Love's Gamble
Good Girl in Las Vegas. Bad Girl in New Orleans. If that was Pru’s deal, he thought, he’d definitely take it.
He was already imagining himself taking her out of the little Halston dress. “In that case, let’s go back to the hotel where I’m staying. The rooms are bigger.”
* * *
They ended up having to stop by Pru’s hotel on route to his anyway. She had a 5:00 a.m. flight back to Las Vegas and said she needed to grab her bag, so that she could take a taxi from his hotel to the Louis Armstrong once they were done with what she called “our business.”
Our business, he thought as he watched her disappear into the hotel. He could already tell that finally sealing the deal on his conquest was going to be fun. A lot of fun.
She emerged from the hotel with a rolling suitcase less than five minutes after going in.
“That was fast.”
“I’d already packed,” she confessed with a self-deprecating smile. “I thought I’d be at the club longer.”
Less than ten minutes later, he was pouring her a glass of wine from a bottle he’d decanted before going out to the Mike Benz gig.
“I’m surprised you’re staying at a Lyon Inn,” she said. “Isn’t there a Benton right up the street?”
She went to stand in front of a watercolor that depicted a historical jazz scene from New Orleans’s famous French Quarter. Max joined her there with the two glasses of wine.
He ignored the painting and handed Pru one of the glasses. “I’m not Cole. I don’t exclusively stay at Bentons just because they’ve got my family’s name plastered across them.”
She took the glass of wine, but her eyes stayed on the watercolor. “But maybe you don’t necessarily want people to know you’re staying at non-Benton hotels either. Is that why you’re staying here under a fake name?”
The front desk staff had greeted him as “Mr. Greer” when he’d entered. Apparently she’d been paying attention.
“One of the reasons,” he answered. “My old college roommate, Sorley, is kind of a big deal—in investment circles at least. His investment group owns a stake in this hotel’s parent company. But he’s kind of a recluse, so sometimes I borrow his name. You know, take it for a spin, so his name won’t be too sad about the glamorous life it could be living if it didn’t belong to a total bore.”
“Also, free hotel room,” she said with an amused note in her voice. “Those come in handy when you’re used to a certain kind of lifestyle, but no longer have the money to fund it.”
He looked over at her. “So you heard about Cole’s decision to part ways with the Max Benton brand?”
“Let’s just say, the Benton Las Vegas isn’t exactly a gossip-free workplace, and I was still working there when you two...uh...parted ways.”
“Hmm, no it’s not,” Max answered. He shrugged. “In any case, it’s good to have boring friends in high places.”
“I bet,” she answered. Her eyes were still on the watercolor. And she still hadn’t taken so much as a sip of her wine.
“So tell me about what you’ve been up to since I saw you last,” Max said, trying to draw her attention from the derivative painting and back to him. “Sunny mentioned you’d decided to retire from the line.”
Now it was her turn to shrug. “I’m twenty-nine now. Close to retirement age anyway.”
There was no official retirement age for Revue girls—mostly because it would have opened the hotel to discrimination lawsuits. But there weren’t many showgirls in the line over the age of thirty. “Still, your best friend is married to the Benton CEO. I think you would have got a pass.”
“Maybe,” Pru answered, her tone vague and distant.
“Tell the truth. You quit because you didn’t want to be on the line when Sunny takes over as head choreographer.”
From what he’d heard, Sunny was all unicorns and rainbows until you entered one of her dance classes. Then she became a total harridan, on par with a drill sergeant.
That accusation finally drew Pru’s brown eyes to him. “That actually is one of the reasons I decided to quit,” she admitted with a laugh. “Staying on the line under Sunny probably would have ruined our friendship.”
She was pretty when she laughed. More than pretty. It made her sparkle.
Max took the glass out of her hand and set it down along with his on the table underneath the watercolor. “Anything else you want to tell me about yourself, before we move on to ‘our business’?”
She raised her eyes to his and said, “No, actually I’m ready to get on with ‘our business.’”
