Love's Gamble (2 page)

Pru observed Max as he watched Mike Benz leave. Though he’d made it seem as if he was the one doing Mike a favor, he now wore a self-satisfied smile. And Pru began to suspect then that Max hadn’t invited her over to his VIP table to just one-up Mike Benz. Rather, he’d been using her to achieve his ultimate goal. Getting Mike Benz to agree to a handshake deal.

This gave Pru pause, because if she was reading the situation right, Max wasn’t quite the useless ne’er-do-well he’d come off as in the online gossip blogs. In fact, she’d bet money Cole had no idea what his younger brother was up to.

Her suspicions were confirmed when Max’s easygoing smile disappeared as soon as Mike was out of earshot. “Planning to go squealing to my brother about this?” he asked Pru.

Pru answered more frankly than she might have under normal circumstances. “I’m
Sunny’s
best friend, not Cole’s. I barely see him, and when I do, we’re usually not talking hotel business.”

“That’s not an answer,” he pointed out.

Pru lifted her eyebrows. Max was also quite a bit shrewder than she’d originally given him credit for. “Okay...” She set her glass of champagne down and turned toward him on the couch. “Are you saying you don’t want me to tell your brother about your plans?”

Max also set aside his glass. “What if I were saying that to you?” he asked.

“Then I’d say if you don’t want me to tell him about your hotel, you can just ask me not to, instead of accusing me of being a tattletale.”

After giving her an incredulous look, Max said, “Fine, can you
not
tell Cole about this?”

“No problem,” Pru answered, somehow managing to keep her voice light despite the raging headache she could feel coming on. Reacting in an outwardly negative fashion to the club’s loud music wasn’t exactly in line with the free-spirit party-girl persona she was trying to affect with Max.

“Hey,” she said, turning her showgirl smile back on, despite the fact that her head was throbbing. “Want to get out of here?”

Chapter 2

M
ax didn’t want to say he was shocked to be leaving the club with Prudence Washington, but he couldn’t exactly say he was not surprised either. He’d already come on to her twice, and he’d been shut down so thoroughly, he hadn’t thought he had much of a chance with her.

The first time, she’d listened to his proposal to keep the time-honored tradition of the best man and maid of honor hookup going with a humorless expression on her beautiful face. “No. Just no,” she’d answered before walking away from him.

The second time, at Cole and Sunny’s shower, he’d decided to try a new tactic, wining and dining Pru before suggesting a sexy rendezvous. But when she saw him approaching, she’d actually turned and walked away before he even had a chance to open his mouth.

However, this time it was Pru who seemed to be coming on to him.

“Do you mind walking?” she asked him with direct eye contact. “My hotel’s right down the street.”

“Which one?” he asked, testing to see if she was serious about her invitation.

She named a cheap but serviceable hotel brand that he’d heard of in passing but had never stayed at himself.

Her quick reply sent Max’s mind into a spin, trying to figure out what had brought on this complete one-eighty. She didn’t seem drunk, or even slightly buzzed, despite the amount of alcohol she’d consumed in the hour since she’d shown up in Sin’s VIP area. He stepped forward and gave the air between them a surreptitious sniff. She smelled fresh. Simple. Soap, a spritz of perfume and nothing more. Just as she had at Sunny’s wedding.

However, Maid of Honor Pru had treated him like a joke—a bad one that she didn’t find remotely charming or funny—while this Pru was all sexy invitation.

Tonight, she was dressed in a gold metallic number that he would have bet money was an actual Halston creation. It accented her flawless brown skin in a way that, along with her long, curly extensions, made her look as if she’d time-traveled right out of Studio 54. It was a look he couldn’t help but appreciate, especially since the dress’s short length showcased her long legs. That was one thing he knew he had in common with his brother. He’d always been a sucker for a nice pair of legs.

And Pru’s legs were a match for Sunny’s, who had also started out as a Benton showgirl. No surprise there, since all of the women hired to dance for the Benton Revue were required to not only be attractive, but also a minimum height of five foot eight.

In a pair of ruby-red stiletto heels so tall they brought her nearly in line with his height of six feet three inches, Pru looked as if she’d fallen out of an ad for the most idealized version of Las Vegas: beautiful, wild and glossy. Like the kind of girl who could rock your world, and happily keep it a secret.

“What changed?” he asked her straight up. He was good at reading people, and as happy as he was to finally close on this long-withheld deal with Sunny’s best friend, he wasn’t sure he trusted the terms yet. “You wouldn’t give me the time of day in Vegas. And now you’re inviting me back to your hotel?”

Pru let his question hang in the air between them for a few seconds, then she stepped forward and whispered low in his ear. “We’re not in Las Vegas anymore.”

He supposed Pru’s comment did explain a few things. For once, there was no one else present looking on. No Sunny or Cole. Not the kid he vaguely remembered Sunny introducing to him as Pru’s younger brother. No one to judge her if she decided to finally take Max up on his original offer to show her a good time.

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

P
ru 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.”