Billionaire With a Twist 2 (8 page)

It was a sensation I believed I could
get extremely used to.

As we strolled—well, as Hunter
and I strolled; I don’t think the director was capable of less
than a full-on bustle, and her assistants scurried after her—we
passed some of her colleagues conducting interviews with the workers.
One fellow, on the older side, self-conscious in his denim overalls,
shuffled his feet and said to his interviewer as we passed, “Well,
it’s the taste of the South and that’s no mistake.”

“Did you hear that?” I
asked Hunter. “I love it; it’s perfect for a tag line!”

“I defer to your expertise,”
Hunter said with a formal bow and a teasing smile.

“It’s certainly one
possibility,” the director said grumpily. Earlier in the day, I
might have taken umbrage at her tone, but by now I knew it was just
how she communicated. Compared to some of the things she’d said
earlier, this was practically a ringing endorsement.

“There it is, coming right up on
your left,” I said.

“Yes, yes,” she said
distractedly. “Good…”

As we reached the distillery, the
director was frowning thoughtfully up at Hunter, clearly mentally
checking off items on a list in her head. “We haven’t got
footage of you yet, either,” she said abruptly. “We’ll
need that. Bartlett, you got a recommendation for rooms we should
use?”

I glowed a little bit inside at this
acknowledgment of my understanding of her work.

“The cask room,” I said.
“You’ll want to do it after anything that needs natural
light, of course, but it’ll be easy to set up the main lights
in there, and there’ll be a good color contrast with his
outfit.”

Hunter fidgeted. “I’m not
sure about an interview…”

“Don’t tell me you’re
nervous,” I teased.

“You already have an unfair
advantage over me with all your psychological advertising knowledge,”
Hunter defended himself. “How can I just give away all my
secrets?”

I raised an eyebrow, and trailed a
finger down his chest. “Well, if you don’t tell me, I
might just go…looking.”

“And is that supposed to be a
disincentive?”

The director cleared her throat. “No
need to be nervous, Mr. Knox. It’ll be a pretty standard set of
questions. The history of the brand, the values, where you get your
inspiration, that kind of thing. People will love it. The face of the
Knox legacy.”

“That does sound easy,”
Hunter agreed, not taking his eyes off mine. A warm smile spread
across his face like honey. “There’s inspiration around
me every day.”

And I grinned back up at him like a
fool, and didn’t care who saw me. “I could say the same.”

#

Long story short, the shoot went great.
Sure, we’d be single-handedly supporting some coffee plantation
with the amount of caffeine the editing team ingested as they made
visual poetry out of the raw footage, but damn, the raw footage in
itself was beautiful. It seemed like every worker they’d
interviewed had some surprisingly meaningful thing to say about the
company and the bourbon and what both meant to them. And our director
might have been gruff, but I would have taken a thousand times worse
from her to get some of the shots she had captured—the casks
stretching on like proud lines of soldiers, the wind ruffling the
fields of wheat like fine-spun gold, the sun sinking over the
horizon, turning the exact color of the bourbon as it poured out of
the large copper still.

It was the afternoon now, and I
personally thought we had enough footage to splice together the next
Oscar-winning documentary, but our director was relentless, and
insisted on one more shoot: the stables. It was there that I was
enfolded in a hug by none other than Homer from the bar.

“Well, there you are, girlie!”

“Homer! I’m glad I ran into
you!”

A few days earlier, I’d been
walking around with the director doing a preliminary look at the
scenery, and been surprised to run into my drinking/crying buddy from
the little dive bar—who, as it turned out, just dispensed
homespun wisdom as a sideline, and spent the majority of his time
breeding horses for folks all over the county, Hunter included.

“Well, what can I do for you fine
ladies and gentlemen?” Homer asked.

“I need some action shots,”
our director cut in. “Something dramatic, majestic. You got a
good mount for Mr. Knox to ride?”

