Billionaire With a Twist

by Lila Monroe

  “Really?” I said in as neutral a tone as I could manage, which was not exactly up to the standard of, say, Switzerland. It was hard to stay neutral when all I seemed to remember were constant judgy comments about how I needed bangs to hide my overlarge forehead, and how buns made men think you had accepted your fate as an old maid. “I’ll think about that.”

  What I was going to think about was getting a hot pink mohawk, or shaving my initials into the side of my head, or maybe working on some dreads. Sure, it’d be professional suicide, but wouldn’t the look on my mom’s face be worth it.

  Yes, yes, it would.

  “So, meet any boys lately?” she asked, with a smile so pained and bright I could tell that she was already prepared for my usual answer.

  “No, Mom,” I said, ladling more asparagus onto my plate. Maybe if I kept eating I could finish all the food on the table myself, and then there would be no more reason for me to stay in this house. “And I’ve been out of high school for six years, so I’m dating men these days. They came highly recommended from a trusted source.”

  Paige hid her smile behind a lavender napkin embossed with a cursive B.

  My mother sighed as if I was put on this earth solely to frustrate her. “Very well, Allison, have you met any men lately?”

  “All sorts,” I said cheerfully, deliberately misunderstanding her just to see that moment of shock in her expression. “Men, they’re everywhere! Did you know they make up fifty percent of the population? Who knew?”

  Mother gritted her teeth, making a sound in the back of her throat that bore a remarkable resemblance to a tiger’s warning growl. “I take it from your immature remarks that you haven’t actually gone out on a date in quite some time.”

  Well, wasn’t she perceptive. I stabbed at the asparagus, and briefly entertained the idea of asking her if she’d consider opening up her own psychic hotline: Mrs. Bartlett gazes into the past, present, and future! Her eyes see all—and she is incredibly disappointed in you!

  “I go on plenty of dates,” I said instead, going for a reasonable, middle-of-the-road, we’re-all-adults-here-so-let-me-just-bring-up-some-facts voice. “I went on a date with Josh from Accounting just last month.”

  “One date.” Her voice was flatter than the entire state of Kansas.

  I resisted the urge to swig my entire glass of white wine like a medieval warrior, and daintily sipped from it instead. “Well, he spent the entire evening talking about his golf game and how women have ruined his life, so you know, I took that as a clue to leave him alone to enjoy the rest of his life with his true soul mate, himself.”

  My mother’s lips thinned in disapproval so great it could probably have been seen from space. “Did you even think about taking up golf? It helps to have common interests.”

  “The sport I have hated with a burning passion since I was fourteen?” I said, sweet as cotton candy. “Gosh, no, I can’t believe I didn’t think of that. How could I have been so foolish?”

  Mom’s lips compressed into yet a thinner line. Pretty soon they were going to vanish entirely. “I know you think I’m being unreasonable, dear, but men have very high-pressure lives. It’s on us ladies to accommodate them and smooth away their cares, in exchange for the security they provide us. And if you don’t start reevaluating your standards, before you know it—”

  And here it came, the deep dark scary fairy tale of The Little Girl Who Went Into the Woods and Met the Big Bad Spinsterhood. From here on out, I could tune out the lecture; it would only be the same one I’d heard a thousand times before: I wasn’t getting any younger. There were lots of attractive partners out there. Men are basically superheroes and gods and yet somehow also dumb as a box of rocks, hence the need to ensnare them with your womanly wiles, i.e. make-up, pie-baking, and giggling at every dumbass thing they say.

  Paige squeezed my hand under the table, her face still tilted towards Mom, brightly attentive. Poor Paige. I was the rebellious one, so she always had to be the good one to keep from breaking Mom’s heart. Paige with her straight As and her bright pink prom dresses and her part-time job as a receptionist. Sure, she made room for her party-planning hobby on the side, which I knew she loved, but I also knew she’d always wanted to be an artist. But she’d given up on that dream a long time ago. Instead she was Perfect Paige with her long list of Mom-approved boyfriends, whose faces she looked up into and smiled and smiled and smiled, and sometimes I didn’t think she even saw their individual faces anymore.

