Billionaire With a Twist 3
Read Billionaire With a Twist 3 Online
Authors: Lila Monroe
By L I L A M O N R O E
Copyright © 2015 by Lila Monroe
Billionaire With A Twist 3
Cover Design: British Empire Designs
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including emailing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
I knew I needed to get off the couch.
It was just that getting off the couch
seemed to require about a thousand more muscles than I had ever
possessed.
Not to mention motivation.
I slumped back into the cushions and
stared up at the dingy grey ceiling. It was a slightly less
depressing sight than the melting, half-eaten carton of dulce de
leche ice cream on the coffee table, or the many used tissues at my
feet, or the tearstained face that would greet me if I sat up high
enough to see myself in the mirror over the mantel.
I couldn’t stop thinking about
Hunter.
His face when we had last spoken, so
cold, so uncaring, so carved from stone as he told me that he never
wanted to see me again—
No, no, no! I wasn’t going to do
this. I wasn’t going to wallow. Maybe I couldn’t summon
the emotional energy to get off this damn couch, but I could damn
well make myself forget about Hunter Knox and my stupid, stupid
mistake.
Somehow.
Alcohol was right out of the question;
even the shittiest liquor just conjured up the taste of Knox bourbon
in my memory, and the taste of Hunter’s lips following that.
Sugar wasn’t doing such a hot job either, not that I hadn’t
tried several variations on that: in addition to the ice cream that
was rapidly turning to soup, my fridge sported stale donuts,
brownies, a mostly-empty tub of chocolate chip cookie dough (don’t
judge), and a churro I’d bought last week that was now so tough
that I probably could have repurposed it as a chew toy for a pit
bull.
I should probably throw it all away.
But that would mean getting off this
couch.
And what use were ‘should’s,
anyway? I should have never gotten drunk at that party. I should
never have spoken to Chuck. I should have told Hunter right away, so
he wouldn’t be blindsided, so he would have had time to forgive
me.
Should, should, should.
It was all so fucking useless. Like me.
After the failure of alcohol and sugar,
my next step had been to buy a handful of the supermarket tabloids
with the silliest headlines I could find. WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO
BAT-APE HYBRID and ALIEN ARTIFACT REAWAKENS ELVIS and all that; Paige
and I used to steal these from the local Publix and laugh ourselves
silly. Mom would’ve died if she’d found out.
I picked up one of them half-heartedly,
but its headlines were all celebrity hook-ups and break-ups—MADONNA
SPOTTED IN SIZZLING ROMANCE WITH MEMBER OF SICILIAN MAFIA??, THE
PRESIDENT’S SHOCKING SECRET, JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT TEARFULLY
ADMITS HER HOARDING PROBLEM CAUSED WRECK OF HER MARRIAGE—and
all they did to my stupid brain was remind me of my own hook-up and
break-up, and how no one would ever really care about it the way
millions of people apparently cared about these ones. No one would
care about it except me.
Hunter would never care.
I let the magazine fall to the floor,
to settle in with the rest of the debris of my life.
I picked up the phone, partly out of
unthinking habit, partly on the off chance that somehow its ring tone
had been turned off and Hunter had called me back fourteen times,
finally ready to hear my explanations and apologies.
He had not.
In the two weeks since he’d told
me to pack my things and leave, he hadn’t called me once. And
he certainly hadn’t been taking any of my calls. And I had made
calls. Sober calls, drunk calls, tearful calls, angry calls. Nothing
had garnered a response.
I dug my spoon back into the melting
mess of dulce de leche ice cream and glomped it into my mouth. It
tasted like nothing at all, but it settled low and hard in my
stomach, like a stone, like defeat.
Ring, ring!
My heart leapt in agonized joy, then
fell again with a nearly audible thud as I looked at the caller ID.
It wasn’t Hunter.
Of course it wasn’t Hunter. He’d
made it clear he wasn’t interested in hearing from me again.
Stupid, stupid, stupid to have imagined that he might have missed me,
that he might have changed his mind.
Worse, the call wasn’t even from
Paige or Martha, who had been checking in with me once every few
days, trying to sound offhand and casual before inviting me out to
ladies’ nights at local bars, or picnics with the historical
society, or brunch with just the two of us—trying to pry me out
of my protective shell and get me back into the real world, offers
which I had all politely—and in a few more persistent cases,
not so politely—declined. Couldn’t a girl just wallow in
peace anymore?
But like I said, the phone call wasn’t
from them.
It was from my boss.
Letting it go through to voicemail
would probably lose me my job at this point, so I picked up the phone
and tried to sound like I had been doing something marginally more
professional than lying around on my couch crying and eating ice
cream.
“Yes, sir?”
“I know you’ve taken
another
sick day—” there was a contemptuous emphasis
on the ‘another’—“but I need you to come in
today, in an hour. Marianne is out with the flu and somebody’s
got to cover her workload.”
My heart leapt again before I could
remember that Marianne was the name of the other woman in the
department, and she didn’t get any great jobs either. Still,
there was a tiny strand of hope left: “And the Knox account?”
He laughed, a hard hacking sound that
was only barely recognizable as mirth. “Don’t kid
yourself, Allison. After the hash you made of it last time, there’s
no way I’m letting you more than forty miles near that one.”
