“I do not owe you, Cole!” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”
“Tell Tomas to turn the car around and I’ll give you explicit instructions about what you can do with me.”
Now Sunny was turned on, and she actually thought about going back to The Benton.
However, she had promised Nora she’d visit, and she didn’t want to be the kind of person who promised to visit a woman putting up a brave front as she faced down the last few months of her life, in order to have sex with—Sunny didn’t know exactly what Cole was to her.
They were cohabiting, but they were only pretending to play the part of boyfriend-girlfriend in public, a fact that Sunny was keenly aware of, even if her heart insisted on beating a little faster whenever she caught him watching her from across the room.
It was only an act. She knew it was only an act, but...it just didn’t feel like an act anymore. And that was how Sunny knew she was getting into dangerous territory where Cole Benton was concerned.
“I think you can wait until after my visit with Nora,” she answered, putting more breeze in her voice than she actually felt. “I’ll see you when you get off work.”
“Lunch,” he answered testily. “You’ll see me at lunch. I’ll have the restaurant send up our usual to the penthouse.”
Their usual was sandwiches that could be eaten cold and quickly if Cole spent the majority of his lunch hour “punishing” her.
“Fine, we’ll have a late lunch,” she said. “See you then.”
* * *
Nora lived in a gated community near the mountains in a stone manor that put Sunny in mind of English teas and horseback riding, even if Las Vegas was technically a desert—and even though the stables were only decorations.
“Never been one for horses. The truth is I can’t stand the things,” Nora had complained on Sunny’s last visit after she’d given in to Sunny’s suggestion to walk the grounds.
Cole hadn’t talked much about what sort of illness Nora was battling, but Sunny knew from when her grandmother was passing on, that walks were universally prescribed until they couldn’t be anymore. However, Nora had obviously been in pain the night before, wincing every time she had to get up or down. Who knew if she’d be having a good day or a bad day when she arrived.
Sunny hoped for the former as she knocked on the arched door at the front of the house. But when Nora’s housekeeper answered the door, she gave Sunny an apologetic look. “Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Sunny, Mrs. Nora isn’t here. Coovey fell down some stairs and she took him to the vet to get him checked out.”
“Oh, no!” Sunny said. “I hope he’s all right.”
“Coovey’s going to be fine,” a voice said. Max appeared behind Nora’s squat housekeeper, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. “I’ll take it from here, Suela.”
Consuela moved out of the way with a parting nod and smile for Sunny, and Max stepped forward.
“Actually it’s probably my fault you showed up here when you didn’t have to,” he told Sunny. “I think I might have said something like, ‘Don’t worry, Grandma, I’ll call Sunny and cancel for you,’ then I got distracted, and it must have slipped my mind.”
“Oh,” Sunny said, thinking it sounded as if it was definitely Max’s fault she’d made the unnecessary trip. “Well, that’s okay. I’ll just head on home. Please tell Nora I’m thinking about her and Coovey. I hope he’s all right.”
Max waved it off. “Don’t worry about it. That yapper is too mean to die. He’ll probably outlive us all.”
Sunny quickly covered her mouth with her hand to hide her smile. She’d never wish ill on any animal, but it was true, Nora’s Jack Russell was more than a little yappy. She’d learned the first time she visited Nora a couple of weeks ago, that dressing defensively was the best way to avoid getting nipped by the small dog. One of the reasons Sunny had decided to wear thick socks and jeans, despite the infamous Las Vegas summer heat.
“Still, I know how much she loves Coovey,” Sunny said, trying not to laugh. “Even if he is a yapper.”
Max eyed her with approval. “So you’re not a stick in the mud like every other girl Cole’s dated. That’s surprising...and disappointing.”
Sunny shook her head, confused. “So you prefer stick in the muds?”
“Nope,” Max answered. “But stick in the muds love me, especially the ones that go out with Cole. Guess I’m a refreshing change of pace, since I’m not...oh, I don’t know, boring as hell.”
He lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to respond, and Sunny got a sense of what he must have been like as a kid, a flirtatious rascal in all things.
“Okay,” she said carefully, keeping as far away from his bait as possible. “Well, like I said. No big deal. I’ll see Nora next week.”
“So according to Suela, you’ve been visiting my grandmother a lot lately, sometimes twice a week,” he said, before she could turn to leave. “Is that part of your deal with Cole?”
“No,” she answered.
He narrowed his eyes at her, and it reminded her of Cole, even though their personalities were on opposite ends of a spectrum. “Are you trying to get in good with my grandmother. Play her and my brother?”
Sunny blinked, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t really just slipped and forgotten to call her. He had purposefully let her drive all the way out here, so that he could accuse her of being a gold digger on his grandmother’s front porch.
“Okay,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’m not even going to get offended, because that’s your family and if I had any family left, I’d be protective of them, too. I’m just going to say that I’m not trying to play anyone. I love your grandmother, and I just want to spend as much time as possible with her before I leave. I’m not after anybody’s money.”
“Leave,” Max repeated. “Where you going, Sunny?”
