by Lila Monroe
She looked great, rested and content and glowing with new love in a pair of comfy jeans and a soft pink cardigan. Guilt turned over in my stomach, more painful than the hangover.
What I was about to say would probably wipe that happy smile right off her face.
Before I could even get started, though, the waiter swooped over, probably drawn by the glow of Paige’s contentment. “And what can I get you two ladies?”
“Stack of pancakes with strawberry syrup and whipped cream, a side of bacon extra well done, and a mint chocolate chip milkshake, please,” Paige said with a chipper grin, which only increased my trepidation. Paige only risked our mother’s wrath with a calorie-loaded meal like that when she was feeling on top of the world.
“Just more water and some dry toast, thanks,” I muttered, digging through my purse and wishing desperately that a bottle of ibuprofen would appear in the bottom. No dice. Of course not.
“Is something wrong?” Paige asked. “Did you lose your phone, or—?”
“Nope,” I grumbled, setting my purse back on the seat. “I’m fine.”
After the waiter was gone, there was an awkward silence that was probably less than five seconds, but that my guilt managed to stretch into eons.
“Ally, honestly, what’s bothering you?” Paige’s voice was concerned now. “Usually when we’re here, I can’t get you to stop raving about the waffles.”
“The waffles are still rave-worthy,” I said.
“Or else you’d be ranting about work,” Paige went on with a fond smile. “All the injustices and slights you’re fighting uphill against, but how it’ll all be worth it someday.”
“Didn’t realize I was such a predictable conversationalist,” I said awkwardly.
“No, no, I like hearing you talk about work!” Paige said quickly. “I’ve always admired how hard you fight—is that it? Did something really bad happen at your job?”
“No, no,” I said before she could get too worried about me and twist the guilt-knife in my gut any further. “Nothing bad. Something kind of good, actually. For me.”
Paige’s forehead creased slightly. “What’s the problem, then?”
“Good…for me,” I repeated. “Maybe not so good for you. Um…Hunter. Well. He kissed me. I kissed him. We kissed. I’m so sorry—”
Paige laughed.
My head snapped up, indignation fighting for space alongside the guilt and rapidly winning. “I’m serious, Paige. It’s the truth! I wouldn’t lie about—”
“Of course you wouldn’t!” Paige said, taking my hand and squeezing it. “Oh, I’m not laughing at you at all, Ally—well, not for that. Just for thinking you could hide something from your big sister. I could tell you liked him. We weren’t really dating.”
I gaped, unable to contemplate a reality in which people cheerfully decided not to date Hunter Knox. “Seriously?”
“Seriously,” Paige assured me. “To tell the truth, I only went along with the whole thing to keep Mom happy and off my back for awhile. I was never interested in Hunter; he’s not even remotely my type.”
I snorted in shocked disbelief. “How is that man not anyone’s type?”
“Well…” Paige smiled a secretive, happy little smile. “…you remember Sergei?”
“Vaguely?” I remembered some Russian guy from Paige’s college art courses: tall, skinny, androgynous; deep soulful brown eyes but couldn’t grow a beard if his life depended on it, and a build that reminded me of nothing so much as a collection of coat hangers strung together tenuously. “Well, different strokes for different folks, I guess.”
“Oh, stroking has been happening, all right,” Paige said in a low voice with a wicked grin that seemed imported from an alternate universe, not native to the face of my famously dependable and well-behaved older sister.
“Uh, what?” I said, an answering grin beginning to steal across my face.
Paige lowered her voice. “Can I tell you a secret?”
“Of course!”
That wicked grin widened, and she let out a little giggle. “I’ve been seeing him again! Under the Mom-radar, of course. He’s painting me,” she sighed.
My mouth fell open wide enough to catch every last fly in the universe. “No way!”
Paige nodded, the cat that got the cream. “Yep. Hunter was actually helping out.”
“Seriously?” I asked again.
“True story. That guy’s a total romantic; I explained about Sergei, and he came right out and offered to invite me on dates and then drop me off at Serge’s apartment. He’d drive off to the library to do research and come back a couple hours later.”