I felt the sinking sensation of
worthlessness in my stomach as he spoke. He was right. I ruined
everything I touched—no! No, I couldn’t let myself think
things like that. I had to fight.
I tried to rally. “Well, I could
work on the Jefferson accounts, or pitch for the Insignia deal, I’ve
done a lot of research on—”
“Stick to what you know,”
he sneered. “You’re lucky you did moderately well with
the hygiene products last year, or you’d be out on your ass
right now. There’s a new tampon line to work on, and with
Marianne out with the flu you can come in and look it over, see if
you can manage something simple.”
And then he hung up on me.
He’d never done that before. He’d
been dismissive, sure, but he’d coated it in polite phrases and
sweet-sounding sentiments. This…contempt…that was new.
It probably meant he was getting ready
to fire me.
I tried to make myself feel something
about this as I slowly stood, trying to remember where I’d last
seen my purse and keys and everything else I’d need to make it
into work. All my hopes and dreams were about to go up in smoke. I
should have felt crushed.
But I already felt crushed.
This…this was just a grain of
sand on top of the mountain that was already crushing me.
I thought about Hunter. I couldn’t
help it; it just came to me in one painful flash: his smiling face,
his strong arms, the partial glimpses of his past and the silence
that hadn’t shut me out but had invited me in, invited me to
really open up and let someone else in for the first time.
But now it was all over.
My career was on its way to being all
over too.
And I had absolutely no idea how to
turn any of it around.
I was having trouble following the plot
of this reality TV show—there was something about someone
cheating on somebody who had maybe cheated on them before, and also
something about a car that somebody was supposed to have bought for
someone else, and also some sort of competition based on putting
together a ridiculously expensive birthday—but it was okay that
the plots were labyrinthine and endlessly embroiled, because the more
energy I expended trying to trace complicated plotlines and digest my
rubbery General Tso’s chicken, the less time I was spending
wallowing in the spectacular blow up of my relationship with Hunter,
and the subsequent slow, painful disintegration of my career.
Well, in theory, anyway.
My phone shrilled on the coffee table,
and I jumped up, simultaneously muting the TV as I check the caller
ID, cruel hope twisting my heart into pieces.
It wasn’t Hunter.
But it wasn’t my boss, either,
which I tried to feel grateful for.
It was Paige.
I wasn’t exactly up for a
feelings share with my big sister—my feelings felt too big and
spiky and painfully sharp for sharing, or for anything that wasn’t
locking them up tight inside me where I could be the only one who was
hurt by them. I still answered the phone, though, because the last
time I didn’t answer she showed up on my doorstep with a dozen
cupcakes and a first aid kit.
“Hey, Paigey, how’s it
hanging?”
I sounded horribly fake even to me.
There was no way I would ever have phrased things like that if I were
doing half as well as I wanted to be. And there was no way that Paige
would be fooled, either.
And she wasn’t; I could tell by
the cheerfully brittle tone of her voice. It made her sound
frighteningly like our mother. “Oh, nothing. Just missed you,
thought we could chat.”
I sighed. “I’m fine,
Paige.”
A pause. “Are you, though?”
I blinked back my tears. Damn that
woman for knowing me so well. Damn her for loving me. Damn her for
not letting things lie, for not letting me lie to myself.
“People get broken up with every
day. It sucks and it sucks and it sucks and then it starts to suck a
little less and eventually it doesn’t suck at all anymore. I
can’t skip the initial suckage, though.”
Paige gave a half-hearted little laugh.
“I wish I could help you skip it, though.”
“Dream on, dreamer.” There
was a lump in my throat; I tried to talk past it like it wasn’t
there. “And don’t worry so much about me.”
“I’m your big sister. It’s
in the contract.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Of course. And if you ever do
want to talk about anything, absolutely anything, you know I’m
right here…”
Oh, I wanted to talk to her so badly it
hurt. I wanted to open up my mouth and spill out every toxic,
horrible thing I was feeling until they were all gone and I felt
scraped clean of my betrayal of Hunter—and it
had
been a
betrayal, even if it hadn’t been on purpose, even if I had felt
terrible afterward.
Even if I still felt terrible.
But I couldn’t do that to my big
sister. I’d already vented so much to her; I couldn’t
pile more things up on her shoulders. Not when she was already
working so hard getting out from under the weight of my mother’s
neuroticism.
I couldn’t let Paige take on even
part of my burden.
Instead I asked, “Have you seen
him?”
It was the exact wrong thing to say to
keep Paige from worrying about me, and still it slipped out of my
mouth.
Paige was reluctant. “Ally, I
don’t know if this is the best—”
I couldn’t let it go now. “Come
on, Paige, I’m not stalking him or anything. I’m not
going to show up naked declaring my undying love. I just…I
just want to know how he’s doing.”
I must have sounded really pathetic,
because Paige admitted, “Well, I did run into him at a charity
auction. It was the one for the victims of hurricanes, to raise money
for housing.”
“He looked—” My voice
nearly cracked. “He looked okay?”
“He looked fine,” Paige
said quickly. Too quickly.
“What aren’t you telling
me?”
“Nothing!” Too quickly
again. Then, “Almost nothing. It’s not important,
honestly it’s not. Can you just trust me on that, Ally?”
Visions of Hunter looking lost, his
clothes worn, his frame wasted, dashed through my head. What if he
was drinking? What if he wasn’t eating? What if he was—
