Love's Gamble (7 page)

Chapter 9

B
y Monday morning, Max was beyond miserable. Not only had Wedding Night Pru not made a much-fantasized-about return, but she’d also spent hours in Cole’s room putting together a dossier on the group of executives who would be joining them at the retreat on Sunday. The first presentation meeting was scheduled bright and early at 9:00 a.m. on Monday.

Max knew this, because in order to give Pru a good alibi for being in Utah on this retreat, he’d be required to make like the prodigal son and attend the meeting. According to the cover story Cole had concocted for him, Max had seen the error of his ways, and now that he was married, he was being welcomed back to the Benton Group with open arms. Luckily the title of “brand ambassador” had always been open for interpretation, so claiming that Max suddenly wanted to be involved in the Benton Group at the executive level shouldn’t be too hard to pull off.

The whole situation set Max’s jaw on edge, but it wasn’t as if he could refuse to play the part. Even he knew that any real husband wouldn’t allow his wife to turn down a job she wanted because he didn’t feel like going to a week’s worth of meetings.

However, Max Benton was not a meetings kind of guy, and he didn’t know what stuck in his craw more: that Cole had gotten him exactly where he’d been wanting him ever since he started nagging Max to join the Benton Group in a real capacity, or that Cole had dragged Pru into the screwed-up mess that was their brotherly relationship.

With PI Pru spending most of Sunday evening in his brother’s room, Max was left with nothing to do but sketch out more plans for his first hotel. He must have fallen asleep while waiting for Pru to get back, because when he woke up, his pad and pencils were all collected on the room’s wooden desk. There was a piece of hotel stationery lying on top of the pad with a note written in efficient cursive.

Borrowed your car to drive home and get some more clothes. Back tomorrow afternoon. I like this one.

Max looked to the pad and saw it had been turned to the third possibility he’d sketched for his New Orleans hotel’s nightclub. His first sketch had imagined the club with a heavenly theme. The second with a devil’s playground effect, and the third was a mixture of the both. Pure Good meets Unapologetic Bad.

He’d liked this vision the best himself and was glad Pru agreed. Maybe after they signed the paperwork, she’d agree to come back with him to New Orleans for a little bit. She could study for her licensing exam there while he put the details in order to start building on the hotel.

Max stopped that thought dead in its tracks. Look at him, acting as if he and Pru were a real couple. He just wanted to finish what he’d started with her, he reminded himself. Get the promised night of passion out of the way and then go their separate ways after he got his money.

Max liked a challenge, and Pru was proving to be a bigger one than most. But at the end of the day, he knew himself. He’d be bored with Pru as soon as he she was caught.

He just had to catch her.

A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts about his lovely prey.

He answered it to find Cole already dressed in a suit. One that was a near match for the one he held out to Max on a hanger.

“Figured you might need something appropriate for the meeting,” he said. “And you’re about the same height as me. See you downstairs.”

Max grimaced at the suit. “Who wears a suit on an executive retreat?” he asked.

“You do,” Cole answered with a smirk.

He thrust the suit at Max and walked away before he could protest any further. Cole was right about the fit of the suit, however. Though it’d been tailored for Cole, it fit Max fine. However, that didn’t make it comfortable. He much preferred the kind of suits he wore to nightclubs, light trendy ones that didn’t reek of office work.

Thirty minutes later, Max found himself around a long table in the lodge’s conference room with a bunch of guys and about five women, all wearing suits similar to his. There was maybe one guy other than Cole and himself under the age of forty, a Latino dude who had taken a seat on the other side of Cole. The guy looked as if he used even more product than Max to keep his hair slicked down in a classic clean cut straight out of a Ralph Lauren ad.

Cole introduced Max to the group with the cover story he’d concocted about his younger brother having finally decided to take an interest in the Benton Group and his role as brand ambassador, now that he was newly settled down. It was word for word the vision Cole would have had Max adhere to if he ruled the world, and Max had to put major effort into not rolling his eyes as Cole spun his fantasy. After that, the group went around and introduced themselves to him and each other.

