Billionaire With a Twist 3 (2 page)

“Paige,” I warned.

“It’s nothing.” She
sighed. “It’s just—he had a date with him.”

Had I felt crushed before? I felt now
like all the air had been forced out of my lungs in a single punch. I
felt smashed as flat as a sheet of paper.

I was going through hell, but
apparently losing me wasn’t even a blip on Hunter’s
radar, not if he was carousing around town with a beauty on his arm.
“Oh.”

I’d meant it to come out
noncommittal or even disinterested, but apparently my cracked and
bleeding heart showed right through, because Paige backpedaled
quicker than a cyclist coming across an alligator dozing on a bike
trail.

“Maybe it was a work friend,”
she offered quickly, in a voice so bright and chipper she might have
stolen it from a Stepford wife. “Or he might have been putting
on a brave face. You know how guys are. They can’t admit when
they’re hurt. Especially when they’re business hotshots,
they think the tiniest scratch will have the sharks circling.”

“Yeah, sure.” It sounded
reasonable. But I knew it wasn’t the truth. “Thanks
anyway.”

Then we shared an awkward silence just
long enough for me to look around my apartment and reflect on how
quickly and effortlessly my entire life had gone to shit.

“Mom finally broke the news to
Dad that both daughters ruined their chance with the most eligible
bachelor below the Mason-Dixon Line,” Paige said finally. I
could tell by her voice she was trying to lighten the mood. “I
think he was mostly disappointed that he wasn’t going to be
getting a discount on bourbon anytime soon.”

Great. Now I was disappointing even
more people. Just perfect.

I changed the subject. “So, how’s
Sergei? Is he still in the picture?”

Paige hesitated just long enough for me
to intuit that she was debating letting me switch the focus of our
conversation, but eventually the bait of being able to talk about her
own life pulled her in.

“No, not really. We’ve been
chatting, meeting up for coffee, that kind of thing. And we kissed a
few times. But, well—” I heard the rustle of her long
blonde locks as she shook her head, and I could just see that pensive
sad expression I knew she’d be wearing. “I’ve
realized that Sergei is what I really wanted when I was twenty-four,
but now that I’m older I feel like…like I just can’t
be looking back at the past like that. I want something real.
Something that’s going to last.”

That was Paige, smart and sensible even
in her rebellion.

“So, what’s the future
hold?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” she
admitted, “but I’ve been getting awfully restless lately.
New York, maybe. The art scene there has always been amazing. And if
my party planning ever gets off the ground, who knows? I might have
to city-hop for a while, go where the work is.”

“Well, if you need a stepping
stone, there’s always room on my couch.”

Paige made grateful noises, but I knew
she wouldn’t be taking me up on my offer.

Paige had seen my couch, and she knew
that there was only room on it for me and my self-pity.

#

The reality show had ended hours ago
and there was never anything remotely interesting on at this time of
night, but I knew that turning the TV off would only fill the
apartment with a terrible silence that I couldn’t face. So I
was flipping through channels, trying to find something that wasn’t
a congressional hearing or an infomercial for a food processor that
sliced, diced, and also organized your socks or some shit.

And then the Douchebros’ ad came
on.

“Oh, baby, oh—”
Creaking springs and lustful moans gave way to the sight of a barely
clad, barely legal blonde sucking eagerly at the neck of a Knox
bourbon bottle, held directly at the crotch line of a smirking male
model.

I wasn’t sure what I was more
disgusted with: the objectification, or how insultingly unsubtle it
was.

“Yeah, swallow it,” the man
urged. “You know you like the taste.”

She murmured happy agreement, but then
there came a whimper of pure need from the floor beside the bed,
where multiple near-nude supermodels lay entwined. “When’s
my turn?”

The man looked straight into the camera
and winked.

KNOX BOURBON, said the letters slapped
up over his face as the audio cut to a poorly sampled hip hop track.
EVEN GOOD GIRLS SWALLOW IT.

I let the remote fall out of my hands,
horrified. Distantly, I heard the sound as it hit the floor.

