Billionaire With a Twist 3(5)
Had Hunter packed them all up and left?
No. No, Hunter would never do that. Hunter would never give up.
I was just letting my imagination run away with me, letting myself get overly influenced by all the darkness and all the eerie creaking sounds of a wooden house naturally settling into its foundations on a cool summer night.
I hoped.
Eventually, the maze of hallways led me to the back of the house, where I saw Martha sprawled out on a lawn chair beside the pool, sunning herself—for a certain value of sun; it had nearly set—in a skimpy red bikini, her damp curls fanning out across the plastic of the chair, a martini on the table next to her.
It was so normal and reassuring I thought I might cry.
Martha spotted me as I slid open the glass door. “Ally!” she cried, leaping to her feet with a happy smile and enfolding me in a warm hug. “Oh, it’s so good to see you!”
I felt the tension seep out of my shoulders as I hugged her back with relief flooding my heart. I hadn’t realized until just this moment how worried I’d been that for all her conciliatory phone calls, Martha would side with Hunter and not want to forgive me. I’d lost my almost-boyfriend, I didn’t want to lose a friend too. “It’s good to see you too, Martha. But what’s going on? Where is everybody? The house is deserted.”
Martha rolled her eyes. “Paid vacation. Most of them have jetted off to Cancun, but someone has to stay behind and make sure the property doesn’t get overrun with mutant alligators or drunk teens or whatever, so I volunteered. I mean hey, I get the pool all to myself and Amazon delivers right to the door, so it’s practically a vacation. Only downside is my boytoys hate driving out this way, so I have to work extra hard to make it worth it.” She grinned. “But oh, do I make it worth it.”
I was confused. “Hunter’s in Cancun?”
“Oh, no, no,” Martha said, shaking her head. “Hunter’s gone fishing.”
She said it with a load of significance that I didn’t understand. “Is that…a metaphor?”
“Nope,” she said with a sigh. “I wish. Nah, he’s holed up at his lodge by the lake, brooding like a goddamn sparkly vampire. Has been for weeks now. It’s what he always does when he feels cornered. He pouts.”
I felt simultaneously concerned that Hunter was feeling cornered, glad that he had some kind of defense mechanism in place, and worried that said mechanism might not be the healthiest one. Well, I couldn’t find out if I didn’t go talk to him, could I?
“Do you have the address?” I asked.
Right after I said it, I worried that she wouldn’t tell me, that she would think it was unhealthy to be this fixated on Hunter. That she would pity me, like Paige had.
But Martha just flashed a smile as bright as a shooting star. “Good on you. Maybe you can pull him out of his funk.”
And she handed me the address that she had had waiting on a piece of paper.
#
I’d thought the fishing place would be nearby, maybe on the other side of the lake that I could see from the manor house, but my GPS told me it was even deeper in the country. I turned on my lights and drove carefully through the rolling hills and deep dark woods that were no doubt lovely and picturesque by day, probably looking like they’d rolled out of a damn Thomas Kinkade painting.
By night, though, it looked like something straight out of a very grim fairy tale, one of the ones where the ending is less ‘happily ever after’ and more ‘and then the last person in the story died in a very bloody, poetically just way.’ They were not doing wonders for my nerves, those rolling hills, and that deep, dark forest.
What the hell was Hunter doing here? He couldn’t really be fishing, could he? I mean, yes, he was allowed to have hobbies I didn’t know about—in the grand scheme of things, liking fishing was a teeny tiny thing compared to some of the things I didn’t know about him—but why was he fishing now? Maybe Martha had misunderstood. Maybe Hunter was putting together his big plan to save the company here; maybe the isolation and serenity helped him think or something.
I mean, it was mostly making me think of urban legends about hillbilly cannibal axe-murderers, but different strokes for different folks.
After about thirty minutes of my GPS’ calm British voice directing me to make this turn or that turn, I rounded a corner and saw the lake. It was larger than the one by the manor, and more wild-looking, its edges rolling and blurring and disappearing into tiny inlets like the fingers of a vast hand. The cabin was tucked back by one of those little inlets, with rough-hewn logs and a blue granite chimney, covered in ivy and moss and looking like it was becoming a part of the landscape itself.
Even in the dark, I could imagine how beautiful it would look by daylight, how the trees would be lit emerald green and the lake sapphire blue, how the sky would stretch on forever, interrupted only by the sight of a bird on the wing.
In a place like this, you could imagine that you were the last person on earth.
Was that what Hunter wanted to imagine?
I parked the car and waited for a minute, gathering my courage. I was doing the right thing. I was.
Now that the engine of my car was off, the silence seemed to envelop everything. I could hear the rustle of the breeze through the leaves, the lapping of the lake water against the sandy shore. A slight slap as those waves hit the dock and the rowboat bobbed off to the side.