It was the usual suspects. A bunch of senior managers from the various casino-resort properties, and quite a few executives from the main Las Vegas office, many of whom Max had met before at the annual board meeting. The Latino guy turned out not to be as boring as the rest of the executives around the table. Cole took the lead on his introduction, inviting the gathered group to congratulate their newest VP, Gustavo Martinez. Apparently he was some kind of hotel wunderkind who’d been recruited straight out of Cornell and had worked his way up to senior management at the Benton New Orleans before he’d even hit his late twenties.

Now at the tender age of thirty-one, he had been trained by Harrison Connors—the soon-to-retire vice president whose job he was actually taking over—and Cole himself. Cole’s involvement was what caught Max’s attention back from the short list of designers he’d like to work with on his own hotel.

From what Max had seen, Cole never took an interest in the younger execs. In his brother’s mind, you either did your job well or you got cut from his team—no mentoring required. But either some of Sunny’s natural altruism had rubbed off on Cole, or he’d taken a genuine interest in this guy, because he was grooming him for an even bigger role in their company than vice president.

Given his recent dealings with Cole, Max doubted it was the former. And his suspicions were confirmed when instead of conducting the first presentation on the Benton Las Vegas himself, he handed the floor over to Gustavo.

First he thanked Cole for “that great introduction.” He had a very Southern flavor to his accent, Max noticed. Louisiana through and through, even if he was dressed up in a suit at an executive retreat in Utah.

“I’m not that fancy. You all can just call me Gus,” Gustavo said to the rest of the table. Then he launched into a speech about what he and the rest of the management team had planned for the Benton Las Vegas, the original Benton property, over the next few years. If Cole had a stockier build, a slightly Cajun accent and a lot more charm, he’d be Gus, Max thought as he listened to the guy deliver his long presentation. No wonder his older brother was so into this guy.

But even Gus couldn’t make a presentation filled with number projections all that interesting. Max was about ready to mentally check out on the rest of the speech, when Gus said, “And here’s something our newly reinstated brand ambassador will find interesting...”

He went on to say that the Benton Las Vegas was currently in negotiations with Grey Soul, a popular Top 40 DJ, for a residence year at the Max.

“Why?” The one word slipped out of Max’s mouth before he had time to remember that Cole had forced him into this meeting and that he wasn’t really interested in any of this.

Gus looked down at him, his charming smile still on full beam. “Why?” he repeated, as if Max’s question were completely incomprehensible. “Because he’s one of the biggest DJs in the world right now.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Max said. “And he just came off a resident year at The Abelli. One of the Benton LV’s biggest competitors.”

Gus’s smile stayed put but came down a few watts. “Yes, we’d be stealing him away from The Abelli, which is why this would be a great coup.”

“You’re thinking like Cole now,” Max said, interrupting him once again.

Another quizzical look from Gus. “And thinking like the man who’s led the Benton Group into unprecedented profits is a bad thing because...?”

“Because Cole thinks about everything as a battle between us and our competitors—which is a good thing when you’re talking about business. But what you’re doing—what you’re supposed to be doing with the Max nightclub isn’t about business. It’s about psychology, about compelling the right people and controlling how our customers view the Benton LV.”

“I know that. That’s basic marketing,” Gus answered. “And we’ve got one of the best marketing companies in LA primed and ready to design a new campaign for the Max when we get this DJ.”

“That’s great, Gus. Good work,” Max said. “I’m glad you and the rest of management are ready to spend a ton of money telling our patrons that we’ve now got The Abelli’s leftovers, because that’s how it’s going to look to them. Not like we stole him, but like we now have yesterday’s news. Because they’re not going to know or care about whatever you went through to secure this guy. All they’re going to see is sloppy leftovers.”

Silence filled the room. But Max’s point must have hit home because the impressed look had fallen off of Cole’s face, and a few of the other execs seemed to be mulling over what Max had said.

Also, Gus was no longer smiling. “And what would you suggest would be a way to put Max in the spotlight?”

“Less Tack. More Lux. All Gamble,” Max answered.

