Billionaire With a Twist (5 page)

Honestly, if she’d been a general
in The War Between the States, the entire Union army would’ve
given up and gone home in despair before a single shot was fired, and
probably spent the rest of their lives crying on their wives’
shoulders about how impossible it was to win her approval.

Which is all to say that if the food
weren’t so delicious, and if I wouldn’t have major guilt
about leaving Paige to fend for herself, I’d have thrown myself
out the plantation-style windows at one of these dinners at least
five years ago, if not earlier.

My mother interrupted my ruminations
with a question tailor-made to prove my point.

“Is that how you’re wearing
your hair now, dear?”

Well, obviously, Mom. “Yes.”

“But it looks so nice when you
wear it back from your face,” she said with a frown. “Is
loose hair really considered professional these days? Honestly,
Allison. And besides, you don’t want men to think you’re
not ready to settle down.”

“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.

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?