Billionaire With a Twist 2 (4 page)

Hunter gave me a look so blank it could
have used a name tag.

“A long ad,” I clarified.
“Like a movie trailer, except…for advertising.”

“Of course, of course.” He
still didn’t look sold, though.

“It’s the perfect way to
showcase the new direction,” I went on. “We can get the
cameras in here, get the board to see what we see in these grounds,
in the distillery—we can capture that sense of history, that
love—”

I bit my lip, as if I could keep that
word from having leapt out of my mouth.

Hunter didn’t seem to have
noticed. “We need the rebrand by the anniversary party, though.
Can you have it done by then?”

I raised an eyebrow in my best Scarlett
O’Hara fashion. “Mr. Knox, you are talking to the person
who finished a sizzle reel for Ladybird Lipsticks in three days on a
budget that wouldn’t buy you half a shoestring. On this, I
won’t even break a sweat. In fact—” the idea came
to me in a flash of light—“we should theme the
anniversary party around it. That will show the board how serious you
are about this whole thing!”

Hunter grinned, grabbing my hand to
press his perfect lips to it. “Allison Bartlett, you are
absolutely brilliant.”

I grinned up at him like my face was
fit to bust, my heart soaring high above me. Everything was perfect.
I was on top of the world.

Then Hunter ruined everything.

“And Paige could help!” he
suggested, dropping my hand to reach for his cell phone. “Event
planning, that’s her thing, right?”

That soaring heart of mine? Plummeted
faster than a hot air balloon that someone’s taken a cannon to.

“Sure,” I said through
gritted teeth and a smile that felt like it had been shellacked on.
“That’s totally her thing. What a great idea.”

“Oh no, did I stumble into a
sister argument?” Hunter asked, still grinning that annoyingly
hot grin. He could at least have the decency to look ugly when I was
angry with him. “Was it her thing first, and then you decided
you wanted it to be your thing, and then she wanted her thing back,
so you had to compromise with a different thing—”

“It’s none of your goddamn
business!” I snapped.

There was a moment of pure frozen
silence.

I had overreacted. I wasn’t
supposed to care. I couldn’t let Hunter know I cared.

I turned away, trying to pretend that I
just wanted more coffee, and that I wasn’t hiding the tears
trying to escape from my eyes.

Hunter’s hand rested gently on my
shoulder. “Ally…”

“It’s nothing,” I
insisted. I forced a shaky laugh. “You know how I am before I
get my morning java…”

“Ally,” Hunter said again,
and his voice was as gentle and concerned as his hand. I wanted to
let him hold me tight and soothe me with his voice. “Tell me
the truth. Are you really okay with me seeing your sister? I don’t
want to hurt you.”

Was that hope in his voice? Oh, I
wanted it to be hope so much, I wanted him to want me as much as I
wanted him. I could feel the heat from his hand through the fabric of
my shirt, and oh, I wanted, I
needed
that hand on my skin,
stroking me, caressing me, pulling me against his strong, hard body
as if he never planned to let me go…

But he didn’t want me. He wanted
Paige. Anything else I thought I heard was just me being delusional.

“You aren’t hurting me,”
I said, and through the haze of pain I was proud of how steady my
voice was. “I’m completely fine with you dating Paige. In
fact, I couldn’t think of anything better.”

With that, I choked down the rest of my
coffee and made a private resolution to keep my nose to the
grindstone and let my workaholism block out any inconvenient emotions
for the duration of this project. I could do that. Sure I could.

Who knew so much time could fit into
one little week?

It was simultaneously too little time
to get everything done, and too much time to have to spend trying not
to think about Hunter and Paige. I tried to avoid the pair of them
while still getting work done by burying myself in hours-long
conversations with Sandra back in D.C., choosing color palettes,
editing photos for perfect composition, and, of course, setting up
conference calls with the director of our sizzle reel to make sure
that everything was going smoothly.

Between my workload and Paige’s—having
to put together a party for two hundred and fifty people, filling in
all the details like tablecloths and bunting and engraved
placeholders that Hunter had left out when he sketched the broad
outlines—avoidance was pretty easy.

