Billionaire With a Twist by Lila Monroe Read Free Book Online

ecstasy of
match-making. There was no way I was getting her off this now; I’d
have about as much luck trying to stop an army tank with a piece of
tissue paper.
    So now I just had to revitalize a
failing company, show my boss I was more capable than the Douchebros,
keep from falling into Hunter’s arms again, and dodge the
‘suitable boys’ my mother was going to be flinging at me
like wedding rice.
    When I’d said I liked challenges
in my job interview, I hadn’t been thinking of anything like
this.

 

FIVE
     
    The birds sounded wrong.
    That was my first muddled thought as I
awoke, and as my head started to clear I realized that it wasn’t
just the different sounds—more trilling and chirping from
songbirds, fewer coos of doves and pigeons—but how clear the
sounds were, unobscured by the blaring horns and thumping wheels of
traffic outside the window.
    Hunter’s plantation manor was
definitely not as bustling as D.C. In theory that should have made it
easier to work.
    In practice, this bed was ridiculously
comfortable, and I had a feeling that I was going to be using up
almost all of my energy just to get out of it.
    I was alone in the bed, by the way.
    I’d arrived on a late flight the
night before, and hadn’t seen anyone besides the housekeeper,
who’d ushered me into my room, where I’d taken a shower
and then passed out from exhaustion. It wasn’t just the late
flight that had tired me out; I’d been prepping for this trip
for a week with research into past Knox ad campaigns, their
financials, and their media presence.
    The fact that there wasn’t a lot
of material to work with—Hunter’s grandfather had
apparently considered advertising a sin, and federal income-reporting
laws a barely avoidable sin—just meant that I had to dig harder
for what was out there. My eyes were worn out from staring at
microfiche well into the early hours of the morning, and my inbox was
crammed full of e-mails from academics regretfully informing me that
their archives didn’t contain any of the materials I’d
asked about.
    I squinted at the clock beside my bed:
six hours of sleep. That was about as much in one night as I’d
had all last week.
    Hopefully, there’d be more
information for me to work with in the family library. But to find
that out, I’d have to get out of bed.
    Sometimes, succumbing to my mother’s
plan to get me married off to a wealthy man and never lift a finger
again didn’t seem too bad after all.
    I groaned and rolled off the mattress,
hitting the floor with a thump. That woke me up slightly more, and I
managed to stumble to my suitcase and paw at my clothes. What to
wear? The sticky heat meant that my pant-suits were right out; I’d
be fine within the air-conditioned manor itself, but my current
guesthouse and the library were in separate buildings, and I’d
be wanting to tour the fields of grain and cotton so I could snap
pictures to send to Sandra, that way she could get some sketches to
me as soon as possible. Immersion was the name of the game for this
campaign; Hunter was commissioning a new message, new branding, new
artwork. It was exciting and terrifying all at once, and I couldn’t
wait to get started, and what the hell was I going to wear?
    I looked around the guesthouse in
exasperation at my own indecision, noted for the first time with my
rested eyes how sumptuous and simultaneously homey it was.
    The bed had simple but clean lines, a
frame of solid oak with Egyptian cotton sheets and a hand-stitched
red and blue flannel quilt on top. The warped glass in the windows
looked as if it stretched back to the War of Northern Aggression, but
each pane was as pristine as the day it had been made. The wooden
floor glowed like carmine gold with fresh floor polish, and a
portrait of a humble soldier—one of Hunter’s
ancestor’s—hung over the granite stone fireplace, along
with a well-loved rifle.
    All in all, it made me glad I had taken
Hunter up on his offer, even if it brought