Billionaire With a Twist 2 (3 page)

“Homer, are you trying to make
that girl jump off a cliff?” the bartender interrupted. “She
came here to forget her heartbreak, not take on yours too.”

“Well, shit, he’s got a
good point about the liquor though,” interrupted another one,
the deep-voiced one—Sonny, wasn’t it?—who’d
thumped the jukebox into life earlier. “Hell, when my folks
kicked the bucket and I had to take over running the household, that
was when I got my first taste of Knox bourbon. It was sweet but hard,
like a promise and a regret. Can’t nothing beat it for the hard
times.”

“It ain’t just for the hard
times, though,” the bartender protested. “Why, my very
first sip of it was a joyous occasion—birth of my first child,
my daughter Nancy.”

“It’s a rite of passage,
not a consolation or a celebration,” argued another of the
crowd. “You don’t feel a real man ‘til your pappy
or your grandpappy’s given you one of their old bottles to open
up and share. Lets you know they trust you, lets you know they know
you’re ready to carry on the old tradition.”

“Hey,” I interrupted. “You
all going to keep jawing, or are you going to give me a taste of this
famous bourbon?”

There was a shocked silence, and for
several seconds I thought I had pushed it too far.

And then the whole room burst into
laughter.

“I like this one, Dwayne!”
Cobra Tattoo—no, Homer, it was Homer, I should remember that so
‘Cobra Tattoo’ didn’t pop out of my mouth—said.
“Pour her the best you got, so she keeps coming back!”

Dwayne obliged, and I tossed back the
bourbon. This was smokier than what I’d tasted before, a faint
hint of apple hiding in the oak and burnt caramel tones. The burn
kicked in a second later, and oh, it was just like they said. A sweet
shiver, a little bit of pain, and then a reward, not numbness—no,
just a little bit of…what was the word I was looking for?
Relief? No.

Exaltation.

I let out a breath I hadn’t
realized I’d been holding. Loosened muscles I hadn’t
realized I’d been tensing.

Let the tears fall that I hadn’t
realized I’d been hurting myself so badly trying to hold back.

“It takes you like that, often
times,” Homer said knowingly. “Let ‘em flow,
girlie. Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of in a bit of tears.”

“Tears is part and parcel of it,”
another biker said, clapping me on the back. “Rite of passage,
shedding the hurt of the past as you hold onto the good of it and
look to the future—”

And as if my mind was a lock and his
words were a key, suddenly I KNEW.

I knew exactly what direction I needed
to take the brand.

I was on my feet before I knew it.
“This is it!”

“This is what now?”

But the ideas were bursting behind my
eyelids like fireworks, too fast for me to keep up with. Sound bites
flashed through my mind:
the rite of passage, classic Americana
nostalgia. Real people, real memories, a taste of home.
Holding
onto the good of the past as we look to the future.
I could feel
the excitement fizzing through my brain, my hands waving through the
air as if trying to sculpt my ideas out of the ether.

“I know exactly what I need to
do! I know exactly what I have to write, how I have to write it, the
art direction for Sandra, I have to—I need—” I
grabbed at my keys. I knew I was grinning like a crazy person; I
could feel it practically splitting my face, but I couldn’t
care less. “I have to get to work!”

“An artist,” Homer said
with a tolerant grin. “I ought to’ve known.”

“Copywriter,” I said
distractedly, trying to find my car key. My fingers did not seem to
be entirely functioning, they kept slipping all over the place.

“Artists,” the barkeep said
with a sigh. And then he snagged my keys. “More than my job’s
worth to let you drive, girlie. Let me call you a taxi.”

I fished my cell phone out of my purse,
and grinned. “I’ve got something better than a taxi.”

Later, there would be plenty of time to
feel sorry for myself. For this blissful second, though, I was on top
of the world. Because I had the one thing I lived for.

I had an idea.

