Billionaire With a Twist 2 (2 page)

Thankfully, I have a big sister to save
me.

“I have to visit the ladies’
room,” Paige announced. “Ally, will you come with me?”

#

“Look at this fucking bathroom,”
I said, slapping my purse down on the green marble counter. “Who
the fuck does it think it’s fooling?”

Paige raised an amused eyebrow. “The
bathroom. Really.”

“Really!” I insisted. “It’s
all gleaming and pristine and shit like it isn’t fifteen
minutes from one of the biggest hotspots of homelessness in the city.
Damn lying bathroom.”

Paige very kindly lowered her eyebrow
and didn’t say a single word about projection as she fixed her
make-up in the mirror. She just reached over and patted my hand with
her free one and said, “I’m really sorry about Mom. She
doesn’t mean to ignore you like this.”

“Nah, it just comes naturally to
her.” I eyed my reflection morosely. My lipstick was starting
to smear. I should fix it. On second thought, why bother? No one
would care.

“She’s…” Paige
hesitated. It was difficult for someone as nice and averse to lying
as Paige to form a full sentence about Mom sometimes. “I think
she’s just so nervous. She looks at Hunter like this great
catch, and she’s overdoing it trying to snag him. Being rude to
you, and overly critical…you don’t deserve it.”
Her hand found mine and squeezed it. “Not that you ever do.”

My eyes were suspiciously wet. “And
it’s not your fault, Paigey.”

I squeezed her hand back.

She smiled at me in the mirror, relief
making her look even prettier. She relaxed slightly, pulling out her
mascara to touch up her eyes. “I’m not the biggest fan of
these fix-ups either. How am I supposed to find out if I even like
the guy if she’s too busy selling me like I’m a side of
bacon?” She pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Still, this
one is cute!”

“Sure. I guess.” I sounded
about as convincing as a ten-year-old in a liquor store with a fake
I.D.

“Did you get a load of those
eyes? And damn but he is lucky we’re in a red state carrying
around those guns!” She snickered. “Those are some
firearms I wouldn’t mind getting up close and personal with!”

She couldn’t know how she was
hurting me. She never would have said those things otherwise. I clung
to this knowledge even as I clung to the countertop, my knuckles
turning white. I was fine. Fine. Totally fine.

I was not going to ruin Paige’s
happiness by doing something stupid, like telling her about Hunter
and I (what Hunter and me? There
was
no Hunter and me) or
crying.

Not that crying was particularly on my
mind. That was just an example. I wasn’t thinking about crying.
Not even a little bit.

“But won’t it be weird
working for him if he’s dating your sister?” she asked,
her forehead creased in concern, her eyes wide. “I don’t
want to mess up your big shot at a promotion.”

It will be extremely weird!
I
wanted to shout.
It will be weirder than the weirdest thing from
the weirdest episode of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!

But I didn’t.

“I can handle it,” I said
instead. “There’s no conflict.” The lie burned.

“Well, if you’re sure it’s
okay…”

No, it’s not okay! It’s
the exact opposite of okay!

“Couldn’t be more okay,”
I assured her. “I mean, as long as you don’t feel like
you have to endure his bad jokes just to help me out.” I tried
to smile.

“After my last two boyfriends,
any sense of humor at all is going to be a blessing,” Paige
said with a grin. She hugged me. “I have the best sister ever!”

Yep, I was a damn fine sister. If you
ignored the part where I lied blatantly to the one person who had
always looked out for me. But it was for her own good, her own
happiness. And probably mine, too. Right? In the long run? Totally.
For sure.

I followed Paige back to our table, a
fake smile on my face, lead in my stomach, and trepidation in my
heart for the amount of match-making and flirting I was going to have
to witness before we even got to dessert. And all with the knowledge
that I could have stopped it, if I’d said one word to either
Paige or Hunter.

I was my own worst enemy, and I had no
idea how to call a ceasefire.

I pressed down harder on the gas pedal,
and savored the rush of the wind through my hair. Barely saw the
kudzu-covered vines rush past in a blur of green, or the occasional
boulders jutting up through the earth. I was out on the back roads,
lost in the rolling hills and barren fields, and I didn’t care
to be found.

