Susannah had started to try and gently persuade George of the dangers of his excessive spending. But it was impossible to order a man whose ancestors had hacked off their servants’ hands for doing less. He had proved deaf to her pleadings.
    Until now. Finally, even he could no longer put off seeing the brick wall of bankruptcy in front of him.
    As Susannah saw it, they had three options. They could pray for a miracle and try to sell the company to a wealthy fool with even less business sense than George; they could face reality and shut it down now before the debts outweighed the assets; or they could open their doors to some management consultants, in the hope that they could turn it around and return it to its glory days. She knew that the third option was probably a non-starter, but she just couldn’t bear to give up yet. The irony was that she needed a team of management consultants in to help herwork out which option to take. And to prevent this being a total waste of money, it had to be one of the best. And for that they needed serious money.
    Susannah also knew that for management consultants to be able to earn their millions, she had to get George temporarily out of the picture. Much as she loved and respected the man, she knew that he could single-handedly wreck everything. He was his own company’s biggest millstone.
    On top of that, she knew that George was proud. He would only consent to any of this if it were done in such a way that the public would never realise what was really going on. He couldn’t possibly let anyone think that he needed help.
    This was an incredibly complex, sensitive subject.
    As their conversation glided to the subject of the company, not a moment too soon – or too late – Susannah slowly lifted her briefcase on to the polished table and opened it.
    ‘Shall we start, George?’ she asked quietly.
    ‘As long as it doesn’t take too long,’ he said, his eyes suddenly fixed on his Gucci shoes. ‘Bought an E-type yesterday. Wanted to give it a turn before lunch.’

4
    THE FAMILY MEETING was underway. Katherine and Annie had both joined their father at his office and after Victoria’s emergency phone call, Charles had popped in after rushing home from his beloved golf course and flinging on a suit.
    They all sat silently round the polished oval table, waiting for Mr Cavendish, the solicitor, to arrive.
    George looked across at his two