Billionaire With a Twist 3 (7 page)

“I’m not a child!” I
snapped.

“You’re certainly acting
like one at the moment—”

“Mom. I will
not
go to the
car with you.” Each word was short and sharp and bitten off
with cold, fierce precision. “I am my own person, making my own
choices, and if you don’t like them—any of them—you
can bite your tongue or you can go somewhere where you don’t
have to see them.”

I could hear my volume rising, but I
couldn’t seem to stop it, all the years of accumulated
resentment breaking through like water through a faulty dam. I went
on, “I’ve been working and working and working, trying to
make you proud—” my voice broke, “but
nothing
makes you proud! You act like nothing matters except getting me
married off and baking pies and popping out babies!”

Mom stumbled backwards a step, her face
blanching deathly pale. My father caught her elbow automatically, but
still she faltered. Dad’s eyes were wide, verging on panic—it
had been so long since any of us had really talked back to my mother,
I think he had no idea how to deal with it now that it was actually
happening.

My dad’s eyes helped me rein in
my rage slightly, just enough to lower the volume and keep from
making more of a scene: “I went to a great college. I graduated
with honors. I got a great job. I made a difference in people’s
lives. I made an entire
life
for myself, but I’m still a
failure—” my voice cracked, but I soldiered on—“in
my own mother’s eyes. As if I have no worth at all, unless I
can find a man to value me first. Can’t you see what you’re
doing? Can’t you see how you’re making me feel? Don’t
you care at all?”

There was a long, tense silence. My dad
looked more thrown than a Super Bowl football. Paige looked like she
expected a bomb to go off.

My mother sniffled. “I—I—”

“What?” I snapped. I could
feel my shoulders going up around my ears. She was going to start in
on how ungrateful I was, I just knew it. She was going to get
defensive and dismissive and act like nothing I said mattered. Like
always.

“I
am
proud of you,”
my mother insisted.

I thought for several seconds that I
must have misheard her.

Mom took out a delicate pink silk
handkerchief, and blew her nose. Her voice shook as she continued.
“I’m proud of you every single day, my dear. I thought
you knew. I thought you had to know—you do so well, how could I
not be proud?”

Dad placed a comforting hand on her
shoulder, another on mine. The weight of it pulled me down, letting
the anger start to seep out of my body.

“I just want you to be happy as
well,” my mom went on. “I want you to find someone to be
happy with, find someone who treasures how bright you shine. I know—I
know I can’t be around forever. I know how quickly things can
fall apart when—when someone who’s been a part of your
life has suddenly gone.”

I remembered suddenly and with shame
that Mom’s own parents had died when she was nineteen. She had
been considering pursuing a career onstage before that happened and
funds had become suddenly too tight to consider it.

She’d always loved ballet.

I remembered the wistful look on her
face when we came across some old recital photos in the attic,
talking about how Grandma and Grandpa had always supported her.

“I just want you and Paige to
have someone to look after you when I’ve gone,” she
finished in a quavery voice, dabbing at her eyes with her
handkerchief.

I took her hand as gently as I could,
looked deep into her eyes. “We can look after ourselves, Mom,”
I said softly.

“I know, I know,” she said
with a watery laugh and a shake of her head. “I’ve seen
you do so many great things on your own. But you’re such good
girls—” she clasped my arm earnestly—“you
shouldn’t
have
to. You should be able to lean on someone
else, every once in awhile. If you wanted to.”

I felt an unaccustomed surge of
tenderness towards my mother, warm and engulfing. “Ah, hell.”
I couldn’t stay mad at her. “Come here, Mom.”

She didn’t even take me to task
for my language as I enfolded her in my arms, Paige and Dad embracing
us as well, our family becoming one giant hug, warm and secure and
safe. My mother felt so small and fragile as I held her, bird-boned,
delicate. I was so used to seeing her as an all-powerful tyrant, and
yet, in this moment…my heart ached for her fragility, for her
losses, for the choices she had made that had driven me so far from
her.

