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Wow. My mom had never been so supportive before. What was happening? Was she really so glad that I’d be around more? It seemed more likely that I had just stumbled into an alternate universe where I had a mother who was actually happy for my successes, but…well…could it be that I had just misunderstood my mother’s motivations? Was she just…lonely?
“This opportunity will be perfect!” my mother was enthusing, her cheeks glowing as she distributed the shortcakes. She clasped my shoulder. “It’s not too late for you, my darling. So many opportunities! I’ll start calling around this evening, see if any of my friends know about any nice local boys who are still single.”
My heart dropped, and I could feel my face falling as well. So that was it. Just another match-making scheme, since I would never be a complete person in her eyes unless I was hanging off the arm of a moderately successful man.
“Mom—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot.” She rolled her eyes fondly at me, magnanimous in the glow of her planning. “Nice local men.”
So now I was not only going to have to prove myself while working on my first big as**signment—I was going to have to do it while fending off all the sons and nephews of Mom’s chapter of the Queen Bee Society Quilters and Ladies’ Social Club.
Yeah, that’s an actual organization that she’s not even remotely ashamed to belong to.
Paige shot me another sympathetic look as my mother chattered on, but she had been too cowed by the previous put-down—not to mention a lifetime of being under my mother’s thumb—to try to divert the conversation.
“Oh, there are so many suitable candidates!” my mother prattled on in a rapturous 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?
? Also By Lila Monroe
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