Billionaire With a Twist(15)

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After resisting the temptation that was Hunter in a tight t-shirt, I followed Martha’s map to the estate library, where I planned to spend the rest of the day. The building it was housed in was about half the size of the manor house, which is to say, about twice the size of any public library I’d ever been in. It was all wood paneling and lush carpets and wall-to-wall bookshelves that would have made the Beauty and the Beast movie drool in envy.

Thankfully, those bookshelves were full of the kind of primary sources I’d been unable to track down back in Washington, D.C., and I was able to spend hours poring over old journals, record books, and newspaper clippings in search of the most fascinating historical tidbits about the company. Those first-hand sources, including the diary of its founder, Hunter Knox’s great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, poor immigrants from Scotland who wanted a better life. They’d come to the United States where they’d worked hard to earn the capital to leave their employers and strike out on their own. Learning from both their roots and the rich bourbon culture of the South, they had worked together as equal partners to create a flavorful bourbon whose popularity swept the nation and went overseas, becoming so popular in Britain that both ancestors were very nearly knighted.

I thought about Hunter as a knight. Hunter, sweaty, in chain mail, valiantly rescuing me from a dragon. He’d unchain me from the rock where I’d been offered in sacrifice, his hands gentle as he stroked my chafed, raw skin—or maybe he’d leave me chained, those soft lips lifting in a wicked smirk as he bent to press them to the sensitive skin of my neck, his hand trailing up my leg—

No, no, no! Bad Ally! Concentrate on research!

Anyway, those first ancestors weren’t even the most remarkable thing. No, the true jackpot I stumbled upon was the way that the Knox family had always strived to do what was right. Ferryville, the town that had befriended them and offered them charity when they were poor, was raised up and revitalized by the Knox’s job-creating factory; the families that had sponsored their passage to America were sent enough money so that they could immigrate as well.

Furthermore, the Knoxes had used the company’s shipping needs as cover for the Underground Railroad, and after the Civil War, had bought up this very plantation, moving their headquarters from Ferryville to here in order to give paying jobs to newly freed slaves and newly discharged soldiers, helping the economy of the ravaged South recover. Though workforces were initially segregated, another ancestor, Alphonse Knox, was instrumental in creating the very first integrated workforce in the state.

Say, what would Hunter look like in Union blue or Confederate grey? Neither matched his eyes, but he would still look so scrumptious in a uniform, all buttoned up and proper, any uniform, and then I could unbutton it and run my hands down his chest and press myself up against him and—

Not the kind of planning you’re being paid to do! I reminded myself with a firm shake of my head. I forced myself to stop squirming in my seat, and pay attention to the record of one of Alphonse Knox’s impassioned speeches.

And all this was only the history of the company in the nineteenth century. I couldn’t take notes fast enough; how was none of this information common knowledge? If the company had maintained even a quarter of its philanthropic interests during the last hundred years, this was a goldmine of advertising catnip.

This was exactly the angle I wanted to work. Social responsibility was hot these days, particularly with the younger crowd that Knox needed so desperately to attract. I couldn’t just slap a social justice sticker on the label, though—that might have worked back in the nineties, but today’s young consumers had been burned before, and the Internet made fact-checking easy. I would have to back up my claims with solid proof, but in a way that didn’t make the company and the product sound boring, overly earnest, or self-congratulatory.

I certainly wouldn’t want Hunter to think I was any of those things, either.

I mean, for the good of our business relationship.

Could I do it? Could I get the company to back a cause both local and global in a way that wouldn’t be written off as cynical or dismissed as a media show? I jotted down a reminder to look up the current components of the packaging and see if Knox could start using anything more environmentally friendly. It joined a long list on my tablet with the rest of my ideas, notes, sketches, and first drafts of e-mails to my art partner. It made a beautiful addition, and made me feel incredibly productive.

This could work. This could really work.

I was so absorbed by the library and by my ideas that it wasn’t until my stomach gave a particularly painful rumble that I looked up and realized how low the sun had dipped in the sky. My stomach gave another rumble like it was trying to imitate Mt. Vesuvius, and then twisted painfully until I got the message. Well, with the map I could probably make my way back to the kitchen before I starved to death. Probably.

I packed up my things as quickly as I could and speed-walked out the library—

Right into the broad chest of Hunter Knox.

It was not quite the way I’d wanted to be sprawled across that muscular expanse.

“Just the lady I was looking to see,” he drawled in that gentlemanly tenor voice. “Though I confess I wasn’t thinking so up close and personal.”

It was entirely unfair how nice he smelled, like salt and spice, cedar and oak and clean sweet sweat. Without thinking, my hand opened, fingers spreading to stroke where they rested against the T-shirt over his chest…No!