Max felt a wolfish smile break out across his face...only to disappear when she pushed away from him and headed not toward the bedroom, but over to the rolling black suitcase she’d left by the door.
She unzipped her bag and pulled out a thick brown legal envelope. “This is for you.”
That’s when Max realized what this really was. Pru hadn’t suddenly changed her mind. It had been a setup from the very beginning.
At first his jaw hardened with knowledge that she’d used his attraction to her to get him exactly where she wanted.But then he decided to school his face into a look of boredom and take the envelope from her.
“What’s this?” he asked, undoing the tie closure.
“Not sure,” she answered. “Cole didn’t go into detail. Just said he wanted it given to you in private.”
That explained why she’d accepted the invitation to his room, Max thought with a fresh burst of ire. His brother was nothing if not discreet.
He should have known Cole was behind this. His brother had been trying to get a hold of him ever since Max sent him an email about wanting his trust money paid out in full. He opened the envelope and found a stack of what looked like legal documents, topped off with an eight-by-ten typewritten letter.
Max—
I received your request to have the amount of your trust fund transferred into your bank account, soon after I terminated your payments for serving as the Benton’s brand ambassador. While it’s true that you’re eligible to receive these monies when you turn thirty-five, it’s also true that the trust’s executor has to sign off on releasing said monies. As you may or may not have realized, now that our grandmother has signed power of attorney over to me, I now serve as your trust’s executor. As such, I’ve decided it’s not in your best interest to be given such a large sum of money until you meet the terms we’ve previously discussed on more than one occasion. Until such time, I will continue to grow your trust with modest investments.
Enclosed, please find a copy of Grandfather’s will, along with the terms of your trust.
—Coleridge Benton III
Max immediately balled up the letter and threw it with an angry swing across the room. “That patronizing son of a...” Max let out a violent stream of cuss words. Cole had been nagging him to settle down for years, and now he was using Max’s trust to get his way.
Chapter 3
Pru watched with raised eyebrows as Max threw the balled-up letter across the room and swore. The charming playboy who’d brought her to his suite had totally disappeared. What the heck had been in that letter? she wondered, as she watched him pitch it before turning back to her with rage now in his formerly wicked eyes.
Max, she suddenly recalled from her research, hadn’t been all fun and games during his years of partying all over the world. He’d actually been arrested a few times for getting in fights. Mostly in other countries, and the Benton lawyers had always gotten the charges dropped. But the fact remained, even though Max Benton officially had a clean record, he’d racked up quite a few charges for engaging in physical violence.
Plus, noses didn’t lie, and Max’s was crooked with breaks. She took a step back, wondering if she could balance on her ridiculously high heels if it came down to her having to turn tail and run.
“Did you know about this?” he asked, his voice low and dangerous.
“Know about what?” she asked honestly, curious about what would have put him in such a state.
“My brother deciding to play God with my trust fund. His saying I can’t have the money from my trust unless I meet his terms.”
Well, that sounded like Cole for sure. Controlling was one of the first words that came up when making a list of his qualities. And if he had any idea that Max was planning to build his own competing hotel in New Orleans, Pru wasn’t at all surprised that he’d decided to play hardball. But another part of Pru, who had goals of her own, felt a twinge of guilt. Max most certainly would need his trust money to fulfill his hope of opening his own hotel, and she hated that her assignment had turned out to be of the dream-killing variety.
“What exactly are his terms?” she asked him, licking her lips nervously. “I know you and Cole have some weird history, but maybe you could just meet them,” she suggested.
Heaven knew she’d had to do a few pride-killing things when it came to meeting her brother’s needs. Like joining the PTA. However, Max didn’t strike her as the kind of guy who liked to work too hard to get the money he needed to make things happen. From what she’d read, he’d never actually worked hard for anything in his entire irresponsible life. Why would he start now?
She waited for him to respond with something ridiculous, such as how he was a Benton and therefore deserved to just have money handed to him with no strings attached. In her experience, most trust-fund babies had a sense of entitlement the size of Jupiter, and she doubted Max would be any different.