This was how Chuck wanted the company
represented to the world?

Hunter had to be tearing out his hair
right now.

Hunter—

I grabbed for my cell phone and punched
in his number. I had to hear his voice, had to know he was okay, had
to let him know that this wasn’t me, I had never wanted this—

“This is Hunter Knox.”

“Hunter, I—” I began.

“Leave a message after the beep,
and don’t forget your number if it’s blocked.”

Frustrated tears filled my eyes. Damn.
Voicemail again, and I’d let it fool me. I’d heard it
over and over these past few weeks until I had every cadence of every
syllable memorized, and I still let it fool me because I was so
desperate for his forgiveness.

“I—Hunter, I, I just saw
the ad, and—” When I’d picked up the phone, I’d
been so certain I’d know what to say, that the words would just
come. But now that the moment was there, they were all so out of
reach. Just like Hunter. “I’m so sorry.”

That was all I had left. That was all I
could say.

“God, Hunter, I am so, so sorry.”

I looked away from my computer screen
and rubbed my bloodshot eyes, massaged my forehead and tense, aching
jaw. I sighed.

Damn, damn, and double damn.

Hunter still hadn’t called me
back, but the burst of energy I’d gotten from my revulsion at
the ad had still managed to propel me across my apartment to do some
research. And that research was not encouraging.

The new campaign was bombing harder
than a fighter plane over enemy territory. Sales of Knox bourbon were
way down, share prices were plummeting even faster, and Twitter feeds
were blowing up with hashtags denouncing every person involved in its
production as sexist scum. I stalked the social media profiles of the
Douchebros and pretty soon had to look away; they were still
virulently defending the product, not even realizing that they were
fanning the flames of the online outrage with their outdated
misogynistic rhetoric. It had a desperate note to it, though; even
they realized that
something
was wrong. Somewhere way back in
those reptilian brains, they had to know that they had fucked up, and
fucked up bad.

There was even talk of a boycott.

I clicked on one of the links in the
tweets, which took me to an online Forbes article. The outlook was
grim, according to that reporter: she claimed that with the share
price tumbling, it might be the end of the line for the heritage
company. Bigger drinks companies were circling like vultures over a
dying rhinoceros, and no executives could be reached for comment.

I thought about the pride in Hunter’s
face as he talked about family heritage, about the meaning in the
careful, artistic production of each bottle of bourbon, about
carrying on tradition.

What the hell was I doing here in this
depressing apartment, this ode to inertia and giving up?

I had to snap out of it.

There was no way I was letting Knox
Liquors go down like this. Hunter was probably going crazy right this
minute trying to hold off a takeover, and he couldn’t
accomplish it alone. He needed my help.

And I needed to make things right.

I shot off a quick e-mail to work
cashing in every single vacation day I had, and grabbed my keys. I
was going to save Hunter.

Whether he wanted me to or not.

#

My car screeched into the driveway of
the manor house, and I got out. I shut the door softly, my heart
hammering its way up to my throat. I was half-expecting Hunter to
come storming out of the manor and demand that I explain my presence,
and if that happened I had no idea what I would say. My
self-confidence in the righteousness of my mission had started to
erode after fifteen minutes of driving, though not enough to turn
back around.

Not enough to abandon Hunter.

It could never have been enough to
abandon Hunter.

The grounds were strangely quiet, the
still air of the evening broken only by the occasional call of a bird
from the woods. The far-away burble of the stream, a breeze rustling
the grass. I’d expected to find Hunter in full war mode against
the Douchebros, barking orders into a cell phone, dictating lists to
Martha, striding back and forth across the grounds as the workers
still loyal to him scurried to do his bidding.

But it was all so quiet it could have
been abandoned centuries ago.

I rang the doorbell to the manor house
three times, trepidation growing in my stomach. When no one answered,
I put my hand on the doorknob, expecting to find it locked.

It turned under my touch.

“Hunter?” I called as I
entered. “Martha? Anybody?”

My voice echoed back to me, the only
thing in the house besides the spiders skittering across the cobwebs
above.