#

Martha tolerated my nonstop chatter all
the way back to the estate and through the night, retreating to the
kitchen to bring me supplies of coffee and doughnuts. I was so
excited that I barely tasted them as I scarfed them down. I was too
excited for them to be anything but fuel for the whirlwind I was
caught up in, calories to burn as my thoughts ignited in a bonfire of
inspiration. No sooner had I licked the sugar from my fingers than I
was back to work, filling a notebook with my scrawls; my footnotes
had footnotes. When I felt like I couldn’t work by
myself—Martha didn’t count; she was technically still
awake, but her eyes had glazed over hours ago—I pulled out my
phone and woke up my art partner Sandra with numerous apologies.

Twenty minutes and several promises
that I wasn’t too drunk later, we both had our laptops out and
were set to Skype through the whole night—in whispers to keep
from waking her son—hammering out artwork and slogan ideas.
Sandra pulled up some photos of the area, including a Prohibition-era
shot of the very building I had just been drinking in, which Sandra
tinted in the colors of Knox bourbon until it looked good enough to
drink. We tossed font ideas back and forth, trying out each of my new
slogans in different locations—upwards left? Down right?
Centered, so as to draw attention to the proud Greek columns in the
manor house photo?

I felt like I was soaring, like my
heart was a hummingbird beating out of my chest, like my ideas were
coming too fast for my breaths to keep up with them. This is going to
be my big break!

I hadn’t felt half so alive in
years.

When I finally came out of my daze of
inspiration and said goodbye to a yawning but excited Sandra, birds
were chirping outside the window, which was letting in the warm sun
of a day I hadn’t even noticed dawning. The clock read 9 am,
and the walls, desk, and floor were covered with so many sheets of
paper it looked like they had been buried under an avalanche. An
avalanche of less than pristine snow, however, since said pages were
crammed full of the ideas that were going to bring Knox bourbon back
to life in a way that hadn’t been dreamt of since Mary Shelley.
Hunter wasn’t going to believe his eyes!

And, my brain fizzing with too little
sleep and too much adrenaline, that thought led me to what seemed
like the next logical step to keep the momentum going:

I had to tell Hunter!

I grinned, wide and purely delighted.
Oh, I couldn’t wait to see his face! Let’s see how
useless he thought advertising was after I knocked his socks off with
this!

I bustled out of the library and into
the manor house. It was a good thing that by now I was so used to
this labyrinth that I didn’t have to pay careful attention to
every landmark, because I wasn’t seeing anything this morning
but a bright and beautiful future full of promotions.

I could hear him puttering around in
the kitchen, and my grin widened to a measure that would have done
justice to a Cheshire cat.

“Hunter, I—” I began
as I entered.

But it wasn’t Hunter sitting at
the breakfast table.

It was Paige.

“I didn’t stay over!”
Paige blurted out before I could say a single word, standing up so
quickly she nearly knocked over the creamer. “I just came by
to get some old papers and letters for the historical society, and
the breakfast was out, and well, Hunter just insisted that I stay and
have a bite…”

“Oh. Oh, right.” Of course
she hadn’t stayed over. Not my strait-laced sister.

Relief flooded me, but it was doomed to
be a short-lived relief as my brain piped up helpfully that Paige’s
defensiveness suggested she must have a certain desire to stay over,
even if she hadn’t acted on it. My traitor of a brain further
added that wait, what was I doing feeling relieved, anyway? Paige and
Hunter were consenting adults, they could do what they wanted. My
feelings didn’t matter.

They didn’t matter one little
bit.

“Well, I’ll just leave you
to that snooze-fest of a discussion, then—” I said as
casually as I could—it felt like trying to talk around an open
wound—while I used all my willpower to walk instead of run over
to the counter to grab a bagel before making a dignified retreat.

Unfortunately for that whole ‘dignified
retreat’ plan, Hunter came into the dining room at that very
moment.

Seriously, what was it with that man
and timing?

“Ah, Ally, won’t you join
us for breakfast?”

“Nah, I’m good,” I
said, starting to back away. “I’ve got a lot of work to
do…”

“Really? Martha was just telling
me that you’d spent half the night doing work. You ought to
refuel before you collapse.”

The man had a point.

He saw me wavering and added, “A
shipment of mangos came in this morning…”

Shit. I really loved mangos.

Also, I was this close to fainting.

