Billionaire With a Twist 3 (3 page)

What the hell was Hunter doing here?
He couldn’t really be fishing, could he? I mean, yes, he was
allowed to have hobbies I didn’t know about—in the grand
scheme of things, liking fishing was a teeny tiny thing compared to
some of the things I didn’t know about him—but why was he
fishing
now
? Maybe Martha had misunderstood. Maybe Hunter was
putting together his big plan to save the company here; maybe the
isolation and serenity helped him think or something.

I mean, it was mostly making me think
of urban legends about hillbilly cannibal axe-murderers, but
different strokes for different folks.

After about thirty minutes of my GPS’
calm British voice directing me to make this turn or that turn, I
rounded a corner and saw the lake. It was larger than the one by the
manor, and more wild-looking, its edges rolling and blurring and
disappearing into tiny inlets like the fingers of a vast hand. The
cabin was tucked back by one of those little inlets, with rough-hewn
logs and a blue granite chimney, covered in ivy and moss and looking
like it was becoming a part of the landscape itself.

Even in the dark, I could imagine how
beautiful it would look by daylight, how the trees would be lit
emerald green and the lake sapphire blue, how the sky would stretch
on forever, interrupted only by the sight of a bird on the wing.

In a place like this, you could imagine
that you were the last person on earth.

Was that what Hunter wanted to imagine?

I parked the car and waited for a
minute, gathering my courage. I was doing the right thing. I was.

Now that the engine of my car was off,
the silence seemed to envelop everything. I could hear the rustle of
the breeze through the leaves, the lapping of the lake water against
the sandy shore. A slight slap as those waves hit the dock and the
rowboat bobbed off to the side.

Surely Hunter had heard me pull in. Why
hadn’t he come out? Was he at one of those curtained windows,
just watching and waiting? Was he going to make me come to him?

Well, that was fair.

I squared my shoulders and left the
car. Struggled to keep my posture straight and my face pleasantly
neutral as I made my way up the path. I took a deep breath, and
knocked on the door.

It banged open like a gunshot.

“Hunter!”

His name was torn from my mouth in a
gasp.

He glowered, leaning heavily on the
doorway in a rumpled plaid button-up and jeans that looked like they
had seen more mud and engine grease than detergent in the sum total
of their lives. He was grizzled and unshaven, his hair mussed and his
eyes narrowed.

“What the hell are you doing
here?”

And then he grabbed me by the shoulders
and pulled me inside.

I was stunned into silence as I gazed
up at him.

Hunter looked terrible.

I mean, he was still gorgeous, you
couldn’t change that with a chisel, but he also looked like
he’d been drinking for two weeks solid, and had only
occasionally remembered to bathe. His eyes on me were furious, but
underneath it I saw the unmistakable gleam of lust. Or was I
imagining it?

“I asked what you were doing
here,” he repeated slowly, his voice barely containing his
rage. Even still, I felt my body responding to the heat rolling off
of him, the press of his hands against my shoulders, the way our eyes
locked.

Words failed me. What I wanted right
then was to shove him against a wall and run my fingers down his
chest, his tight abs, slip them under the waistband of his jeans to
wrap around that thick, hot—
no!
I was here for a reason,
a very important reason.

“I came here to, um…”
Speech left me again as I saw his fiery gaze flick down to my lips,
then dip lower to my collarbone, my cleavage—God how I wanted
him to put his hands where his eyes were—before jumping back up
again. He was still glowering at me like I was a Pinkerton agent come
to check up on whether he was keeping an illegal moonshine still.

I tried again. “Hunter, I just—”
I’m so glad to see you, it’s so good to see you, oh
God, are you okay, oh, I wish I could say any of these things out
loud and not risk getting shoved back out onto the porch and the door
slammed in my face…
“We need to talk.”

“Do we now?” he said,
stony-faced.

“Yes. We do.”

