by Lila Monroe
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.
Hunter gave me a look so blank it could have used a name tag.
“A long ad,” I clarified. “Like a movie trailer, except…for advertising.”
“Of course, of course.” He still didn’t look sold, though.
“It’s the perfect way to showcase the new direction,” I went on. “We can get the cameras in here, get the board to see what we see in these grounds, in the distillery—we can capture that sense of history, that love—”
I bit my lip, as if I could keep that word from having leapt out of my mouth.
Hunter didn’t seem to have noticed. “We need the rebrand by the anniversary party, though. Can you have it done by then?”
I raised an eyebrow in my best Scarlett O’Hara fashion. “Mr. Knox, you are talking to the person who finished a sizzle reel for Ladybird Lipsticks in three days on a budget that wouldn’t buy you half a shoestring. On this, I won’t even break a sweat. In fact—” the idea came to me in a flash of light—“we should theme the anniversary party around it. That will show the board how serious you are about this whole thing!”
Hunter grinned, grabbing my hand to press his perfect lips to it. “Allison Bartlett, you are absolutely brilliant.”
I grinned up at him like my face was fit to bust, my heart soaring high above me. Everything was perfect. I was on top of the world.
Then Hunter ruined everything.
“And Paige could help!” he suggested, dropping my hand to reach for his cell phone. “Event planning, that’s her thing, right?”
That soaring heart of mine? Plummeted faster than a hot air balloon that someone’s taken a cannon to.
“Sure,” I said through gritted teeth and a smile that felt like it had been shellacked on. “That’s totally her thing. What a great idea.”
“Oh no, did I stumble into a sister argument?” Hunter asked, still grinning that annoyingly hot grin. He could at least have the decency to look ugly when I was angry with him. “Was it her thing first, and then you decided you wanted it to be your thing, and then she wanted her thing back, so you had to compromise with a different thing—”
“It’s none of your goddamn business!” I snapped.
There was a moment of pure frozen silence.
I had overreacted. I wasn’t supposed to care. I couldn’t let Hunter know I cared.
I turned away, trying to pretend that I just wanted more coffee, and that I wasn’t hiding the tears trying to escape from my eyes.
Hunter’s hand rested gently on my shoulder. “Ally…”
“It’s nothing,” I insisted. I forced a shaky laugh. “You know how I am before I get my morning java…”
“Ally,” Hunter said again, and his voice was as gentle and concerned as his hand. I wanted to let him hold me tight and soothe me with his voice. “Tell me the truth. Are you really okay with me seeing your sister? I don’t want to hurt you.”
Was that hope in his voice? Oh, I wanted it to be hope so much, I wanted him to want me as much as I wanted him. I could feel the heat from his hand through the fabric of my shirt, and oh, I wanted, I needed that hand on my skin, stroking me, caressing me, pulling me against his strong, hard body as if he never planned to let me go…
But he didn’t want me. He wanted Paige. Anything else I thought I heard was just me being delusional.
“You aren’t hurting me,” I said, and through the haze of pain I was proud of how steady my voice was. “I’m completely fine with you dating Paige. In fact, I couldn’t think of anything better.”
With that, I choked down the rest of my coffee and made a private resolution to keep my nose to the grindstone and let my workaholism block out any inconvenient emotions for the duration of this project. I could do that. Sure I could.
FOUR
Who knew so much time could fit into one little week?
It was simultaneously too little time to get everything done, and too much time to have to spend trying not to think about Hunter and Paige. I tried to avoid the pair of them while still getting work done by burying myself in hours-long conversations with Sandra back in D.C., choosing color palettes, editing photos for perfect composition, and, of cours
e, setting up conference calls with the director of our sizzle reel to make sure that everything was going smoothly.
Between my workload and Paige’s—having to put together a party for two hundred and fifty people, filling in all the details like tablecloths and bunting and engraved placeholders that Hunter had left out when he sketched the broad outlines—avoidance was pretty easy.
