Billionaire With a Twist by Lila Monroe Page A

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,