Avoiding constant phone updates from my
mom—“Paige says they held hands! Paige says Hunter
mentioned an island he would love to take her to! Paige says Hunter
complimented her on her eye for color and detail!”—was a
bit more difficult.

So when my phone rang, I paused for a
second, pondering if it might be worth it to endure a storm of
you
didn’t pick up your phone, you had me so worried, I thought you
were dead, you don’t care about your mother
disappointment,
in exchange for not having to hear her urgent update on what
sickeningly cutesy nicknames Paige and Hunter had come up with for
each other, or what they were planning on naming the children.

On the other hand, those disappointment
storms were a terror to behold, let alone experience. I sighed and
picked up the phone.

And saw that its caller ID was showing
not my mother’s number, but my boss’s.

What the heck? My status update wasn’t
due until tomorrow.

I answered with trepidation. “Allison
here, sir, hello?”

“How are you doing, Ally?”
he asked jovially.

“Just fine. And yourself?”
I returned, unable to break the rules of Southern politeness even as
my stomach tossed and turned in anticipation of bad news. What other
reason could there be for an early call, praising me? Not freaking
likely.

“Oh, I can’t complain,”
he said. “After all, if they let me start complaining I might
never stop, har har.”

I decided to bend the rules of Southern
politeness slightly, and if not exactly cut to the chase, at least
sidle around in its general direction.

“Sorry to hear that, sir. Is
there anything I can help with? Is that why you called?”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. Just
calling to check in, see how things are going. I know how
overwhelming it can all be, your first time out.”

My first time out on something that
wasn’t swathed in pink and coded girly so many ways that a
seasoned cryptologist would give up and cry
, he meant, but I let
it slide in the interest of not getting fired.

“I’m doing just fine,”
I said. “Busy, but you’ve seen how I can juggle multiple
tasks. I know my status update is scheduled for tomorrow, but I can
give you a preliminary one if you—”

“Great, great, great,” he
interrupted, clearly having not listened to a word I’d said.
“That’s great, Ally, I’m glad. There’s just
one little thing—”

Of course there was.

“It’s that Chuck—you
know Chuck, great head on his shoulders, member of the old frat,
knows how we do business here—Chuck has expressed some
concerns.”

Of course he had.

I managed to restrain myself from
saying that I’d like to express some concerns to Chuck myself,
preferably with a paintball gun, and instead asked, as pointedly as I
could without my boss feeling like I was ‘giving him lip,’
“Do
you
have any concerns, sir?”

He huffed into his mustache, annoyed
that I’d even somewhat called him out on his passive-aggressive
bullshit. “You know it isn’t like that, Ally.”

Oh, wasn’t it?

I bit my lip to keep from blurting out
my mental catalogue of all the humiliating crap he’d thrown at
me in the past with a hangdog look and an insistence that his sexist
outlook was just company policy. Giving me every single feminine
hygiene client, like their product was radioactive or something.
Denying me the Lockheed guns contract, even though I’d been out
at the shooting range since I was six and the guy he did give it to
wouldn’t know a stock from a barrel. Laughing off my sexual
harassment claims when the guys from accounting made comments about
my legs, telling me to just ‘appreciate the compliments before
you’re too old to get them.’

I concentrated on the important thing.
He had, technically, said that he wasn’t concerned about me.
“I’m glad to hear that. So you agree with me that I won’t
be needing any oversight.”

‘Oversight’ being our
polite term for ‘sending in a guy at the last second to hog all
the credit.’

He sighed a deeply regretful sigh that
made me want to strangle him. “Consumer confidence is our game,
Ally. I can’t change the way we do business just because it
hurts your feelings.”

Typical. Running around at Chuck’s
beck and call whenever he threw a little hissy fit was just the way
we did business but when I calmly stated my dislike for it, it was
just ‘hurt feelings.’

“Of course,” I said,
gritting my teeth. “And how are we planning on mollifying
Chuck’s concerns?”