I pulled away from his grip and his
hypnotic eyes and pushed past him, further into the house. It was
even more rustic than my cabin back at the estate had been; there was
a fridge and stove, but that was about the only sign that this cabin
existed in the twenty-first century. Everything else was wool rugs
and antlers and animal hides, hand-hewn wooden tables and a lumpy
home-made couch. A door off to the right looked like it might lead to
a bedroom; I caught a glimpse of more wood.

I pulled myself back to the present; I
hadn’t come out here to gawk at his living quarters. “What’s
going on at the company? Have you seen the new campaign? You
have
to have seen the new campaign. How could that have happened? Can we
stop it? We have to stop it! How do you think we can—”

“I haven’t seen them, and I
have no intention of seeing them,” Hunter snapped. “And
I’ll thank you not to bring them up again.”

He strode past me to rummage in the
fridge for a cooler, a dented red and white number. He opened it to
check the number of bottles, added a few more from a half-empty case
on the floor. And of course I definitely did not examine the curve of
his ass in those jeans as he leaned over, didn’t have to force
myself not to drool. Not for a second.

“How can you say that?” I
demanded. “This is your legacy!”

“Not anymore,” he said,
grabbing at a bait box, which he balanced on top of the cooler; he
picked up a fishing pole with the other hand. “I’m just
being practical. Knowing the specifics isn’t going to change
one damn thing, so I’d rather not know. Here’s all I need
to understand: I lost control, the board outvoted me, and now it’s
all over. See how simple that was? Or did you think things would turn
out differently?”

He shot a glare at me that could’ve
stripped paint, and stormed through the open door back outside.

I followed. “But—”

“I’m done listening to
you,” he interrupted. He was making his way to the dock, his
strides long, impatient. “I listened to you once before and
look where it got me.”

The words hit me like a punch to the
throat.

I pushed back at the pain, spluttering,
“Fine, don’t take my advice on what to do. But do
something
. I can’t believe you’re just sitting
here doing nothing at all!”

He bared his teeth in what was
technically a smile, but looked like it was causing him actual pain.
“Oh, I’m not doing nothing. I’ve got plans. Me, the
lake, some fishing and beer. It’s golden.”

“Oh, great plans,” I said
sarcastically. “Why didn’t I think of that? That’ll
definitely save your family name, for sure.”

His jaw tensed for just a second, his
eyes opening wide enough that I thought I glimpsed a moment of true
hurt, like a puppy who had been kicked. Then he wheeled around and
stomped away down the length of the dock without saying anything.

Damn that man!

I hustled on after him, my sensible
heels clicking rapidly against the wood of the dock. I followed him
right on into the boat, which he was not expecting. His eyes darted
over the side, skimming the surrounding lake water, and for a minute
I thought he was going to try to get me off the boat by force.

“You wouldn’t dare,”
I said, though we both knew full well that he would. That is, if
things were better between us. And then he’d jump in after me
and pull me close, his hot tongue searching the corners of my mouth
as my legs wrapped around his hard torso—ah, and there my brain
went again, malfunctioning with dirty thoughts.

Instead of making my dreams come true,
Hunter just sighed and turned away from me, opting for the
oh-so-much-more-mature option of pretending I didn’t exist.
Which was quite a feat considering how small the boat was.

The muscles in his arms rippled as he
rowed us out in the center of the lake. The moon was high in the sky,
lighting each wavelet and cat-tail with ethereal beauty. Everything
looked gilded in silver.

“This is a lovely place,” I
said, trying for a more neutral topic to start with. “Do you
come here often?”

“Shush,” he said, still not
looking at me. “You’re going to scare the fish away with
all your talking.”

Had that man actually just
shushed
me?

You know what? Fuck neutral topics.

“Why the fuck do you care more
about fish than about the company?” I snapped.

His hand clenched tighter around the
oar. “I think the bigger mystery is why you’re acting as
if you care at all. After all, you told Chuck I wasn’t fit to
lead, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t mean it like
that!” I burst out, furious and impatient and ashamed all at
once. “I mean—God, Hunter, I was so drunk and I was
jealous and he was egging me on and even then I didn’t say the
things the way he said I did, he twisted them all around—you
have to believe me, Hunter, he was playing me, he’s playing
both of us right now—”

For a second I thought I saw something
soften in his posture, as if he were about to turn toward me. Then he
went stiff again. “I’m really not interested in all
that,” he said coolly. “You say he twisted things? Fine.
I believe you. He did it, and it’s done, and I don’t
really care. It’s not my company anymore.”