I wanted to lose myself in the rush, in
the speed, in the rolling landscape, but I couldn’t escape the
pictures running through my head. Pictures of Hunter and Paige,
laughing and talking and smiling…together.

Together…I could learn to hate
that damn word.

I wasn’t driving anywhere in
particular, just driving. Trying to get away from those pictures,
those pictures that twisted up my insides with how sad they made me,
because two people I cared about were happy, so shouldn’t I be
happy? But I couldn’t be. I couldn’t make myself be. And
the pictures caught up with me no matter how hard I pressed the gas
pedal.

I knew I couldn’t go home—I
mean, back to Hunter’s estate. What if Paige was there? What if
Paige was still there
in the morning
? I couldn’t face
that. I couldn’t even begin to think about facing that.

I’d really backed myself into a
corner here, and I had no idea what I was going to do next.

But I’d be fine. Of course I’d
be fine. After all, I couldn’t date Hunter anyway. I was
focused on my career, like I should be. Kicking ass and taking names,
proving the Douchebros wrong and almost driving my car into a tree—

“Aaaaaaaaaah, shit shit shit!”
I hit the brakes just in time, screeching to a halt before I could
end all my angsting prematurely via an oak that looked like it had
survived Sherman’s March. I leaned back against the driver’s
seat, breathing heavily, trying to slow down my heart. Shit. I’d
almost gotten myself killed. No guy was worth that.

I just needed a moment. I just needed
to relax.

Too bad I could barely remember how to
relax anymore.

Then I saw the glow from the dive bar’s
neon lights in the distance, and I thought I just might be able to
remember.

#

The lights spluttered as I entered the
bar, casting flickering orange and blue shadows on the grimy walls
hung with moth-eaten hunting trophies. The jukebox blared out an old
blues tune with a soulful wail, and the cigarette smoke hung as heavy
as the clouds in my soul.

Perfect.

I slid onto a cracked red leather bar
stool next to a bunch of old biker types with mustaches that could
have doubled as their motorcycles’ handlebars, wearing more
leather than a herd of Angus cattle. They shot me a surprised look,
but apparently one look at my face was enough to settle the question
of why a city slicker was patronizing their establishment, and they
went right back to what sounded like a well-worn argument about the
virtues of American-made motors.

The bartender was an older fellow with
hair that was the whitest thing in the whole dingy place. “What’ll
it be, little lady?”

I surveyed the row of dusty bottles
behind him and saw a few that looked promising. “Tequila,
please.”

“Any particular kind?”

“Bring me your top three.”

He poured the shots, and I tossed the
first one back quickly, feeling the burn travel through my throat
down to my stomach. The sweet icy almost-pain of it was perfect,
sandpaper scraping away the sticky sweet taste of all the nicey-nice
deception I’d been trying to practice lately.

The bartender cracked a surprisingly
gentle smile. “You drink that like it done you a personal
injury.”

I shrugged. “Got to take it out
on somebody. And the law frowns on me taking it out on the one who
deserves it.”

“Ain’t that the same old
story,” he said, nodding appreciatively at my logic. He turned
toward the biker guys by the jukebox, and hollered to them: “Sonny!
Put on that song!”

“What song?” a guy with
more silver jewelry than an entire Nevada mine asked.

“Don’t you ‘what
song’ me!” the bartender said with a roll of his eyes.
“The song that lady with the leopard print tights sings about a
man what done her wrong!”

“Oh, that song. Well, why didn’t
you just say?” He whacked the jukebox and a new mournful wail
issued from it, this one with a distinctly country twang.

“Dolly Parton,” the
bartender said thoughtfully, his face creased in bliss. “Ain’t
a thing about heartbreak that woman don’t know.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, tossing
back the second shot. It burned even more, and I coughed. In my
experience, alcohol worked a damn sight better than country music
when it came to heartbreak. Still, it’d been a sweet gesture on
his part. “I’d appreciate it if you could keep these
coming.”

The bikers joined us up at the bar.
They looked considerably less threatening as they bobbed their heads
to the song’s melody. One of them even had a twinkle in his eye
that reminded me of my late grandpa, if Gramps had had a tattoo on
his shoulder of a cobra sinking its fangs into a heart while an eagle
dug its claws into the cobra’s coils.