Sunny peeped over his shoulder to make sure Consuela wasn’t anywhere around. Then she said, “Don’t tell Nora, but I’m moving to New York at the end of summer. I’ve got a scholarship to study dance pedagogy in the fall.”
Max stepped out of the house. “No idea what dance pedagogy is, but you can tell me all about it over lunch.”
He closed the door behind him and walked past her to the bright yellow Ferrari Tomas had parked behind in the manor’s large, circular, white stone gravel drive.
“So Cole loaned you his Benny?” Max asked, nodding toward Tomas.
“No, long story, but it’s kind of a joke,” she answered. “And I already have lunch plans. I was only planning on visiting Nora for a little bit.”
“Cancel them,” he responded. He was reminding her more and more of Cole by the minute. He hitched his thumb at the Bentley. “So this the first time Tomas has ever driven you someplace alone?”
“Yes,” Sunny answered.
“And Cole happened to play this ‘joke’ on you the day after I got into town,” Max said.
She thought of all the things Cole had said about his brother in the back of the limo after their first official event, and she realized this might not have been as straightforward of a punishment as she thought when she first got in the Bentley.
“I’ll definitely ask him about that when we meet for lunch,” Sunny said.
“Or...” Max suggested, his wicked playboy eyes set to full gleam. “You could come to lunch with me in my car. It’s a lot more fun than that old man Bentley.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she told him.
Max waggled his eyebrows. “You sure about that? I got all the dirt on Cole, and I’m the only one who does. Or at least the only one who’s not too scared of him to spill it.”
Sunny hesitated.
* * *
Sorry can’t make lunch, will make it up to you tonight.
Cole frowned when the messag
e popped up across his screen. What did Sunny mean she couldn’t make lunch? He’d known she’d been putting in more time at the community center, teaching more classes and coordinating the end-of-summer show for the girls. She’d even been trying to get him to take part in the show, since he’d been regularly coming with her to the Sunday classes. But she hadn’t told him she was going anywhere today but to see Nora. And she’d never cancelled on him before.
On a hunch, he asked Agnes to get Tomas on the line.
“Hello, Mr. Benton. How can I help you?” Tomas said when Agnes put him through.
“Just a quick check in. Sunny just texted me that she couldn’t make it back for lunch.”
“Sì, she’s still in the restaurant. I’m waiting outside.”
Cole began to feel stupid for calling. Another non-controlled action Sunny had brought out in him. “I see, so she decided to go out to eat with Nora instead?”
“Ah...no, not exactly, Mr. Benton. I think something might have happened. Ms. Johnson said the plan was to go to lunch with your brother and she asked me to follow them to the restaurant. They’ve been in there for a little while. Do you want me to go get her? Give her a message? Mr. Benton? Mr. Benton?”
Cole didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer for a good number of seconds as his hand squeezed around the phone, tight as a chokehold. But finally he managed to squeeze out, “What restaurant?”
Tomas gave him the name of a little place, about five minutes from Nora’s mansion, and Cole hung up without another word.
He then pushed the intercom button. “Agnes, have the valet bring one of my cars around.”
Agnes must have heard the barely controlled rage in his voice, because she didn’t ask which one like she usually did, just answered, “Right away, Mr. Benton.”
* * *
Sunny didn’t want to use the word boring to describe Cole’s brother, but if the description fit.
His dirt turned out to be a total bust. Mostly stories that started off with Cole warning him not to do something and Max going on ahead and doing it, anyway, usually with disastrous results. He’d been telling her these stories for nearly an hour, and judging from the way he laughed at the end of all them, Max thought they were great. Somehow it was just hilarious to end up in jail in a foreign country or having to climb out of some married countess’s window naked. The list went on and on, and convinced Sunny that Max wasn’t exactly the international playboy as he’d been painted in the press. More like a rich guy with a knee-jerk need to rebel.
“So you don’t work, like at all?” Sunny asked. “But the company is paying you to, what? Party all over the world?”
Max frowned as if he suspected she was purposefully trying to rain on his parade, but he pulled out his card, nonetheless, and handed it to her. “The official title is Brand Ambassador. I live the glamorous life all over the world and that reflects well on the hotel.”
She inwardly grimaced. That wasn’t what Cole had insinuated. But obviously Max had a much higher opinion of what he did for the company than Cole did.
“It sounds like you’re putting your degree in marketing to use about as well as I did with my degree in dance over the last five years.”
Max’s forehead scrunched. “Why do I have the feeling that means ‘not too well.’ What’s the matter, being a showgirl like our grandmas wasn’t good enough for you?”
“Being a showgirl is great if you have the passion for it, and a lot of the women in The Benton Girls Revue do. But the truth is I took the easy way out. My boss was a friend of my grandma’s and offered me a job as soon as I graduated. I took it, because I was too scared to pursue my dreams someplace where dancers didn’t learn all their choreography in high heels.” She took another sip of her iced tea. “It sounds to me like you’re kind of scared, too, Max. Like you’re running all over the world, acting like a jerk, so that you don’t actually have to take any real chances.”
