Hollin Cross

Wren Ashdown has been refused Christmas leave four Decembers running. The reason is always the same: the Festive Allocation Guidance gives the holidays to staff with dependants, and Wren, thirty-three and single, has none.

Callum Rourke runs the warehouse, counts everything twice and has never once asked for anything. He has no dependants either. What he has is a spare room, a very good story, and a niece and nephew who charge by the hour.

One fake marriage, two hired dependants, a forged household calendar and a home visit from HR later, Wren and Callum have a fortnight in a snowed-in mountain chalet and a signed declaration that they will never do each other a professional favour. They also have a problem. The paperwork says the marriage is false. Every stocktake says otherwise.

A warm, sharp, very adult workplace romantic comedy about forms, feelings and the rare item that turns out, on inspection, to be exactly what it says on the label.

Wren Ashdown and Callum Rourke survived a fake marriage, a home visit from HR and a fortnight snowed into a chalet. They came out of it with a real relationship, two matching rings from a market kiosk, and one secret the whole company must never learn.

Then HR announces Household Leave Synchronisation. Registered couples will now take their annual leave together or not at all, and between Buying's quarter-ends and the warehouse's stocktakes, "together" works out at roughly never.

So Wren does what any senior buyer would do. She files a grievance. Callum signs it. Their colleagues start a petition, Internal Communications starts a breathing exercise, and somewhere along the way a blank form called F47 begins travelling around in Callum's jacket pocket.

Three hearings, one vow renewal, a pub jar of loose change and a very small warehouse bay later, the leave policy is in serious trouble. So, possibly, are they.

A warm, sharp, very adult workplace romantic comedy about grievance bundles, dispatch notes, and the one form that is worth filling in properly.

Wren Ashdown and Callum Rourke have beaten a leave policy and a grievance process, and they are engaged, on paper and in permanent ink. Then Northbridge Holdings buys Bellweather and Pruitt, and the consultant sent to merge it arrives with a redundancy matrix, a great deal of talk about synergy, and a plan to keep whichever of them is judged more essential. He is also someone they had hoped never to see again.

So they do the least efficient thing available. They get married, for real, in December, in the staff car park at Pruitt Yard, with a council licence, two registrars, a forklift in bunting and most of the warehouse watching.

Car Park Vows is the final book of the Hollin Cross trilogy: a satirical, high-heat romantic comedy about forms, families, a hearing nobody wanted, and two people deciding who gets a life outside work. It contains explicit sex scenes between consenting adults.