Impossible. Hunter cared about the
company so much. It was in his blood. He couldn’t just turn
that off like a faucet.

He couldn’t turn off his feelings
for me like that, either—could he?

“How can you not care? We were—we
were—”

I fumbled for the words. What had we
been to each other? Surely we had been something.

“We were barely anything.”
Hunter’s voice seemed to answer my very thoughts. “And
then it ended. Now, can you
please
be quiet? This conversation
is putting me to sleep.”

And then that bastard stowed his oars,
leaned back against the side of the boat, and pulled his cap down
over his face, all set to fall straight to sleep.

He wasn’t actually going to go to
sleep on me, was—

He was already snoring.

Unbe-fucking-lievable. I stared at him,
so frustrated I was sure there must be smoke coming out of my ears.

Who was this man? It couldn’t be
Hunter Knox. Hunter Knox would never be so beat down and defeated,
hiding out in a shack and pretending not to care—he was
pretending not to care, wasn’t he? It was just an act?

It had to just be an act. The
alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

As I stared at Hunter I set my jaw,
molding my frustration into determination. This business was his
family heritage, his whole world; I needed to get him back up on his
feet and engaged in the company—and life—well, and maybe
me, too?—again.

If only I had one single idea how to do
that.

#

“Um, Hunter?”

From the other end of the boat, he gave
a lazy groan.

“Hunter!” I said more
urgently.

He raised his cap just high enough to
glare at me through half-lidded eyes. “I knew this silence was
too good to be true.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m a bitch,
whatever,” I snapped. “You can go back to your sweet
dreams in a second, but first, tell me: is the sky supposed to be
doing that?”

Specifically, the sky was swirling in
different shades of purple-black and grey, with faint lightning
sparking off in the distance. It had also gone eerily quiet.

Hunter scrambled upright, his hat
falling off behind him. “Shit, no. We got to get this boat in
to land. Storm’s on the way.”

He grabbed the oars and started rowing
back so quickly that I began to get even more nervous. I’d
assumed that if Hunter had taken us out earlier, he must have known
the forecast wasn’t supposed to get too bad. That he hadn’t
was…worrying.

Almost as worrying as the way the wind
was starting to whip the waves against us.

Still, Hunter was making good time, and
we were almost halfway across the lake towards the cabin before I
knew it. I counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder
as rain began to splatter down on my face; the body of the storm was
still almost twenty miles away.

There was probably time.

Hunter swore. I glanced back over at
him and saw him rubbing a weeping blister on his thumb. He was
sweating and out of breath, which didn’t seem like him either;
he must have gotten out of shape during this retreat.

“Can I help?” I offered.

“I think you’ve helped
quite enough,” he said through gritted teeth.

It seemed like at some point I should
be getting inured to the hurt, and yet each time he spoke like this
to me, the pain lanced into my heart once more. Tears sprang to my
eyes, but I managed to keep them from falling.

“How long are you going to keep
punishing me for this, Hunter?” I asked, my voice breaking.

“I’m not punishing you,”
he snapped. “I’m just doing what’s best for me, and
high time I did too.”

“I just want to help—”
I pleaded, gesturing towards the oars.

“I don’t need your help!”
he practically roared. He blocked my gesture as if I were making an
actual grab for the oars, and I wobbled, off balance. I tried to grab
at the side of the boat, but at the same moment a wave slapped
against our hull, the world spun—

And our boat tipped.

Icy water engulfed me as I plunged into
the dark water, shocking every inch of my body, making my muscles
seize up and contract. I kicked with everything I had and breached
the surface, coughing and gasping for breath, bobbing up and down
like a cork in the water, casting desperately about for something to
grab onto—