“Do I ever! Come take a gander at
this piece of horseflesh, you ain’t never seen better—”

Homer began to lead them off to the
stall with his prize stallion, a majestic coal-black beast with fiery
eyes but a loyal heart. I was about to follow, when I heard a gentle
whicker. I looked into the stall it was coming from, and saw the most
beautiful horse I could have ever imagined.

Her coat was freshly brushed and shone
like moonstone, her mane long and silver-white like my childhood
dreams of unicorns. Her eyes were deep dark pools, and she clopped
right up to the bars and gently lipped them, as if saying hello.

“Ah, I see I can’t keep the
jewel of the crown away from you,” Homer said from behind me.

I started. How long had I been standing
in one place, entranced by this beautiful mare? Hunter was already
leading his horse out the door, and he grinned back at me with a
playfully challenging air.

“Want to ride?” he asked.

I waved him off, shaking my head. “Nah,
they don’t need footage of me.”

Hunter mounted his horse in one smooth
motion, the muscles of his back rippling. “Your loss.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I
said. “The view from this angle is no loss at all.”

#

Hunter put on an
excellent show. It was a good thing there were other professionals
there, because there were several moments when I became too occupied
with drooling to do a single damn thing. His glistening skin under
the hot sun, the way his shirt stretched over his muscled torso, his
firm but gentle hold on the reins…what can I say? There’s
just something really hot about good horsemanship.

Even as everyone else wrapped up,
Hunter seemed reluctant to leave. Finally, when it was just the two
of us and one actor scarfing down the leftover sandwiches from craft
service, I rolled my eyes and went over to him. “Come on,
Hunter, we still need to sign the last of the paperwork.”

“It’ll keep ‘til
tomorrow,” he said.

Despite his words, he had started
trotting towards the stables, so I assumed he was going along with
the plan when suddenly, he just stopped.

I stopped too, and looked up at him.

“Well, I don’t know what
you’re looking at me for,” he said. “I’m the
one waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me to do what?”
I asked. “Develop telepathy?”

He grinned, and guided his horse in a
quick little circle around me. “Come on, I saw you eyeing that
mare. You had a horse phase as a little girl, admit it.”

“It was hardly a phase—”
I started.

“There’s no shame in it. I
understand most girls have a horse phase, or a wolf phase. Sometimes
a dragon phase, is that true?”

“You know what’s not hot?”
I shot back in my best monotone. “How well you know the psyches
of little girls.”

He smirked. “Come on, Ally!
Saddle up. You don’t know what you’re missing!”

“I do, actually,” I said,
“but some of us have responsibilities—”

“I’ll show you the ropes,”
he offered. “Take it nice and easy on you, I promise.”

Did he just…

He did just.

Oh
hell
no.

“Excuse me?” And with a
raised eyebrow I walked into the stables and to the stall of that
gorgeous mare, opened the door, and mounted her in a single smooth
motion.

In fairness to Hunter, he was outside
and didn’t see that, so it wasn’t entirely condescending
when he started to try explaining how to control the animal: “Now,
you want to imagine that your body and the horse’s are one—”

On the other hand, I’d never been
much for lectures on subject matter I already knew, even from guys so
hot they could make the sun explode.

So I cut the matter to the chase by
running a ring around him and jumping three fences in a row.

You know, beginner stuff.

Then my mare and I galloped away,
leaving Hunter in the dust, before wheeling to a stop atop the hill.
I laughed out loud in exhilaration, the wind rifling wildly through
my hair, the air muggy and hot and scented with ripe earth and pine
needles and promise.

And why shouldn’t I be
exhilarated? If Hunter knew anything about my mom, he should have
realized that she would have insisted on a proper young lady having
knowledge of the equine arts, a.k.a. horseback-riding lessons since I
was three.

Hunter was currently at the bottom of
the hill, gape-mouthed.

“What’s the matter, Richie
Rich?” I called back. “Can’t keep up?”

He grinned a grin of pure joy, and
spurred his horse after me.

The more time I spent here, the more
gorgeous it grew.