“Knew you’d be on board,”
he said placidly, even though I hadn’t quite climbed onto said
board just yet. Like most people at the company, he liked to assume
reality was the way he wanted it to be, and just wait for it to
conform. “I’d like Chad and his colleagues to come by and
lend a hand,” he continued. “That group has some real
unity of vision, you know, and they’ve been chomping at the bit
to really prove their stuff.”

I’d been chomping at the bit for
years, and all it had ever gotten me was patronizing lectures about
how overly ambitious women came off as bitches and lost contracts.

“Sandra and Hunter and I have all
the vision we can handle right now,” I said, going for a light
and breezy tone that didn’t communicate,
and I will let the
Douchebros’ vision come to light only over my dead body.

“Sounds like you could use a
little help corralling it, then.”

“I assure you, sir, we’ve
got everything under control.”

“Now, now, missy,” he said,
in what I had to assume was the same voice he used when his
granddaughter wanted another scoop on her ice cream cone. “The
client comes first, remember? We have to make him feel secure.”

“Hunter feels so secure in this
he’s been calling in favors to get us the best sizzle reel
possible,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked,
he
was the client, not Chuck.”

This was venturing dangerously close to
sass territory that normally would have earned me a reprimand, but
today I just got an indulgent chuckle of the ‘I’m about
to impart some wisdom to this innocent naïve sweet summer child’
variety.

“That he is. For now.”

I felt my hackles rise. “What are
you saying?”

“Read the changes in the sky,
Ally,” he said, sounding especially pleased with himself for
the touch of metaphor. “Stormy weather’s coming, and if
we want to keep this contract we can’t afford to back the wrong
horse.”

I resisted pointing out that he’d
changed metaphors mid-race. “Sir, with all due respect, the
direction they want to take this in is completely antithetical to—”

“Allison, I’ve made my
decision and that’s final.”

His voice had lost all its fake
cheerfulness, and was grim and final and set in stone. And there was
nothing I could do.

“At least talk to them,” he
went on, his voice going back to its normal tone as he returned to
pretending that I had a choice in the matter. “They’ll
all be at that liquor industry event in the city, you know, the
awards one?”

Message received. Fine. I would play
nice as long as they did. Which meant that science would probably
need to invent a new, shorter unit of time.

Especially since my temper was already
going to be on a hair-trigger—Hunter was bringing Paige to that
event. I’d planned to skip it for precisely that reason, but
now it seemed I had no choice.

“All right, sir.” I tried
not to sound as sour as a lemon. “I’ll chat them up for
sure.”

“Glad to hear you’re still
a team player,” he said, and after a few more minutes of polite
chit-chat—essential both to politeness and to maintaining the
fiction that he hadn’t just railroaded me—we said our
goodbyes.

I stared at the phone, the full
implications just starting to sink in.

Fuck.

#

“Martha!”

Martha jumped, and tried to hide the
book she was reading under a pillow, though not before I got a good
look at the cover: some kind of steamy sci-fi romance, with muscular
Amazonians in space-suits surrounded by lithe, oiled, barely-clad
men.

Well, that was one fetish.

“Ally Bo-Bally!” Martha
said, trying to hide her flush. “What can a lady of the world
such as myself do for you?”

“A huge favor,” I admitted.
“My boss just steam-rollered me into attending this big social
function—”

“And you need to check a boy-toy
out of my man-harem to accompany you? Good thing for you I keep a
Rolodex for these very occasions.”

It was actually kind of tempting. That
was certainly one way to make Hunter jealous—but no, no, I
wasn’t going to be that petty. I was going to rise above such
things.

Well, a little way above such things.

No harm in making him see what he was
missing, after all.

“Actually, I need a different
Rolodex,” I said. “Got any recommendations for a place to
get a nice outfit and hairdo, short notice?”

Martha’s eyes lit up. “Do I
ever!” She stood, grabbing my arm. “Come on, let’s
go snag the Rolls!”

“You said that was for
emergencies,” I pointed out as she pulled me along like a fish
on the line.

Martha cast a look back at me and my
ensemble and shook her head with a pitying grin. “Ally, by any
definition, this is an emergency.”