But instead of answering her, Max went completely still, his head inclining as if an idea had suddenly occurred to him.
Then to Pru’s surprise, his arm snaked out, pulling her forward, so that her body was flush with his and fully locked into his unexpected embrace.
Pru froze—well, at least the outside of her froze. Another part of her, one that she didn’t realize was still in working order after years of celibacy, stirred. Waking up, and to her great embarrassment, actually warming to the sensation of having Max’s entire body, including what felt like a rather large erection, pressed against hers.
“So this is what you do now that you’ve retired from the Revue?” he asked. “Run Cole’s blackmail errands.”
“No, this was a one-off,” she answered, breathless and completely flummoxed. “I’m actually studying to become a PI, and he threw me this case because none of the other people he’d hired to find you had come through. I guess I was sort of his Hail Mary.”
Max’s eyes narrowed. “Cole sent others, but only you were able to find me,” he said. “Why is that?”
Pru shrugged. “I...um...kind of guessed.”
“You ‘kind of guessed’ that I was staying in New Orleans under a pseudonym?”
“Yeah,” she answered. “That’s kind of my MO. Someone brings me a case to solve, I gather all the information I can, then I just...guess.”
“And you guessed I’d be here in New Orleans, using Sorley Greer’s name?” he asked.
“No, not exactly. I didn’t even know who Sorley Greer was until you mentioned him tonight. But I’d read enough about you to know that you and Mike Benz were friends, and he happened to be doing his first stateside gig tonight. So I flew out here on a hunch.”
To her surprise, Max began to chuckle, his chest rumbling against hers. “You flew to New Orleans on a hunch,” he repeated. “Because you thought I might be in Sin’s VIP.”
“And I was right. My method worked,” she felt compelled to point out.
Max looked down at her, his expression now verging on slightly bemused. “That you were. But I think you might have missed something important in your information-gathering stage, when you came up with your plan to fly out here and trick me into inviting you into my private sanctum.”
His observation pulsed in the air between them, filling Pru’s chest with a weird combination of dread and anticipation as she asked, “What?”
“You didn’t notice in all those stories going around about me that no one’s ever said, ‘I played Max Benton for a fool, and I totally got away with it.’”
Pru swallowed. He was right. Max did not have a reputation for taking insults lightly.
Her sudden unease at his implied threat must have read on her face.
“Hmm, now you’re getting it,” he said, his voice almost soft with menace.
Before she could ask what exactly she was supposed to be getting, his mouth found hers in a lazy kiss.
Well...lazy on his part at least. To Pru, it felt like having her insides hollowed out as a pit of long-dormant lust opened up inside her stomach. Max Benton might have been a lot of things—a ne’er-do-well, a brawler, a playboy—but a bad kisser wasn’t one of them.
His mouth was confident on top of hers, practically guaranteeing a favorable conclusion for her if she let him keep going.
But she couldn’t let that happen. She was a professional. At least she would be after she got her PI license. Professional PIs didn’t let themselves get seduced by the people they tracked down.
Just as she was about to rally her mind and body to push him away, he cut off the kiss. So abruptly, that her legs felt a little shaky when he unexpectedly let her go.
Now he was the one who took a step back from her. “You really aren’t my brother’s flunky?” he asked, his eyes sharp with suspicion.
She bristled, flustered that her body now felt a little bereft, and insulted at the insinuation that she was completely at Cole’s beck and call, like one of his servants.
“It’s just a case,” she answered. “One I was happy to get before I officially become a licensed PI this fall.”
He studied her intently, as if he was trying to detect a lie.
She met his gaze straight on, because she wasn’t lying, not even by omission this time.
“In that case,” Max said, a rather feral smile spreading across his obscenely handsome face, “let’s get married.”
Chapter 4
Let’s get married.
Pru stood there, shocked into silence for what might have been a good minute. Then she said, “What?”
Max folded his arms and leaned against the back of the suite’s couch. “You heard me. I said let’s get married.”
“What?” Pru said again. “No! What the...? Why would you even ask me that? What is wrong with you?”