Or maybe I simply noticed more details.
The way the sun shone through the Spanish moss, more enchanting than
any stained glass window in a cathedral. The brightly colored lizards
that scampered up the trunks of oaks that had been saplings when
Columbus first landed on American shores. The way the moss-covered
rocks at the edge of the forest stream glistened like emeralds.

For the first hour that we rode through
the forest, we had been competitive, each trying to ride faster, to
jump higher, to make our way through thinner openings and trickier
landscapes. But we had slowed down now, taking mercy on our mounts
and relaxing in each other’s presence. We rode together in
companionable silence, moseying along and taking our time to digest
all the beauty around us.

Or in my case, the beauty next to me.

I snuck another glance at Hunter. His
shirt stuck to his skin with sweat, and it made my mouth water as I
imagined peeling that thin cloth away.

We were, in unspoken agreement, riding
our horses as close together as we could without spooking them. I was
close enough to hear each breath Hunter took, to hear each shift of
his body in the fine leather saddle, to almost imagine I could hear
each beat of his heart.

And I could smell him, too—that
sweet clean sweat scent, and the faint lingering honey of his
cologne, and the slight vanilla scent of his shampoo, and oh, the
scent of him was driving me mad, the humid air bringing it to life
even stronger until I could smell nothing else, until desire hummed
like a song between my legs and I rocked myself unconsciously against
my saddle.

I imagined riding along on the same
horse with him, his firm body pressed against my back. His strong
arms would encircle me, holding me safe. His warm breath would ghost
along my ear, and then his soft lips would caress my neck, and I
would feel his cock harden against me, and I would lean back into him
and moan—

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Hunter’s voice broke me from my
reverie, and I blushed, quickly looking away at the landscape to try
to hide it.

“Yes, it is.” We had come
to the edge of a sloping hill that gave a long view of nearly all of
Hunter’s land, just in time to see the last bit of the sun slip
below the lake, a faint memory of a glow still lighting that sapphire
strip. “This place…every time I think I know it, it
surprises me.”

Without looking away from the sunset,
Hunter reached out and took my hand.

“This was my whole world when I
was a child,” he said softly. “I thought Heaven itself
could be no more beautiful than the land we had here, my family and
I. Before they died, my grandfather used to take me fishing down by
the stream, taught me how to watch for catfish and tickle their
stomachs. My mother taught me to sail on that lake, how to taste the
breeze and catch it, riding the power but not letting it overpower
you. My father—” his voice caught slightly. “He
liked to sit in the shade of the trees, and read Flannery O’Connor.
Sometimes I walk by and I remember that so strong, it’s like I
can still hear his voice.”

“You’ll always have those
memories,” I said. I didn’t know if it was the right
thing to say. I wanted it to be the right thing to say, wanted to
comfort him, but there was so much I still didn’t know about
Hunter, so much still to learn.

And I wanted to learn. I wanted to
learn everything about him.

I wanted to give him the comfort he had
lost, so long ago.

“But will I?” Hunter asked.
“Oh, I know I can’t lose the land, and even if Chuck
takes over the company he’ll have to lease the factory from
me—but will the memories stay unsullied? Will I even deserve
them if I let the company go?” His face twisted in what was
almost agony before he twitched, shaking his melancholy off with
visible effort. He turned to me, with a smile that was only a little
strained. “But look at me, hogging all the good brooding for
myself. Any dark secrets you want to get off your chest?”

It just popped out: “Well, I’ve
secretly got the self-esteem of a red-headed stepchild from growing
up in Paige’s shadow.”

I felt incredibly vulnerable as soon as
I said it. I’d never stated it so baldly before.

But Hunter’s hand was warm in
mine, and he didn’t pull away. He was there for me.

His brow furrowed. “I know your
mother can be a trial. Has it been that bad?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.
After awhile, anything can seem normal. It wasn’t ‘til I
was in college that I realized that not every mother played favorites
that way.” Now it was my turn to look off into the distance.
“After that little taste of freedom, I couldn’t go back
to the way things were before, all the little comparisons and slights
and put-downs, never any praise no matter how hard I tried to be her.
I had to be me. So I moved out of the house, and then I moved out of
town.”