  Mom was gathering full steam now, like a locomotive about to make the leap over a broken canyon bridge. She’d be huffing and puffing if she didn’t think it would sound less than genteel. I might be tuning her out, but I could still read her body language like a picture book: this was going to be a long one. Settle back into your chairs, ladies and gentlemen, and the flight attendants will be along shortly to offer you a complimentary beverage during this in-flight movie.

  I only tuned back into the conversation when she mentioned Paige’s name: “And then that old art professor of Paige’s shows up at her work, of all places, and tries to get Paige to enter some of her old paintings in a show, really, I’d be open to it if it was some of her nice watercolor landscapes, but no one wants to see that horrid modernist stuff she got into while she was in college.” She shuddered dramatically, as if Paige’s interest in modernist painting were a particularly mangled dead mouse that had been dropped at her feet.

  Paige looked down at the napkin in her lap, blushing in shame. And I couldn’t let that stand.

  “Uh, obviously people want to see it if her professor is still pursuing it after, what, four years since she took a class,” I said.

  My mom shivered delicately. “Yes, well, certainly not our kind of people. Imagine what that would do to Paige’s prospects for a husband!”

  Paige was still looking at her lap, ashen-faced, as if she had done something terrible like set fire to a school, rather than just having some talent in a field other than husband-finding. I took pity on her and decided to try to draw my mom’s fire.

  “Well, that’s too bad. Oh, hey, that reminds me of this ad we’re putting out for the Grace-and-Harmony personals site—”

  I didn’t even get to the part about how I’d helmed the ad about the gender preference options that my mom would have found really offensive before she interrupted.

  “Darling, please don’t bring up online personals at the dinner table, they’re unspeakably crass.” She raised her eyebrow at me. “I certainly hope you haven’t had to sink to that level. I will not have you consorting with that—that—” she pulled out the strongest insult she was capable of—“riff-raff.”

  Great, first I wasn’t meeting enough men, now, I was trying to meet them the wrong way. “I’m too busy at work to maintain an online profile,” I said, which was technically true, since I hadn’t logged on in months. What can I say, if I wanted constant dick pics I’d sign up for a porn subscription. “We’re actually doing a project with local roots right now, the Knox bourbon—”

  “Why, that company’s not an hour’s drive from here!” my mother said, her voice suddenly strangely delighted. She leaned forward, eyes bright. “Tell me, will you be commuting a great deal?”

  “Er, yeah…” I said slowly, still trying to work out why she’d switched gears from furious to gleeful.

  “And it’s a long-term project?” she asked, her eyes sparkling like those of a mad scientist gathering together all the ingredients needed for a dastardly plan.

  “A few months…” I allowed, hesitantly.

  “Wonderful!” She clapped her hands and stood, practically sprinting to retrieve the dessert, strawberry shortcakes smothered in whipped cream and dusted with pink sugar, from the sideboard. “This calls for a celebration!”

  Wow. My mom had never been so supportive before. What was happening? Was she really so glad that I’d be around more? It seemed more likely that I had just stumbled into an alternate universe where I had a mother who
was actually happy for my successes, but…well…could it be that I had just misunderstood my mother’s motivations? Was she just…lonely?

  “This opportunity will be perfect!” my mother was enthusing, her cheeks glowing as she distributed the shortcakes. She clasped my shoulder. “It’s not too late for you, my darling. So many opportunities! I’ll start calling around this evening, see if any of my friends know about any nice local boys who are still single.”

  My heart dropped, and I could feel my face falling as well. So that was it. Just another match-making scheme, since I would never be a complete person in her eyes unless I was hanging off the arm of a moderately successful man.

  “Mom—”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot.” She rolled her eyes fondly at me, magnanimous in the glow of her planning. “Nice local men.”

  So now I was not only going to have to prove myself while working on my first big assignment—I was going to have to do it while fending off all the sons and nephews of Mom’s chapter of the Queen Bee Society Quilters and Ladies’ Social Club.

  Yeah, that’s an actual organization that she’s not even remotely ashamed to belong to.

  Paige shot me another sympathetic look as my mother chattered on, but she had been too cowed by the previous put-down—not to mention a lifetime of being under my mother’s thumb—to try to divert the conversation.

  “Oh, there are so many suitable candidates!” my mother prattled on in a rapturous ecstasy of match-making. There was no way I was getting her off this now; I’d have about as much luck trying to stop an army tank with a piece of tissue paper.

  So now I just had to revitalize a failing company, show my boss I was more capable than the Douchebros, keep from falling into Hunter’s arms again, and dodge the ‘suitable boys’ my mother was going to be flinging at me like wedding rice.

  When I’d said I liked challenges in my job interview, I hadn’t been thinking of anything like this.

  FIVE

  The birds sounded wrong.

  That was my first muddled thought as I awoke, and as my head started to clear I realized that it wasn’t just the different sounds—more trilling and chirping from songbirds, fewer coos of doves and pigeons—but how clear the sounds were, unobscured by the blaring horns and thumping wheels of traffic outside the window.

  Hunter’s plantation manor was definitely not as bustling as D.C. In theory that should have made it easier to work.

  In practice, this bed was ridiculously comfortable, and I had a feeling that I was going to be using up almost all of my energy just to get out of it.

  I was alone in the bed, by the way.

  I’d arrived on a late flight the night before, and hadn’t seen anyone besides the housekeeper, who’d ushered me into my room, where I’d taken a shower and then passed out from exhaustion. It wasn’t just the late flight that had tired me out; I’d been prepping for this trip for a week with research into past Knox ad campaigns, their financials, and their media presence.

  The fact that there wasn’t a lot of material to work with—Hunter’s grandfather had apparently considered advertising a sin, and federal income-reporting laws a barely avoidable sin—just meant that I had to dig harder for what was out there. My eyes were worn out from staring at microfiche well into the early hours of the morning, and my inbox was crammed full of e-mails from academics regretfully informing me that their archives didn’t contain any of the materials I’d asked about.

  I squinted at the clock beside my bed: six hours of sleep. That was about as much in one night as I’d had all last week.

  Hopefully, there’d be more information for me to work with in the family library. But to find that out, I’d have to get out of bed.

  Sometimes, succumbing to my mother’s plan to get me married off to a wealthy man and never lift a finger again didn’t seem too bad after all.

  I groaned and rolled off the mattress, hitting the floor with a thump. That woke me up slightly more, and I managed to stumble to my suitcase and paw at my clothes. What to wear? The sticky heat meant that my pant-suits were right out; I’d be fine within the air-conditioned manor itself, but my current guesthouse and the library were in separate buildings, and I’d be wanting to tour the fields of grain and cotton so I could snap pictures to send to Sandra, that way she could get some sketches to me as soon as possible. Immersion was the name of the game for this campaign; Hunter was commissioning a new message, new branding, new artwork. It was exciting and terrifying all at once, and I couldn’t wait to get started, and what the hell was I going to wear?

  I looked around the guesthouse in exasperation at my own indecision, noted for the first time with my rested eyes how sumptuous and simultaneously homey it was.

  The bed had simple but clean lines, a frame of solid oak with Egyptian cotton sheets and a hand-stitched red and blue flannel quilt on top. The warped glass in the windows looked as if it stretched back to the War of Northern Aggression, but each pane was as pristine as the day it had been made. The wooden floor glowed like carmine gold with fresh floor polish, and a portrait of a humble soldier—one of Hunter’s ancestor’s—hung over the granite stone fireplace, along with a well-loved rifle.

  All in all, it made me glad I had taken Hunter up on his offer, even if it brought us into awkwardly close proximity.

