**** Author's Note ******
This story is a bit long, but I chose to post this one as a single long story than in chapters as I have some of my other long stories. Let me know if you like them this way or as chapters.
Enjoy!
M.
*
Sometimes getting a new boss can be a good thing. They bring in new ideas and concepts, revitalizing a department or in this case, a company. It doesn't always work that way, sometimes the changes are for the worse. The opinion is still out on the new company CEO.
One of the things he brought to the table were mandatory attendance retreats. Yep, that's right, mandatory. Everyone in the department from the executive vice president to the secretaries, were directed to attend a two to three day retreat every six months. These were a mixture of team building and social events with serious out of the box brainstorming sessions. To everyone's surprise, the last outing yielded an outrageous idea from one of the secretaries, which turned out, after a lot of engineering, to be a great solution to a long standing problem. So with that reinforcement in mind, Mike Michael's boss gave him no choice but to attend the upcoming ski retreat. Now when it comes to the outdoors Mike is no stranger. In fact he is an avid hunter and fisherman, and spends most of his weekends in one of those pursuits.
Being single again at thirty sucked for Mike, and after ten years of bar trolling, and getting fixed up with women at church by friends, Mike was still single, and it still often sucked. He just didn't seem to be able to find a woman who made a long term fit. Oh he had lots of women friends, but it seemed that domestic tranquility was not their primary motivation. As a result he'd pretty much learned to be on his own and concentrate his activities on things he could do and enjoy alone. Camping, hunting, fishing, backpacking, ATVing, these were all things he liked to do regularly, sun or snow. Skiing, on the other hand, is one activity he had made it a point to avoid. After several sets of broken ribs from various incidents, like motorcycle accidents, he pretty much decided that skiing was going to stay off the to-do list. He just didn't need another set of busted ribs, which was what he expected if he tried to stand on some skinny boards on a slippery surface, especially if that surface was a hill. It amazed him that anyone would spend the huge sums of money it took to slide down some stupid hill, over and over, on those things.
The last retreat was camping and a two day canoe trip. Mike considered it to be quite fun; partly because he felt quite at home in that element, and partly because it was fun to watch those who were out of their element struggle. Of course it didn't hurt to get to watch the secretaries, married and single, strutting around in swim suits that showed way more than you could ever see at work. It was quickly apparent that he knew his way around a camp and ended up being the go-to guy for almost everything. Mike showed a number of people how to set up their tents, deal with camping and instructed a number of coworkers, including the engineering administrative assistant, on how to cook over an open fire. Marlene seemed genuinely happy to have the help and Mike had to admit he enjoyed when she stood much closer to him than necessary, often touching their hips together. He also taught people who had never been in a canoe, how to get downstream without ending up upside down. All in all, it was fun, but it was still a working trip.
The engineering session was actually helpful, and the team building activities were interesting, but for Mike, the social end kind of flopped. He had a hard and fast rule about dating women from work, and he saw nothing in that retreat to change that attitude. If anything it was reinforced when they played some silly game that was the equivalent of spin the bottle where each chosen person had to give one embarrassing moment they had in the last year. To his surprise and shock, the embarrassing moment that one of the secretaries used, was when Mike accidently walked up on her and one of the other young secretaries getting it on, on the far side of the gravel bar they took their lunch break on that first afternoon. Somehow her embarrassing moment turned into his. This incident for some reason made him instantly popular; with the guys wanting to know all the details of what he saw, and the younger ladies, wanting to know all the details of what he saw, but from a slightly different perspective. That popularity continued for weeks after the trip.
What surprised him most was that the two twenty something secretaries didn't seem at all bothered by the fact that he saw them, or that the other guys knew about it. They did seem to rebuff all the obvious advances, but for reasons he simply didn't understand, they seemed to gravitate toward him after the encounter. One of them, a slim young lady named Cindy, even went so far as to get things switched around so she was the secretary working on his projects. Mike guessed that allowed her to be closer to him on a daily basis, although he clearly didn't know why. They hadn't dated, and he hadn't made any overt moves. To Mike it was just not a good thing to have at work romances within the same department you work in, even more so when she's just a tad over half your own age. Well, maybe a bit more than that, but she was still fifteen or so years younger than he was.
But that was all six months ago. Today he was standing in front of his bosses desk, listening to him tell him that he didn't have a choice, he was going to have to go on the ski trip. Mike left his office resigned to going and hoped that he could avoid actually going on the slopes.
The following week found Mike stuffing his suitcase into the underbelly of the tour bus before climbing aboard and finding an empty seat by the window. His intention was to try to get a little reading in on the six plus hour trip to the resort. No, Mike didn't consider himself anti-social, he just really didn't want to get stuck talking small talk for six hours to someone that he really wasn't friends with. Mike was just getting settled in well and had his book open to where he had left off last, when it was unceremoniously pulled from his hands by Marlene, the administrative assistant.
"Nope! You're not going to spend the whole trip with your nose in a book. Not when you have me to keep you company." She said as she dropped into the seat next to him with a smile.
Mike had to admit she looked pretty damn good. He guessed she was in her early thirties, slim, but not overly so, with a thin waist and pleasant face that usually held a smile. Her probably shoulder length blond hair was perpetually up in a bun on the back of her head, and oh yes, she has a pleasantly large pair of tits, which at the moment were well outlined in the tight white turtleneck sweater she had on.
"Sorry, just thought I might catch up on some reading." He answered lamely.
"Nope, not this trip." She said with a smile. Then she leaned over close to him and whispered, "And if you keep staring at my tits there isn't much point in sitting by the window."
Mike turned red at getting caught staring at her. "Sorry, I... Um. Sorry." He said, turning to look away from her.
