Bad Girl and Loverboy

by Michele Jaffe

  Imogen gripped the mallet hard and sent the ball flying up to three hundred.

  “Try again. Close your eyes this time,” Benton said, and for some reason she did. Stood on the platform and closed her eyes. “Feel the power of the force.”

  She opened one eye to look at him and he pressed his lips together. Then she took a deep breath, squeezed as hard as she could, and whammed the mallet down.

  The bell rang. And for some reason she felt great.

  “Told you you could do it,” Benton said, repeating that after he showed her his secret tricks for the ring toss and skee ball.

  “I saved the best for last,” he said, and held open the door of the merry-go-round. He did not let her choose her own horse, but made her get onto a feisty white mare. He perched on a gray pony. They had gone around a few times before she noticed a plaque on the wall thanking Arbor Motors for the restoration of the horses and the mechanism. When she asked Benton about it he shrugged and said, “It’s the merry-go-round they used in the movie The Sting. I couldn’t let it get run-down. Besides, it’s pretty great, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. It is pretty great.” How many multimillionaire CEOs of auto companies had ever used the phrase pretty great? Imogen wondered.

  They went on three times, the first two at Benton’s insistence, the last time at hers. By then Imogen could see how two dates with him would be enough. Enough to make you want more. A lot more.

  For someone else, she reminded herself.

  It was dusk when they walked down the pier to the parking lot where they had left Benton’s L.A. car, a ‘sixty-nine Bel Air convertible. The sky was pink-orange and the ocean somewhere between gray and blue. Imogen grabbed Benton’s arm and pulled him toward her and kissed him.

  CHAPTER 67

  When they separated, