Billionaire With a Twist 2 (5 page)

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It was an hour since we’d pulled
into the swanky store parking lot with a screech of tires that would
have made an action hero envious, and we were only now all the way to
the dressing room stage of the proceedings.

“Show me what you got!”
Martha’s impatient voice called out from the other side of the
doors.

“Give me a sec!” I pulled
the hem to straighten it and stepped out.

“Oh, honey, no, no, no,”
Martha said immediately.

My face fell.

“The A-line is a good cut for
you!” she added quickly. “Really emphasizes your good
points. And the silk? Thailand-sourced, top notch, points for that.
It’s just the color. Saffron yellow? Who do you think you are,
Viola Davis?”

I looked in the mirror again and
conceded that she had a point. The yellow made my skin look like I
was a jaundice victim.

“How do you know all this stuff?”
I asked, retreating back into the changing room.

Martha snorted. “What, I can’t
know things?”

“Of course you can,” I
said, slightly muffled as I pulled the dress over my head. “I
just expect you to know, like, car stuff, and secret tips for getting
a few dozen guys mooning over you.”

“Oh, I got that too.” I
could hear the grin in her voice. “But just ‘cause I go
with the comfortable and sexually intimidating wardrobe of tank tops,
dungarees, and combat boots these days doesn’t mean I didn’t
have a fashionista past.”

“Did you?” I asked, trying
for the life of me to picture it.

“No,” she admitted. “But
hey, you don’t have to eat a pie to know how to roll the
crust.”

I pulled on Dress #2, one I’d
picked for the ethereal ruffles cascading down the skirt.

“So how come there’s all
this big fire for a new dress?” Martha asked. “I mean,
don’t you have any nice outfits you could ship from home?”
Her voice turned teasing. “Or has Hunter seen those already?”

Hunter had seen a lot more of me than
my dresses, but I wasn’t in the mood for Hunter-related banter.
“I can actually make decisions without thinking about Hunter’s
reaction, thanks.”

I slammed the door open harder than it
probably warranted.

Martha considered my outfit for a few
seconds, then shook her head regretfully. “The color’s
better, and you almost make those ruffles work, but damn girl, we
need to leave the mermaids back in the eighties with all the other
mistakes of that decade.”

I snorted. “If there’s any
room.”

I clomped back into the dressing room
and pulled the bolt, before mournfully contemplating my remaining
options. There were a lot of them, and I wasn’t sure I had the
energy to keep getting shot down. Maybe this had been a bad idea.

“Hey, though,” Martha said
in a voice that was clearly meant to be cheering me up. “At
least the bimbo he’s dating now looks like you. Shows how
hung-up on you he is.”

“That bimbo is my
sister
,”
I said.

There was an awkward silence, and then
Martha cleared her throat. “Oh.”

I halfway expected her to jump into an
impassioned defense of her hero, but she stayed silent. I guess she
knew there were some things you just couldn’t defend.

I was weirdly…disappointed?...about
it, though. Like I had maybe thought that Martha would have some
perfect excuse for Hunter, and then I could stop being so angry at
him and maybe even stop yearning for him and maybe, finally, have a
normal client-advertiser relationship without all this Romeo and
Juliet bullshit.

Yeah, and pigs would fly over the moon.

I made some last minute adjustments to
the criss-crossing shoulder-straps of Dress #3 and braced myself for
another round of fashion scorn.

I came out, and Martha’s mouth
fell open.

“That bad?” I said,
wincing.

Martha shook her head, eyes as wide as
a goldfish. “Girl, I am seriously considering switching teams.”

“That good?”

“Daaaay-um. First of all, classic
black. Second of all, construction: look at that plunging neckline
that still manages to keep you covered, and the way the back hugs
your ass without being trashy. Third of all, have you seen that
hand-stitching? No, you have not, because it is perfect and not
calling attention to itself.”

I spun slowly, admiring myself in the
mirror, running my hands over the smooth ebony satin, watching the
way the cloth rippled in an artistically asymmetrical line around my
knees. “You’re sure it works?”

“Any guy would be lucky to have
your fine self,” Martha asserted.

I looked at myself in the mirror, my
curls falling on my bare shoulders, my calves caressed by soft
fabric. My eyes glowing with delight in myself.

She was damn right.

The Kadiatu Suites was a swank, modern
hotel, all polished white marble and champagne silk drapes. The lush
carpet swallowed all sound until the noise of the crowd was barely a
genteel murmur and the light clink of glasses. Oil paintings from
European countries with names I couldn’t pronounce shared space
on the walls with classic African tribal art, and waiters in tuxedos
that most doctors couldn’t afford swanned elegantly through all
the salons and lounges with their high-vaulted ceilings, offering
chocolate-dipped strawberries, ladyfingers, miniature cups of
tiramisu, and tiny custard tarts topped with blueberries,
blackberries, and a butterscotch drizzle. It was all a welcome change
from the gorgeous but admittedly rustic beauty of Hunter Knox’s
plantation, and under normal circumstances, I would have been busy
soaking up all the glamour like a leafy tree in the sun.

But somehow, none of this could make up
for the company I was having to keep.

“It is lovely, isn’t it?”
Chuck said at my shoulder. “I could almost believe we’re
someplace civilized. How soon ‘til you think someone pulls out
a rifle and shoots the chandelier?”

I smiled as pleasantly as I could and
changed the subject. “What a nice tuxedo you have. Tell me, do
you and Hunter have the same tailor?”

“Clothes, clothes, clothes,”
Chad said with an eye-roll, lounging against the nearby table with
the rest of his Douchebro posse. Unbelievably, they had all decided
that it was completely kosher to keep their collars popped at a
formal event. “Ladies be shoppin’, am I right, Chuck?”

Chuck gave a little derisive laugh.
“Oh, gentlemen, let’s let the lady have her fun.”
He turned his patronizing gaze on me. “Why don’t you tell
us all about your little outfit? Was it very expensive? Or was it a
gift from…a special friend?”

The Douchebros snickered. My smile was
starting to get painful. By the end of the night I might need to have
it surgically removed with a chisel.

I was doing my best to stay on Chuck’s
good side, at least until the results from my ad campaign were in,
and that meant doing my best to smile at his jokes and ignore the
Douchebros. I only had to make nice until they were distracted by
some passing starlet’s tits, and then I could get back to my
main mission: Operation Charm. Target? The members of the board.

I’d already chatted to Mrs.
Aaronovitch about her dog-breeding program, promised to speak to a
Yale admissions officer for Mr. Stiefvater’s son with the low
grades but promising extracurricular set, and chatted about
volunteering for one of Ms. McGuire’s pet causes, alligator
conservation.

And then I had carefully guided the all
those conversations toward the wonderful job I thought Hunter was
doing with the company, and the exciting future of Knox Liquors once
my ads had hit the world. And if you think it’s easy to guide a
conversation from the rate of dental decay in captive alligators
gathered from the Everglades, to the future of a bourbon company, you
are sadly mistaken.

But it would all be worth it, once I
had proven myself.

I surveyed the crowd for my next target
and spotted Ben Minister, a portly gentleman of fifty with a walrus
mustache, a spotless silver suit, and twinkly green eyes. I quickly
reviewed my knowledge of him: used to breed Greyhounds, tended to
vote moderate candidates, had spearheaded a clean-up of the local
pond after two small children caught sicknesses swimming there.

“Mr. Minister!” I flashed
him the winning smile that had disposed teachers kindly toward me
since kindergarten. “Will you join us? I was hoping to get some
news from the horse’s mouth on how the Margaret Lake clean-up
is progressing.”

“Certainly, certainly,” he
said, his voice like a finely oiled piece of old mahogany that had
only just begun to crack and creak in the humid Southern air. “You’re
that young lady down from D.C., aren’t you? What do you think
of us barbarians down here in the jungle?”

“I think it’s
beautiful
down here,” I insisted passionately, and I wasn’t even
acting. I couldn’t have lied about something like this. “The
forests, the hills—even the light over the swamps. Sometimes I
watch the sun going down over the lake at Hunter’s plantation—”

“Bet that’s not the only
thing ‘going down’ at Hunter’s plantation,”
one of the Douchebros muttered. The rest of the posse snickered and
high-fived him.

“Excuse me?” Mr. Minister
said in a tone that could have formed frost on palm leaves. “What
did you just say?”

That’s right, boys. Never impugn
a lady’s honor in front of an old-fashioned Southern gentleman.

But Chuck pulled together a fairly
innocent look, and let his down-home accent that he usually worked so
hard to conceal seep back into his voice. “Oh, nothing, sir. We
were just hoping that Ally here was about to share what she’s
been working on all this time at the Knox place. She’s been
spending so much time on it, and we purely hope it’s something
we can help her out on.”

Help yourself to the credit for, you
mean
, I thought.

“Yeah, Ally,” one of newest
Douchebros, Seth, piped up. “Let’s hear all about this
great new rebrand.”

Ben Minister raised his brows. “I
admit I am rather intrigued myself. Hunter has been playing things
quite close to his vest.”

“Well, I don’t want to
spoil the big reveal for him,” I hedged. “He’s put
so much work into unveiling it at the anniversary party; I couldn’t
go and steal his thunder like that.”

“Understandable, completely
understandable,” Mr. Minister agreed. “But surely you
could give us a few hints…?”

And damn, I couldn’t refuse, not
without looking like a flake who hadn’t been doing any real
work. I had to tell him something at least a little bit concrete,
even though I could see the Douchebros practically salivating, eager
to get their grimy paws on my concepts.

“Well,” I began hesitantly,
“it’s focusing on a lot of the history of the product.
We’ve been collecting some oral histories from local sources—”

“Booo-ring!” Chad said with
an eye roll that made me concerned for the strain on his facial
muscles. “The only oral sources the American public wants are a
hot blonde in a—”

Chuck discreetly elbowed him in the
ribs.

“I think what my colleague is
saying,” he went on smoothly, “is that while Miss
Bartlett’s plan is certainly noble, it is also untried. Whereas
his own marketing strategy has been the basis for every successful ad
campaign since the advent of behaviorism and Dr. Skinner. New ideas
are enticing, of course, but a man of your commitments—so
noble, by the way, I was so pleased to see someone standing up for
his community—a man of your sizeable commitments can hardly
afford to take on such a risk when a tried and true method presents
itself as an alternative.”

Minister looked back and forth between
Chad and Chuck, filled with distaste for the former, and wavering
towards the reasonable-sounding words of the latter. He had almost
forgotten I existed. Now would be the perfect time to remind him.

“If by ‘tried and true,’
you mean ‘tired,’ then sure. Strategies don’t work
perfectly forever. The numbers already show the American public is
getting tired of being talked down to. In fact—”

And then I saw Hunter and Paige, and I
forgot what words were.

Paige was looking evanescently
beautiful in a gauzy princess gown of pale peach pink, her tresses
swept up into something out of a Cinderella storybook. Her smile lit
the room.

And Hunter…

A black tuxedo hugged every muscled
inch of his body, a deep red tie and pocket square flashing like
blood against it. His shirt was golden in a way that brought out the
feral energy of his eyes. That barely contained energy was in his
movements too, quick, sharp, a predator on the prowl. A grin lifted
his lips, the light glinting off his teeth.

His hand was resting possessively, as
if its placement were perfectly natural, on the small of my sister’s
back.

“Excuse me?” Ben Minister’s
voice intruded through my haze. “Miss Bartlett? Are you quite
all right?”

“Well, she was trying to do
math,” Chad said, “probably strained something. You know
lady brains can’t handle that stuff.”

Mr. Minister’s lips thinned, and
Chuck looked as though he would murder his current ally if there were
fewer witnesses. It was probably easier to be business partners with
sexist pieces of shit when they were less obvious, but Chuck had the
tools he had.

“Sorry, I thought I saw someone I
knew for a minute there,” I said with a bright smile, forcing
my attention back onto the battle at hand. And at least this was a
battle that I knew could be won. “I think you’ll find I
know my mathematics quite well. In fact, if we look at sales figures
for liquor companies for the past three decades—”

I very determinedly kept my eyes on the
board member, and not on the rest of the party, as I resumed my
attack on the Douchebros’ allegations. I very determinedly
resisted scanning the crowd, or listening for the sound of familiar
footsteps.