Avoiding constant phone updates from my mom—“Paige says they held hands! Paige says Hunter mentioned an island he would love to take her to! Paige says Hunter complimented her on her eye for color and detail!”—was a bit more difficult.
So when my phone rang, I paused for a second, pondering if it might be worth it to endure a storm of you didn’t pick up your phone, you had me so worried, I thought you were dead, you don’t care about your mother disappointment, in exchange for not having to hear her urgent update on what sickeningly cutesy nicknames Paige and Hunter had come up with for each other, or what they were planning on naming the children.
On the other hand, those disappointment storms were a terror to behold, let alone experience. I sighed and picked up the phone.
And saw that its caller ID was showing not my mother’s number, but my boss’s.
What the heck? My status update wasn’t due until tomorrow.
I answered with trepidation. “Allison here, sir, hello?”
“How are you doing, Ally?” he asked jovially.
“Just fine. And yourself?” I returned, unable to break the rules of Southern politeness even as my stomach tossed and turned in anticipation of bad news. What other reason could there be for an early call, praising me? Not freaking likely.
“Oh, I can’t complain,” he said. “After all, if they let me start complaining I might never stop, har har.”
I decided to bend the rules of Southern politeness slightly, and if not exactly cut to the chase, at least sidle around in its general direction.
“Sorry to hear that, sir. Is there anything I can help with? Is that why you called?”
“Oh, not at all, not at all. Just calling to check in, see how things are going. I know how overwhelming it can all be, your first time out.”
My first time out on something that wasn’t swathed in pink and coded girly so many ways that a seasoned cryptologist would give up and cry, he meant, but I let it slide in the interest of not getting fired.
“I’m doing just fine,” I said. “Busy, but you’ve seen how I can juggle multiple tasks. I know my status update is scheduled for tomorrow, but I can give you a preliminary one if you—”
“Great, great, great,” he interrupted, clearly having not listened to a word I’d said. “That’s great, Ally, I’m glad. There’s just one little thing—”
Of course there was.
“It’s that Chuck—you know Chuck, great head on his shoulders, member of the old frat, knows how we do business here—Chuck has expressed some concerns.”
Of course he had.
I managed to restrain myself from saying that I’d like to express some concerns to Chuck myself, preferably with a paintball gun, and instead asked, as pointedly as I could without my boss feeling like I was ‘giving him lip,’ “Do you have any concerns, sir?”
He huffed into his mustache, annoyed that I’d even somewhat called him out on his passive-aggressive bullshit. “You know it isn’t like that, Ally.”
Oh, wasn’t it?
I bit my lip to keep from blurting out my mental catalogue of all the humiliating crap he’d thrown at me in the past with a hangdog look and an insistence that his sexist outlook was just company policy. Giving me every single feminine hygiene client, like their product was radioactive or something. Denying me the Lockheed guns contract, even though I’d been out at the shooting range since I was six and the guy he did give it to wouldn’t know a stock from a barrel. Laughing off my sexual harassment claims when the guys from accounting made comments about my legs, telling me to just ‘appreciate the compliments before you’re too old to get them.’
I concentrated on the important thing. He had, technically, said that he wasn’t concerned about me. “I’m glad to hear that. So you agree with me that I won’t be needing any oversight.”
‘Oversight’ being our polite term for ‘sending in a guy at the last second to hog all the credit.’
He sighed a deeply regretful sigh that made me want to strangle him. “Consumer confidence is our game, Ally. I can’t change the way we do business just because it hurts your feelings.”
Typical. Running around at Chuck’s beck and call whenever he threw a little hissy fit was just the way we did business but when I calmly stated my dislike for it, it was just ‘hurt feelings.’
“Of course,” I said, gritting my teeth. “And how are we planning on mollifying Chuck’s concerns?”
“Knew you’d be on board,” he said placidly, even though I hadn’t quite climbed onto said board just yet. Like most people at the company, he liked to assume reality was the way he wanted it to be, and just wait for it to conform. “I’d like Chad and his colleagues to come by and lend a hand,” he continued. “That group has some real unity of vision, you know, and they’ve been chomping at the bit to really prove their stuff.”