Cobra Tattoo caught me staring and
smiled. “Ah, I see that old bit of ink’s caught your eye.
A little souvenir from my own piece of heartbreak.” His eyes
grew misty. “Juniper Raleigh, her name was, and I thought she
set the stars in the sky. Hair like a bonfire and eyes like
fireworks. I courted her for damn near five years before she’d
say yes to a night at the pictures, but in the end she said yes to
marriage too.”

“That doesn’t sound too
heartbreaking,” I said, my tongue loosened by the tequila. “Did
she break up with you or something?”

“The cancer took her,” he
said simply. “Over in a year. Hell of thing.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt like
the world’s biggest jerk. “Sorry for…well, I guess
I didn’t say that too respectfully.”

“I was only nineteen, and I
thought the world had come crashing down,” he said with a
forgiving smile. “And it had. It always does, with heartbreak.
Other people might not be able to see it, but when your heart’s
in pieces it’s like your own personal Armageddon. I’m not
going to hold a bit of blunt speaking against someone who’s
standing on such trembling ground.”

His simple acceptance threatened to
bring tears to my eyes.

“It’s—a guy,” I
blurted, surprising myself. “I love—no, no, I don’t.
There’s no way I love him. I’ve only just started to know
him. But I
wanted
to get to know him. I wanted to find out if
I could have loved him, really loved him. I wanted that chance. And
now it’s just…” My hand was trembling on the
counter. “It’s just
gone
.”

Shit, this wasn’t what I needed.
I wanted a raucous night out, the sweet numbing of liquor, not a
drunken crying fest. One more shot ought to do it—

I reached for the tequila but Cobra
Tattoo made a gesture like I was reaching for a live cobra, and I
stopped. He strode over and took a sip from the glass; grimaced.

“Dwayne, you letting her drink
this hogwash?”

The bartender—Dwayne,
apparently—shrugged. It was a shrug with a slightly defensive
look. “Figured she was old enough to pick her poison.”

“There’s poison and then
there’s poison.” Cobra Tattoo shook his head at me
severely, or it would have been severely if that kind twinkle in his
eyes hadn’t made him look like a down on his luck cross between
Santa Claus and Dumbledore. “Girlie, this tequila’s no
good. Not that I’m a fan of tequila much in the first place,
but this label? The things they do to an agave plant would make you
cry. For heartbreak you don’t want nothing but the best to ease
that pain, make it burn across your heart before it can fade away.”

Normally I bristled at this much
intimation that I didn’t know what I was doing, but he spoke so
earnestly that I couldn’t bring myself to bite his head off.
“Okay. What tequila should I drink then?”

“Shouldn’t be drinking no
tequila at all! That’s a drink for gals who go on spring break
and show off their titties for a free T-shirt, not a serious stand-up
gal like you.” He clasped my hand like he was trying to pull me
free from quicksand. “You need Knox bourbon. Best in the
South.”

Despite all the talk of heartache, the
friendly conversation had been keeping a portion of the pain at bay.

Until I heard Hunter’s last name.

Pain lanced through me like a sword,
shot through with the memory of his scent and the touch of his mouth.

The way he said my name, the way I had
wanted to hear him say my name…

Great. Even in a hick bar, I couldn’t
escape Hunter.

“No thanks,” I said.

My voice had come out clipped and cold,
and I saw a faint start of surprise from most of the biker guys and
the bartender, but Cobra Tattoo’s expression of kind joviality
never faltered.

“Well, it’s your choice,
but you don’t know what you’re missing.” He sat
down on the stool next to me, leaning back against the counter as his
eyes went misty and far away. “Nothing like it in the world.
First taste of it I had was at the wedding to my Juniper. It was like
someone had taken all the fire in her veins and brewed it up into
magic. I kissed her and the taste of it was on her lips and I never
wanted it to fade.” Sadness seeped into his voice, tinged it
mournful, wistful, resigned. “Drank it for the second time at
her funeral. Brought tears to my eyes with how close it made her
feel. Like I was kissing her all over again. Still drink it on her
anniversary.”