Also also, if I didn’t tell
someone who actually got it about my ideas, I might actually
literally explode.

“Well, alright,” I said,
sitting down.

“I’ll go fetch the food!”
Paige said, and before Hunter or I could protest that she was a
guest, not our servant, she was in the next room; in the next breath
she returned bearing a platter of sliced mangos and blueberries and
strawberries and a pitcher of coffee. “The crepes are almost
done, cook says.”

She scraped enough mango slices onto my
plate to keep a small orchard in business, and for a few minutes I
occupied myself with getting enough of that sticky syrupy goodness
into my insides as was humanly possible. Then the dam burst, and I
began to tell Hunter all the ideas that had been percolating in my
brain overnight.

Hunter started off the conversation
leaning back in his chair, a detached smirk on his face.

Three minutes in, he was leaning across
the table toward me, his eyes lit with interest, gesturing almost as
wildly as me as he expanded on the ideas and tossed out names of
artistic types he knew who might be able to help us get the product
in on time.

He had some good suggestions, but also
a few that showed he knew as much about the advertising business as I
did about traditional Chinese tea-brewing, and I was so involved in
shooting down the more disastrous ones—and, okay, maybe also a
little distracted by the way his eyes flashed when he was
impassioned, and how he leaned forward, subconsciously rolling up his
sleeves and revealing those toned biceps— that almost all the
food was gone from the table before I realized that neither of us had
given Paige a chance to speak all breakfast.

“Shit, I’m monopolizing
this whole thing, aren’t I?” I said, breaking off to look
at Paige. “And you drove out here for that society thing and
everything.”

“Oh, don’t apologize,”
Paige insisted. “I’ve got everything I need, and I love
to see my little sister at work.” She stood, giving me a hug
around the shoulders. “Not enough to miss a shift at the
florist shop, though, so I’m going to beat it and leave the
fine detail to you guys without my supervision. See you next week at
Mom’s dinner?”

“Can you think of a way to get me
out of it?” I said with a sigh, and Paige laughed.

“Let me walk you to the car,”
Hunter said eagerly, standing and helping Paige into her jacket.

“Why, thank you, Mr. Knox.”

“Please, call me Hunter, I
insist.”

The cook brought in more food then,
steaming and fresh from the griddle, but even a platter of bacon and
blueberry pancakes with chocolate syrup, eye-catching though they
might be, couldn’t distract me from the sight of Hunter walking
my sister out, his hand on the small of her back.

He leaned close to her, murmuring
something in her ear that I couldn’t catch.

But I did catch Paige’s delighted
giggle.

I looked at the bounty spread out
before me, food more elaborate and delicious than any I’d ever
had the privilege to eat before, and suddenly, I wasn’t hungry
at all.

I felt a lot like being sick, to be
honest.

Then I saw Hunter turning back from the
car towards the house, and I hastily speared something and put it in
my mouth. It tasted like ashes, but I chewed furiously. I couldn’t
let him guess how I was feeling.

Hunter sauntered back into the room as
casual as a cat. “How’s the food?”

“Fine!” I said, not looking
up. I could feel his gaze on me, scrutinizing me, and I took another
bite of food, a bite so casual it could have been written up for
violating dress code. “So. What do you think about the pitch?”

“Honestly?” He paused, and
I tried not to hold my breath. “I love it.”

I looked up, startled. “Wait,
really?”

I mean, I knew the pitch was great. But
I was so used to having to fight to prove myself that I’d
thought I would have to fight him, too.

“Hell yes,” Hunter said.
His grin was wide and unaffected. “You actually get it—the
tradition of the family, how to honor that legacy while bringing it
into the future. I’m one hundred percent behind that.”

His words lit a warm fire in my chest,
the sweet warmth of validation enfolding me like a wool blanket.

I was good at my job. I knew that. But
it was nice to hear someone else say it.

“Where to begin?” he said,
almost to himself. “There’s so much to do, and the
board’s been fretting for ages, they’re already
impatient, got to have something to show them—but can’t
neglect Chuck, he’s on my ass about deadlines and revenue, if
he gets an excuse…”

I cut in. “What about a sizzle
reel?” I suggested.