She didn’t wait for his answer, just turned and rezipped her suitcase, grabbing it by the handle as she beat a hasty retreat for the door. Obviously, she had missed something in all her research. Something such as Max Benton being a psycho, one she needed to get away from as soon as possible.
“C’mon,” he said, following her out of his suite—or in this case, Sorley Greer’s suite. “You’re the one who told me to meet my brother’s terms, and me getting married—those are his terms.”
That announcement surprised her enough to make her stop and turn to face him. “Come again?” she asked.
“Cole wants to put me on a leash and bring me to heel before the Benton Group opens up their first Benton Inn in the fall. This new hotel needs to appeal to regular families, so he’s trying to get me to settle down. Like him. That’s the real reason he fired me. The real reason I had to sell my shares in the Benton Group to Sorley, so that he wouldn’t come after them.”
Max shrugged and shook his head as if none of what he was saying was a huge deal. But the fists he’d unconsciously balled at his sides belied his nonchalance. As did his lethal tone.
Pru arched an eyebrow at this latest bit of information about the Benton brothers’ relationship. She wasn’t one to dispense business advice, especially to someone like Cole Benton, who’d been groomed to be a hotel magnate from a very young age. But despite Max’s reputation as a reckless playboy who lived only for fun and clubbing, just an hour with him had revealed to her what her research hadn’t.
Max Benton wasn’t as devil-may-care as he appeared on paper. No, he was way darker than that. She could practically feel the wolf lurking underneath his surface.
And you couldn’t put a wolf on a leash.
If Cole had asked her—he never would have, but if he had—she would have told him to abandon his plan to reel Max in. She didn’t have any real evidence to back it up, but she was almost certain that Cole was playing with fire where Max was concerned. Trying to force him into marriage wasn’t even a remotely good idea.
“Okay, well that’s between you and your brother,” she told Max. “I don’t want anything to do with that.”
He ignored her refusal, regarding her with those pale green eyes of his. “How much is he paying you?”
She shook her head. Funnily enough, when she’d seen the amount Cole was willing to pay someone simply to find Max and deliver a large envelope to him, she’d thought it had been outrageously generous for the service provided. But standing in the hall with Max, she was beginning to think it might not have been enough.
“I’ll double it,” he said. Then before she could refuse him again, he said, “Tell you what, name your price. Whatever it is, I’ll pay it.”
She shook her head again, wondering how she’d found herself in such a crazy scenario. “Max,” she answered, her voice hard and frank, “there is no amount of money that would convince me to fake marry you.”
“Never say never. That’s what I always say when it comes to money. You never know when you’re going to get hit with a rainy day.”
Pru would have thought Max was talking about his own currently diminished circumstances, but his eyes were gleaming at a ten on the wicked-bastard scale. “Don’t worry,” she answered drily. “I’ve got a savings account.”
If he was insulted by her refusal, it didn’t show. He just smirked. “I’d think you’d at least agree to think about it. After doing all that research on me, aren’t you a little bit curious?”
“About what?” she asked him. “About how you run through money like water? About how you’ve been arrested on every continent but Antarctica? About how you got the nickname ‘The Ruiner’?” Pru shook her head with her lips turned down. “I’m curious about a lot of things—that comes with being a detective. But not about any of that.”
She tilted her suitcase forward. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be heading back to Las Vegas to pick up my check. I’m done here.”
He inclined his head to the side and squinted in a way that reminded her of his brother. Though the two men didn’t share anything in common but the color of their eyes.
“You sure about that?” he asked her with a smile so lazy, it looked as if he was on the verge of falling asleep. “Because this doesn’t feel done, and judging from that kiss, we could have a good time if you fake married me. A real good time, as they say here in New Orleans.”
Pru swallowed, her body stirring with the memory of how it had felt to have his mouth claim hers, and the reality starlet’s words rang in her ears for the second time that night. Once you go Max, you never go back.
Okay, time to go, she thought. She turned and walked away from Max Benton as fast as her stiletto heels would allow her.