The laughter disappeared from Max’s eyes and he went still, so still, Sunny could once again see some of his brother in him. “You sound like my brother,” he finally said.
Sunny had been on the wrong side of Cole’s dead-eyed stare enough times by now not to be intimidated by Max’s version. She shrugged, “Okay, if making your brother the enemy helps you feel better about wasting your life, go with that. Whatever helps you get by.”
“So you think I should be like Cole. Work all the time, never have any fun.”
“I think you and Cole are on two opposite ends of the scale. He uses work to run away from his demons and you use fun.”
Max glared at her. “What do you know about our demons?”
“Not a whole lot,” Sunny admitted. “But they’ve got to be some kind of powerful to have you and Cole so shook.”
Max shook his head. “You’ve said that? You’ve actually said that to my brother, and he’s still with you?”
Sunny laughed, “No, not exactly. But I hope our relationship is helping him with his stuff. You know, like he’s helping me with mine.”
“You have stuff? I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? Everyone has something going on, some of us are just better at hiding it. But you know, I was raised by Grandma, too, just like Cole.”
“Yes, poor Cole who lost his mommy when he was a kid while I got to keep mine.” Max cut his eyes away from her, staring off into space with a bitter expression. “What he doesn’t get is that sometimes it’s better if they die.”
Recognizing a familiar bitterness in Max’s words, Sunny reached across the table and took his hand. “I get that,” she said softly. “I was raised by my grandmother, but my mom’s still out there, walking the streets of God knows where, going after her next fix. She’s lost, and sometimes I think that might be even worse than her being dead, because she didn’t want me—at least not as much as she wanted to get high.”
Max’s eyes met hers. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry about your mom, but just think, if she stayed like mine did, then you might have ended up like me. What did you call me? A waste?”
“No,” Sunny said, rubbing the back of his hand. “You’re not a waste. You’re just a little lost. And you keep on touching base here in Las Vegas, so that’s got to mean something.”
“Yeah,” Max said with a wry laugh. “That Cole insists I come home at least once a month to collect my paycheck. What a pain in the ass.”
“Or...” Sunny said, tilting her head to the side, “you could look at it as an opportunity to reconnect with your brother. One chance every month. He’s giving you that.”
Max’s eyebrows lifted and the wicked gleam returned to his eyes. “So you want me to what? Thank Cole for forcing me to come back to Las Vegas every month?”
Sunny was about to tell him it would be a start, when Max turned to look at something happening toward their left. His forehead scrunched up. “Is that Cole?”
Sunny looked up, too, just in time to see Cole, leaping like a Duke of Hazzard over the patio’s low wrought-iron fence.
Everything happened fast after that. Cole got to their table in an instant, and the next thing Sunny knew, he was yanking Max out of his chair by the front of his T-shirt.
“No, Cole, don’t!” she screamed.
But it was too late before Sunny could stop him, Cole hauled back and punched the hell out of his brother.
Chapter 19
Cole hadn’t punched Max in years. Too long, really, and he got a certain amount of satisfaction when his fist came back with blood from his brother’s split lip on it.
Blood Max spit out, like Cole’s hit was nothing. He always had been able to take a punch like a pro fighter.
“Nice!” Max said, thumbing his jagged nose and raising his own fists with a wild blood-stained grin. “I was wondering when the real Cole would show up. Sunny, sweetheart, l
et me introduce you to him. I don’t think you’ve met yet.”
The only thing that kept Cole from punching Max right in the middle of his smug face again, was Sunny getting in his way before he could.
“Be careful, Sunny,” Max warned. “You don’t want him to lose it and hit you, too.”
Cole tried to get around Sunny, ready to beat Max for as long as it took to make him stop talking, but Sunny put her hands on his chest.
“What did you say to me about causing scenes?” she asked, her eyes blazing with anger.
The world suddenly came back into focus for Cole then, and he looked up to see what Sunny was referring to. Lunch patrons—a whole lot of them, some with camera phones out, ready to record whatever he did next.
“Please, Cole, calm down,” Sunny said, keeping her voice low. “Come back to the car with me and we’ll talk.”
After a few tense seconds, Cole grabbed her by the hand, dragged her through the main part of the restaurant and out the front door—there wasn’t actually a patio entrance, which was why he’d been forced to jump the fence. But Cole didn’t take her back to the car waiting for her in front of the restaurant, he took her to his Jag, which was still idling near the patio, the driver’s-side door hanging wide-open, because he’d jumped right out of the car when he saw Max with Sunny, holding hands. Holding hands!
He opened the driver’s-side door with a hard yank. “Get in,” he told Sunny.
“You sure you want to go with him, Sunny Delight?” Max asked. He’d followed them out of the restaurant. “Hunting us down and punching me just for hanging out with you. That’s a stalker move for sure. He’s my brother, but you’re one hell of a girl, and I’m not so certain you should be going home with him.”
Max stood only a few feet away from them now, just outside of punching distance, but Cole could remedy that. He started toward him again, only to have Sunny push him back. “No, Cole, don’t make it worse than it already is.” Then she looked over her shoulder at Max. “I’ll be fine. Please just go, Max.”
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