I’d been chomping at the bit for years, and all it had ever gotten me was patronizing lectures about how overly ambitious women came off as bitches and lost contracts.
“Sandra and Hunter and I have all the vision we can handle right now,” I said, going for a light and breezy tone that didn’t communicate, and I will let the Douchebros’ vision come to light only over my dead body.
“Sounds like you could use a little help corralling it, then.”
“I assure you, sir, we’ve got everything under control.”
“Now, now, missy,” he said, in what I had to assume was the same voice he used when his granddaughter wanted another scoop on her ice cream cone. “The client comes first, remember? We have to make him feel secure.”
“Hunter feels so secure in this he’s been calling in favors to get us the best sizzle reel possible,” I pointed out. “And last time I checked, he was the client, not Chuck.”
This was venturing dangerously close to sass territory that normally would have earned me a reprimand, but today I just got an indulgent chuckle of the ‘I’m about to impart some wisdom to this innocent naïve sweet summer child’ variety.
“That he is. For now.”
I felt my hackles rise. “What are you saying?”
“Read the changes in the sky, Ally,” he said, sounding especially pleased with himself for the touch of metaphor. “Stormy weather’s coming, and if we want to keep this contract we can’t afford to back the wrong horse.”
I resisted pointing out that he’d changed metaphors mid-race. “Sir, with all due respect, the direction they want to take this in is completely antithetical to—”
“Allison, I’ve made my decision and that’s final.”
His voice had lost all its fake cheerfulness, and was grim and final and set in stone. And there was nothing I could do.
“At least talk to them,” he went on, his voice going back to its normal tone as he returned to pretending that I had a choice in the matter. “They’ll all be at that liquor industry event in the city, you know, the awards one?”
Message received. Fine. I would play nice as long as they did. Which meant that science would probably need to invent a new, shorter unit of time.
Especially since my temper was already going to be on a hair-trigger—Hunter was bringing Paige to that event. I’d planned to skip it for precisely that reason, but now it seemed I had no choice.
“All right, sir.” I tried not to sound as sour as a lemon. “I’ll chat them up for sure.”
“Glad to hear you’re still a team player,” he said, and after a few more minutes of polite chit-chat—essential both to politeness and to maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t just railroaded me—we said our goodbyes.
I stared at the phone, the full
implications just starting to sink in.
Fuck.
#
“Martha!”
Martha jumped, and tried to hide the book she was reading under a pillow, though not before I got a good look at the cover: some kind of steamy sci-fi romance, with muscular Amazonians in space-suits surrounded by lithe, oiled, barely-clad men.
Well, that was one fetish.
“Ally Bo-Bally!” Martha said, trying to hide her flush. “What can a lady of the world such as myself do for you?”
“A huge favor,” I admitted. “My boss just steam-rollered me into attending this big social function—”
“And you need to check a boy-toy out of my man-harem to accompany you? Good thing for you I keep a Rolodex for these very occasions.”
It was actually kind of tempting. That was certainly one way to make Hunter jealous—but no, no, I wasn’t going to be that petty. I was going to rise above such things.
Well, a little way above such things.
No harm in making him see what he was missing, after all.
“Actually, I need a different Rolodex,” I said. “Got any recommendations for a place to get a nice outfit and hairdo, short notice?”
Martha’s eyes lit up. “Do I ever!” She stood, grabbing my arm. “Come on, let’s go snag the Rolls!”
“You said that was for emergencies,” I pointed out as she pulled me along like a fish on the line.
Martha cast a look back at me and my ensemble and shook her head with a pitying grin. “Ally, by any definition, this is an emergency.”
#
It was an hour since we’d pulled into the swanky store parking lot with a screech of tires that would have made an action hero envious, and we were only now all the way to the dressing room stage of the proceedings.
“Show me what you got!” Martha’s impatient voice called out from the other side of the doors.
“Give me a sec!” I pulled the hem to straighten it and stepped out.