The American Lover Read Free Page B

just grab while you’re working, instead of eating healthy meals. So, to sum you up, Caleb. You’re unattractive, unadventurous, predictable and boring.  And you wonder why I’ve been taking lovers.”
    As I listened to Cassie callously eviscerating me, it was obvious that my marriage had been over for some time.
    What a fool I’d been.  How could I have been so blind to what had been going on around me for so long?
     

Chapter 1 - Faith
 
    Two years later
     
    I was not in the best of moods on Monday morning, thanks to John Beal, my lazy bastard of a boss.
    I’d progressed to become a senior systems analyst at the Royal London Bank, which was in the final phase of being fully assimilated into the mighty American Western Bank Corporation.
    When they’d acquired the much smaller but prestigious Royal London in a hostile takeover, it had proved very unpopular with our longstanding and loyal customers, who hated any kind of change.  As the main reason for the takeover had been precisely to acquire these extremely valuable high worth customers, in order to pacify them and prevent them leaving in droves, the American powers that be had promised that we’d be retained as a separate London sub branch, with everything organised so that customers would hardly be aware of any changes to their accounts. 
    That was why we’d retained our Royal London brand name, logo and offices - for now anyway. However, we all believed it was only a matter of time before the AWB bosses reneged on their promises, once the dust had settled and the controversy had died down.  They were fully aware that, as much as customers might grumble, the reality was that as long as their financial matters ran smoothly, they’d be unlikely to go through the hassle and disruption of changing all their accounts.
    So, we were frantically working behind the scenes to implement all the necessary systems compatibility upgrades that had been deemed necessary to bring us into line with the rest of the AWB corporation, while still ensuring there was no negative impact on our customers with any outage or down time.
    It was a massive project, and over the last year, I’d been working my socks off to get our latest integration project up and running to meet the very tight deadline imposed by the head office in San Francisco.  Thanks to my reputation for attention to detail, I’d been given a specialist role, to prioritise the integration of the highest value customer accounts and shield them in every conceivable way from any kind of disruption.
    And yet that hadn't stopped my boss from telling me late on Friday afternoon that I was being pulled, just so I could babysit some big wig they were sending over from the States.
    Apparently, they needed some vitally important data from our systems to comply with a new dictat from the IRS - the U.S government agency responsible for tax collection and tax law enforcement. It was something to do with preventing financial crime, money laundering and such like, and from previous dealings I'd had with providing data for the American tax office, I understood that there was no point in arguing or trying to find a way around whatever the IRS demanded.  You just had to provide whatever they asked for to the letter . That much I did know.
    And now it was falling to me to ensure UK compliance for what the IRS deemed as another branch of the American Western Bank, because these days my boss, John, was putting in as little effort as possible. 
    He was just cruising lazily towards his retirement in just over a year, not bothering to keep himself updated on any of our system upgrades. So, although as senior manager it should have fallen to him to work with this head office executive, he knew his lack of knowledge would make him look a total pillock.  That’s why he was ‘delegating’ the task to me. 
    Yay. Lucky me. Joy.
    I was going to be the lucky individual who got to sit with this person for the next week to plough through