Billionaire With a Twist by Lila Monroe Page B

when anyone mentions your name. And
Hunter’s into all that noble ‘proving yourself’
bullshit too. But you’re like the ‘play’ to his all
work. And he needs that. So if you ask me, I’d say you two are
made for each other.”
    I was barely listening to her rattle
on, because my mind was stuck on one thing that just didn’t
make sense. “Wait a second, Martha. What’s with the
‘proving yourself’ thing? He’s Hunter Knox .
What’s he got to prove?” I asked.
    “Are you kidding me?”
Martha took a hand away from the wheel to gesture, and I struggled to
focus on her words instead of on my imminent death as the car swerved
slightly. “He spent a couple years after college trying to set
up his own business, and it tanked, and Chuck and all the rest of
those assholes on the board have never let him forget it. They treat
him like a total loser, like everything he touches is going to blow
up. Never mind that since then he’s actually brought profits up
across the board for Knox and gotten up one of the highest employee
satisfaction ratings in the country. Never mind how many times he
gets on the cover of Forbes or is asked to advise on a government
think tank. Nope, who cares about that stuff? For Chuck it’s
just a broken record of that one failure, over and over and over
again!”
    She was practically shouting as she got
to the end of the sentence, and she struck the horn angrily as she
finished, confusing the hell out of the guy in the pick-up in front
of us.
    I regarded her thoughtfully. “You’re
really loyal to him, huh?”
    Martha’s face was serious as she
nodded. She took a deep breath, and went on more calmly. “He
took a chance on me. My last job before this…I messed up. I
messed up bad. My no-good drunk of a dad had cleaned out my savings,
and I was barely scraping by, and my boss…he left a bunch of
jewelry in his desk, in an open drawer. I saw it, and I thought about
all the times he groped my ass or yelled at me for dumb mistakes, and
I thought…well, I thought, this is compensation, you know?”
    She shook her head, as if trying to
shake the memory from it.
    “I’m not judging,” I
told her.
    Martha went on. “After I got
fired, Hunter looked me up. Said he’d always thought I seemed
like a good employee and he wanted to hear my side of the story, and
after he did, he gave me a job. Good pay, good benefits, he doesn’t
get handsy, and he trusts me. Lets me handle things. And I do.”
    “I’m sorry it’s been
rough,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. My job
experience didn’t look half so bad compared to hers.
    Martha shook her head, rejecting my
pity. “It’s in the past. And I’ve always been a
present girl, myself.” We peeled into the parking lot of an
outlet mall. Martha grinned wide. “And speaking of presents,
let’s get you looking like something these boys can’t
wait to unwrap…”
     
    #
     
    “Yo, babe, can I top you up?”
A young man with more muscles than hand-eye coordination waved a
bottle of vodka at me. I was honestly impressed that he was still on
his feet.
    “I’ll stick to punch,
thanks,” I said, taking a sip from my half-full cup. Tonight’s
research only involved alcohol at a remove, which was a good thing—I
was not looking forward to repeating my last drunken experience with
any of these immature dudebros. Or any of my drunken college
experiences, come to that.
    I winced at the blurry memory of
several different parties; there was that time when I vomited green
puke all over my closet on St. Patrick’s Day and woke up in the
bathtub, that time I confessed my love to a stoner guitar player who
stopped me in the middle to tell me he didn’t even know my
name, that time I accidentally made out with a former professor and
then started crying when he said he was married—
    Yeah, no alcohol was definitely the way
to go tonight.
    I looked around, trying to observe
drinkers in their natural habitat. What do twentysomething