  Oh, Mr. Knox, I don’t want to put you out, I can stay at a hotel—

  And make you have to commute an hour a day, wasting valuable time? That guesthouse is just sitting empty. You’ll be doing me a favor, giving me a reason to keep Chuck from using it for bottle storage.

  I hadn’t seen Hunter yet, but like I said, I only arrived last night. I probably wouldn’t see him for quite awhile anyway: I had research to do, and the last terse e-mail he sent me said he was busy sorting out production problems with the distillery, something about the recipe being off in the last batch, potentially a problem with carelessness, dissatisfied labor, or even industrial sabotage. He certainly didn’t have time for anything as unimportant as settling me into my current digs.

  I definitely wasn’t disappointed or anything. Nope.

  And I was totally not freaking out about what I was wearing because we had sort of kind of a little bit slept together.

  I just wanted to look professional, and not die of heat at the same time.

  And of course I didn’t want to remind him of what had happened that night, but if I just happened to pick an outfit in which my legs looked particularly stunning...

  No. No. No! I was here to work. That was all.

  I settled on a light cotton floral skirt that swirled modestly around my knees and a sleeveless blue blouse, and then had a quick cup of coffee in my guesthouse’s mini-kitchen. Afterward, my brain finally starting to function properly, I squared my shoulders, grabbed my briefcase, and set out to find the library.

  Just stepping out of the guesthouse took my breath away. The sun glowed golden over the rolling green fields, sheltered at their edges by oaks and willows hung with curtains of Spanish moss, and a stream gurgled blue and pristine along the western edge, its banks dotted with pink and purple flowers.

  The main house rose like a triumphant monument at the very center, circled by lilac and honeysuckle whose heady scent swam through the thick, humid air. My own guesthouse was bedecked with climbing morning glories in pale violet, and the others next to me were garlanded with rows of sunflowers. Just behind them I could see the stables, hear the horses whinnying as grain flowed into their troughs.

  And to the east—a lake, glimmering like liquid sapphire, and on the horizon the edges of the distillery barns and sheds for the production of the famous bourbon. The wind shifted, and a scent of burnt caramel drifted across the air, sweet and sharp and full of promise. It was like I’d actually walked right into a dream.

  The sky was the purest blue I had ever seen, and through my daze I found my arm raising to snap a picture with my cell phone. If Sandra could recreate that color I would barely need to write any copy.
That shade of blue could sell refrigerators to the Inuit.

  The beauty of the estate so gobsmacked me that I couldn’t decide what to do first. I’d intended to visit the library this morning—if I could find it—but I rebelled at the thought of spending time indoors on such a lovely day. Hadn’t I just said that the name of the game was immersion?

  It was time to explore.

  #

  After spending an hour splashing my feet in the stream and meeting all of the horses—the grooms were a little hesitant to let me visit with them, but were won over after their most cantankerous stallion took sugar lumps from my hand—I convinced myself to get back on track and trotted quickly over to the blessedly air-conditioned manor to return to my original quest: the library.

  It ended up being a pretty long quest, since the manor house ended up being larger than some Eastern European countries.

  I didn’t mind, though, because it was also absolutely breathtaking. My mom might put on airs about our heritage, but even with all her efforts, our house could never have dreamed of this opulence: crystal chandeliers, Persian carpets so lush my feet almost disappeared in their weave, gold-framed oil paintings that looked like they’d been taken straight from a museum. I felt like I’d wandered onto the set of a period drama—only the electric lights and air conditioning kept me from feeling like I’d straight-up taken a time machine into the past.

  I might have wandered through those luxurious labyrinthine hallways forever, but after about fifteen minutes my stomach rumbled in response to the delicious smells being wafted from somewhere nearby: sizzling bacon, baking bread, fresh squeezed orange juice…

  It was way past time for a proper breakfast.

  I tried to follow the scent, but instead of leading me to the kitchen, I stumbled into a room full of animal heads. Lions, rhinoceroses, tigers, wolves, cougars, panthers, and bears leered at me with glass eyes from the walls, their mouths twisted in frozen snarls.