I couldn’t promise that we would
ever be close. She loved me, but she had expressed that love for so
long by belittling me and my choices that there was a part of me that
feared that all that damage could never be undone.

But I hoped that maybe, just maybe,
this conversation was a sign of better things to come.

#

My hands danced restlessly at my side
in anticipation as the crowd’s murmur quieted, their eyes
focusing on Hunter as he took center stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,”
Hunter began, and the crowd fell completely silent as his slow,
measured, dark honey tones reverberated through the warm afternoon
air. “I can’t thank you enough for coming out here today
and giving me a hand. I appreciate your support more than I can say.”

The crowd gave murmuring sounds of
assorted “you’re welcome”s and “of course”es.
Looking around at all the smiling faces, you could tell that Hunter
was among friends here. These were the people who loved him, who
supported him, would believe in him and back him all the way.

I was proud to be in their company.

“We’ve none of us had an
easy time of it lately,” Hunter went on. “I’m sure
none of you have missed the recent news about Knox Liquors.”

Angry grumbles spread through the crowd
in response; Hunter waved them to silence.

“Now, now. What’s done is
done. As a very wise lady told me just recently—” his
eyes locked on mine, and he gave a wolfish grin—“there’s
no point in dwelling on the past when you could be looking towards
the future. And what a bright future it’s looking to be!”

Whoops of agreement greeted his
statement.

“Now, if you’ve all
sufficiently wetted your whistles to form an opinion on what recipes
you find most palatable, you’ll find the ballot boxes to your
left, with Martha distributing the voting slips; everyone gets three
to distribute between the flavors as you wish.”

“What if we haven’t wetted
our whistles enough yet?” heckled someone from behind me.

“Then too bad, because we’re
all out of beer!” Hunter shot back, and the crowd laughed.
“Well, what are you waiting for?”

The crowd hustled over to the ballot
boxes, and I did as well, intercepting some of the tidal wave of
people before they could swamp Martha entirely with their questions
and their voting slips. We helped direct everyone to the ballot box
they wanted, and sent them away with plates of barbecue and lemonade
until there was enough breathing space to pull out the calculators
and tabulate the results.

It seemed every brew had a few diehard
fans, but soon a few clear leaders emerged, and from those
candidates, one soon began to stand head and shoulders above the
rest: a hoppy blend with strong overtones of sarsaparilla and Mexican
vanilla that Hunter had chosen to call simply “Dixie.”

“Dixie is the winner!”
Martha announced to widespread cheers.

Hunter was surrounded by supporters,
who showered him in hugs, handshakes, and hearty backslaps. A few of
the burlier young men hoisted him on their shoulders and began to run
a victory lap around the lawn, and I laughed and laughed as I watched
them, until I had to sit down on the grass or fall down. My heart
felt as light as a feather, and my mind was already dancing with
visions of what was coming next, exhilaration and nervousness
combining in a heady mix of anticipation and terror.

This had been the easy part.

Next up, the expo!

“Ah, Miss Bartlett. How is that
family of yours doing? Any developments in that…emergency of
theirs?”

My boss peered at me over his glasses.
He was trying to make me feel guilty for not divulging any more
information than privacy laws said I had to. Was this just his normal
brand of passive-aggression, or was he starting to get suspicious?

“Almost cleared up,” I said
as brightly as I could. “Oh look, is that the time, I have to
go update the company’s social media presence or everyone will
think we’re dead, see you later!”

I fled as quickly as I could, hoping
that the words ‘social media’ would have confused him
enough to keep from following me.

The best way to keep my boss from
asking questions had always been to start talking about something he
knew nothing about; better to let the flighty young lady do her
thing, he seemed to think, than to reveal he knew nothing about it.

I was back at work, and with Hunter
prepping production on a new test batch of the Dixie brew, there was
nothing for me to do back at the manor house. Well, I could have
stood around admiring Hunter’s profile and simultaneously being
bored silly by all the beer jargon he spouted like an overexcited
fanboy, but somehow that seemed less productive than heading back to
D.C. and catching up with all the work that had piled up for me in my
absence (I didn’t think that Hunter’s red alert levels of
hotness would qualify as an emergency my boss would be on board
with).