She had responsibilities to see to back home, she reminded herself. Such as her little brother, whom she’d had to leave alone this weekend in order to fulfill this assignment, and a licensing exam to study for.
“If you change your mind, you know where to find me,” Max called behind her. “Just ask for Sorley Greer.”
Pru didn’t allow herself to stop walking, not until she got to the bank of elevators at the end of the hallway. But as she pushed the down button, she couldn’t help looking back to where Max had been standing outside his hotel room door.
He was still there. Watching her with squinted eyes. Watching her as a wolf watches its prey right before it attacks.
Chapter 5
Three weeks later Pru was still shaken by Max’s proposal. Not to mention that kiss! So much so that she could barely concentrate on studying for her PI exam. It didn’t help that her morning internet scour for everything related to Max Benton had turned up the exact same thing it had every other time she’d searched for news about Max.
Absolutely nothing.
No club spottings from gossip blogs. No wedding announcements either, even though his thirty-fifth birthday was the Friday after next.
Was he really going to give up all that money? If so, how would he continue to fund his lavish lifestyle? Or make his hotel dream come true?
She thought of her recent phone call with her friend who worked at NevadaStar, the Benton Group’s official credit union. In a weird continuation of her compulsion to keep looking into Max Benton, she’d decided to follow his money after the fact.
She hadn’t during her first instinctual investigation because she knew it was the first thing most detectives did. If none of the other detectives had been able to find him using a money trail, she figured she wouldn’t be able to either. But the fact remained that following the money was still one of the best ways to find what someone was up to. And for whatever reason, she could not stop digging into Max Benton’s life even though she was no longer getting paid to do so.
Max still hadn’t announced a marriage to fulfill Cole’s demands to release his trust money. So maybe, she’d speculated, he had found another source of funding for his hotel. He was friends with, if not the richest men in the world, many of their sons and daughters. Including Sorley Greer, whom Pru had also looked into as a possible financier for Max’s hotel.
However, according to her research, Sorley wouldn’t go for a project this small. He tended toward big investments based on predictions only he seemed to be able to make. To the point that quite a few other big-time investors had accused him of insider trading, only to have to back down from their claims when Sorley’s lawyers sent them strongly worded letters that made generous use of words such as defamation and libel. In any case, as good as Max’s hotel idea was, it didn’t exactly fit in with the rest of Sorley’s portfolio.
But that didn’t mean that Max hadn’t found another way to get the money, which was why she’d asked her friend at NevadaStar to look into his account. The nice thing about having been involved in a stage show that aged most of its pretty participants out at thirty was that she now had contacts working in post–Benton Revue jobs in nearly every institution in Las Vegas. Very lucky for her, since the truth was that having contacts in the right places was critical to working cases as a private investigator.
But this particular lead didn’t pan out. According to her friend, Max hadn’t received a single noninterest cent since Cole cut him off. From the Benton Group or anyone else. And the interest on his account was seriously measured in cents now, since he currently had only a three-figure number left in it.
“I guess stunting like he used to ain’t cheap,” her friend observed with a whistle over the youngest Benton heir’s low amount of available funds. “Either he’s going to have to get in back good with his family, or get a real job.”
Try as she might, Pru just didn’t see Max getting a regular job. Building a splashy new hotel with his trust money? Yes. That was the type of big gamble that a guy like Max would go for. Actually using his marketing degree from the Boston Institute of Technology in order to earn a paycheck that wasn’t a thinly disguised version of his original allowance? She doubted it.
But maybe he’d just been blustering about starting his own line of boutique hotels, she thought after finding nary a mention of Max during her latest internet search. She’d met guys like Max before back when she’d been into the Vegas lifestyle. Guys who’d been all talk and no play. Guys who thought they had what it took to make a big vision come to life but crapped out before even rolling their dice.
Pru frowned, wishing her fingers weren’t itching to call up her friend at NevadaStar and ask her to go even deeper with her search. Maybe send over his year-to-date transactions report. Her friend had said most of the money in his account had gone toward paying credit-card bills. But maybe there was something she’d missed, something she hadn’t seen.