“Okay, this is about three times
more creepy than I expected,” I muttered, closing the door
behind me.

It creaked like a ghost’s moan,
because of course it did.

I wandered through the house,
occasionally calling out but finding that my voice grew softer and
softer as I did so, as if I were afraid of someone actually answering
back. I knew I was being silly, but I couldn’t help myself: the
Gothic architecture looked so much more imposing in the
half-light—even flipping on the switches didn’t help,
since at least half the bulbs seemed to have been burnt out and never
replaced. There was a fine film of dust over everything. What had
happened to all the servants? Had Hunter reassigned them all to help
save the company?

Had Hunter packed them all up and left?

No. No, Hunter would never do that.
Hunter would never give up.

I was just letting my imagination run
away with me, letting myself get overly influenced by all the
darkness and all the eerie creaking sounds of a wooden house
naturally settling into its foundations on a cool summer night.

I hoped.

Eventually, the maze of hallways led me
to the back of the house, where I saw Martha sprawled out on a lawn
chair beside the pool, sunning herself—for a certain value of
sun; it had nearly set—in a skimpy red bikini, her damp curls
fanning out across the plastic of the chair, a martini on the table
next to her.

It was so normal and reassuring I
thought I might cry.

Martha spotted me as I slid open the
glass door. “Ally!” she cried, leaping to her feet with a
happy smile and enfolding me in a warm hug. “Oh, it’s so
good to see you!”

I felt the tension seep out of my
shoulders as I hugged her back with relief flooding my heart. I
hadn’t realized until just this moment how worried I’d
been that for all her conciliatory phone calls, Martha would side
with Hunter and not want to forgive me. I’d lost my
almost-boyfriend, I didn’t want to lose a friend too. “It’s
good to see you too, Martha. But what’s going on? Where is
everybody? The house is deserted.”

Martha rolled her eyes. “Paid
vacation. Most of them have jetted off to Cancun, but someone has to
stay behind and make sure the property doesn’t get overrun with
mutant alligators or drunk teens or whatever, so I volunteered. I
mean hey, I get the pool all to myself and Amazon delivers right to
the door, so it’s practically a vacation. Only downside is my
boytoys hate driving out this way, so I have to work extra hard to
make it worth it.” She grinned. “But oh, do I make it
worth it.”

I was confused. “Hunter’s
in Cancun?”

“Oh, no, no,” Martha said,
shaking her head. “Hunter’s gone
fishing
.”

She said it with a load of significance
that I didn’t understand. “Is that…a metaphor?”

“Nope,” she said with a
sigh. “I wish. Nah, he’s holed up at his lodge by the
lake, brooding like a goddamn sparkly vampire. Has been for weeks
now. It’s what he always does when he feels cornered. He
pouts.”

I felt simultaneously concerned that
Hunter was feeling cornered, glad that he had some kind of defense
mechanism in place, and worried that said mechanism might not be the
healthiest one. Well, I couldn’t find out if I didn’t go
talk to him, could I?

“Do you have the address?”
I asked.

Right after I said it, I worried that
she wouldn’t tell me, that she would think it was unhealthy to
be this fixated on Hunter. That she would pity me, like Paige had.

But Martha just flashed a smile as
bright as a shooting star. “Good on you. Maybe you can pull him
out of his funk.”

And she handed me the address that she
had had waiting on a piece of paper.

#

I’d thought the fishing place
would be nearby, maybe on the other side of the lake that I could see
from the manor house, but my GPS told me it was even deeper in the
country. I turned on my lights and drove carefully through the
rolling hills and deep dark woods that were no doubt lovely and
picturesque by day, probably looking like they’d rolled out of
a damn Thomas Kinkade painting.

By night, though, it looked like
something straight out of a very grim fairy tale, one of the ones
where the ending is less ‘happily ever after’ and more
‘and then the last person in the story died in a very bloody,
poetically just way.’ They were not doing wonders for my
nerves, those rolling hills, and that deep, dark forest.