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.
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