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.”
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.