Well, trying to catch up, anyway.
Enough stuff had piled up in my absence that I was starting to think
they’d made my cubicle into a trash can and forgotten to tell
me.

No one had done any work on that tampon
line while I was gone and the other woman in the office was out
sick—too afraid of cooties, I guess—and the client was
irate, threatening to take their business elsewhere. I tossed off
some copy for it, no big deal—I could’ve done another
tampon line in my sleep—and sent Sandra an e-mail outlining
what they wanted in terms of art. That barely dented the pile of
work, though—it seemed that while I was gone, I’d been
designated everyone’s official paperwork monkey, and those
forms weren’t going to file themselves.

Lost in the daydreamy reveries of
self-filing paperwork and coworkers who actually did their own damn
jobs, I was so busy that it wasn’t until my stomach rumbled and
I looked up at the clock that I realized I’d managed to skip
lunch. I looked at the pile of paper on my desk and decided that I
couldn’t risk the time it would take to hop over to the Chinese
joint across the street that did the really good chow mein—if I
stepped away from this desk for more than five minutes, the paperwork
would probably start reproducing.

Cafeteria vending machine it would have
to be. Maybe if I was lucky they would still have the Garden Salsa
flavor of Sun Chips, and the Snickers would have been replaced
recently enough that their peanuts wouldn’t have turned to
brittle dust with age.

Yeah, I know, dream big.

I had almost trotted down to the
cafeteria when I heard the not-so-dulcet tones of bragging
Douchebros, their voices extra loud, like they wanted to make sure
that no one suffered the tragedy of not hearing their extremely
important conversation.

Worse, their voices were heading
directly towards me.

I so didn’t have the energy to
deal with their bullshit right now. Their ‘lighthearted’
teasing about my failure to secure the Knox deal, their leering
comments about my outfit and my body, their sexist speculations about
the way I had earned this job. All of that took way more energy than
I had at this moment. It probably took more energy than a power plant
produced in a year.

So I hid instead.

I looked around, rapidly locating a
blind spot behind some tarp where the maintenance guys still hadn’t
finished installing the new water fountain. I’d been annoyed
about this for months—how hard is it to put the new one in
after you’ve taken the old one out?—but now I sent a
silent thank you to them for dragging their feet, and ducked behind
the blue plastic.

Oh God, please let this tarp be too
opaque for me to cast a shadow. If they catch me hiding out here from
them, they’ll never let me hear the end of it.

As they drew closer, I began to be able
to make out some words and sentences. Something seemed off about the
conversation, though—there were long stretches of silence,
something the Douchebros would normally never tolerate. Were they on
the phone?

“Yeah, yeah, that’s
awesome, Chuck,” Chad was saying as he and his entourage drew
level with me. “So you got this takeover offer when?”

My blood ran cold. A takeover offer.
That they were discussing with Chuck.

They had to be talking about Knox
Liquors.

What would this do to Hunter?

“What’s the problem, bro?”
another Douchebro put in. “Sounds like easy money, so why’s
he dragging his feet?”

The distant sound of Chuck’s
voice grew muffled as Chad covered the speaker with his hand.
“Because of Hunter fucking Knox, bro, duh. There’s a lot
of legal jazz that means we’d need Hunter’s agreement and
voting shares to sell. There’s no way that tool’s going
to go for it.”

Relief washed through me, and a spark
of hope. So it wasn’t a done deal. There still might be a way
to stop this.

“No, no, dude, I totally hear
what you’re saying…” Chad’s voice and the
footsteps of his coterie began to fade, and then die away.

My mind was already racing ahead of
them.

I was furious, yes, and worried, and
still guilty—but most of all, I was thinking.

This might not just be a travesty, it
might be….an opportunity.

It was time for some espionage.