Their grandfather’s original six-word mission statement for the Benton brought Cole’s head around to Max. “Keep talking,” he said.

So Max did. “Granddad didn’t want the Benton doing what every other hotel was doing in Vegas. That was his thing from the start. He took a risk building a sleek and modern hotel back in the age of glitz, and if we want to do this Granddad’s way, we don’t go after the latest thing. We take a gamble and go after the
next
thing. That’s how you get the clientele you want. You get the DJs that only rich guys who have the money to party in Ibiza know about.”

Max had no idea he had so much to say on this subject until fifteen minutes passed and he’d given Gus not only a list of DJs to pursue for monthlong resident spots, but the celebrities who wouldn’t have to be paid to make an appearance at one of their gigs.

And it didn’t stop there. Later on during Gus’s presentation, he also discovered he had a lot of opinions about their plan to hire the same design firm that’d done the last set of updates back toward the beginning of the millennium. And a few suggestions for East Asian cities they’d left off their list to run Benton Las Vegas ad campaigns. Gus’s presentation ended up going well over its allotted two hours, and by the time Max made his last point, it was time to break for lunch.

As all the execs were standing to leave, Cole said to the room, “I suggest you all take notes about what went wrong during Gus’s presentation. Use the time before your presentation wisely. Reconnect with your teams and make sure your presentations won’t fall apart if Max asks you the same marketing questions he has asked Gus.”

No one was more surprised by this announcement than Max. He’d thought this was all supposed to be an act. But judging from the way a few of the executives rushed out of there, they were actually planning to rework their presentations in order to garner Max’s approval. Also, Gus, who remained behind, didn’t look nearly as confident as he had at the start of the meeting.

He approached Cole with downcast eyes. “May I have a word with you, Mr. Benton?”

Cole leveled a displeased look on Gus. “Later,” he answered. “I have a few things to go over with my brother.”

Gus’s jaw tightened, but he gave Cole a quick nod and followed the rest of the executives out. Soon Max and Cole were the only two people left in the room.

“Must be hard for the guy,” Max observed. “Actually giving a damn about what you think.”

Cole didn’t answer, just smirked at Max.

“What?” Max asked, though he already knew.

Cole just continued to stand there, smirking.

Max shook his head. “I was bored,” he told Cole. “I figured why not mess with your carefully crafted Cole clone. What else did I have to do?”

Cole gave him an appraising look. “Yes, that must be it. Either that or you have a lot more of Granddad in you than he ever gave you credit for. More than I ever gave you credit for.”

Max wanted to roundly deny Cole’s assessment. He was nothing like their grandfather, who’d been even stodgier than Cole. As far as Max could tell, he’d ever done only two exciting things in his life: married their grandmother, Nora, who had been a showgirl when they met, and founded his own hotel.

But then Max thought about his plans for the New Orleans property he was developing and closed his mouth.

Mistaking his silence for agreement, Cole stood up and said, “You’re going to fit into the Benton Group just fine. Let’s go have some lunch. You can tell me all about the reconnaissance work you were apparently doing on the Benton’s behalf by partying all over the world.”

Cole’s words were actually dangerously close to the truth. Max had decided to start his own hotel using little more than his past experiences with hotels and nightclubs of all types to develop his own property. But Cole didn’t know that.

“Pru should be getting back anytime now, and I promised I’d take her into town for lunch,” Max lied.

Of course Cole invited himself along.

They went back and forth for a few minutes, before Max gave up and decided to just have lunch with his brother in the common room with the rest of the executives. He doubted Pru would appreciate having to play the part of his wife at a restaurant with Cole anyway.

“I’ll just stay here and have lunch with you,” he said to Cole.

Cole didn’t even try to hide his smile over winning their latest battle. “Probably for the best,” he said, guiding his brother out of the conference room. “We wouldn’t want to arrive late for the rest of the presentations. The CEO not being there on time reflects badly on the whole company.”

Max was about to tell Cole where he could put the rest of his sure-to-be-boring presentations, when he stopped short, his eyes narrowing.