My heart squeezed tight in my chest. Damn, but I had fallen into bed with a nice guy that night at the hotel.
“It was pretty obvious he was hung up on someone too,” Paige went on. “Then I saw you two together, and—well. I can put a puzzle together when it’s that easy.”
I was so relieved I couldn’t believe it; all the tension that had lived in my shoulders and back for so long had fled, and I felt like without it I might collapse. “Oh my God, Paige, I’m so happy I can’t even—and I’m so happy for you!”
“And Sergei’s been helping me get back into the art scene,” Paige confided. “In fact, some people want me to do a show at Blackbird, you know that little gallery downtown?”
“Do I know it? The place you’ve been pining to do a show at since you were seventeen? Of course I do!” I was so proud and happy I could burst. I wanted to grab her hands and swing her around in a circle. “Oh man, you are a superhero.” Then a thought occurred to me. “So wait, all that party planning and socialite stuff—”
“Oh, I’ve been having to do all that too,” Paige said. “You know Mom would’ve smelled a rat if I’d let any of it slide. And of course I’ll keep helping out with the Knox stuff even after I tell Mom; it’s the least I can do for you. Plus, I really love it. I do.”
“See previous statement about superheroics, times a billion,” I said.
“Thanks, Ally. I don’t always feel that way.” Paige’s lower lip wobbled slightly; her eyes took on the slightest sheen of unshed tears. “I’ve been under her heel so long, sometimes I forget that it’s actually my life. I let her take over. You were so smart to move out when you did, get yourself out from under her thumb. I’ve been thinking about doing the same. So I can start doing things my way.”
I restrained myself from leaping up and doing a victory dance; I didn’t want to scare her off. Instead I asked, “Are you moving in with Sergei?”
Paige shook her head regretfully. “No. It’s tempting—Lord, is it tempting—but I have to stand on my own two feet first.” She looked determined, and then she sighed. “It’s hard work, though. I’ve been looking at apartment listings, trying to work out a budget I can live on with my salary, but everything is so overwhelming.”
“I’ll help you!” I volunteered.
Paige’s face lit, then fell again. “But you’re so busy. I couldn’t impose.”
I took her hand and squeezed it. “Hey, anything for my big sister. Especially anything for a big sister like you.”
And then tears really did well up in Paige’s eyes, and she stood, pulling me toward her to envelop me in a great big bear hug that warmed me to my bones.
So that was one source of guilt resolved.
How much trouble could the next one cause?
(Ever hear the phrase ‘famous last words’?)
Chapter Eighteen
“How’s my favorite ad person?” Hunter asked, strolling onto set.
“Uh, I’m the only ad person you even remotely consider human,” I told him, trying to ignore how delectable he looked in a loose white linen shirt that set off his tan, and jeans that hugged his ass in all the right ways. “And I’m great! I mean, I’m being eaten alive by this schedule and judging by their hungry looks, possibly eventually also by the actors, but I’m great—”
“Excuse me!” Our director bustled up, a feisty wo
man with horn-rimmed glasses, short spiky blue hair, and the drive of Napoleon. “We still need footage of the distillery, and if we don’t leave now, we’ll lose the light, and of course the lighting people will do their best to fill it in, but artificial is never the same as—”
“Right, right,” I said. “Well, if you’re all ready, I’ll lead you there…”
“One minute!” She bustled off again, shouting for cameramen and personal assistants and lighting directors and sound guys.
Hunter touched my arm. “May I tag along?”
I raised my eyebrow in mock outrage. “On your own plantation? How dare you suggest such a thing!”
He laughed and linked his arm with mine, strolling along with me as the director corralled her minions and began to follow us to the distillery. On the way there I talked almost entirely to the director—scenes we should shoot, shots we should cut, lighting, color, camera angles—and yet I never lost track of the sensation of Hunter’s strong arm through mine, Hunter’s strong presence at my side. The heat coming off his skin, the heat coming through his eyes.
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. Someti
mes 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.
Chapter Nineteen
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.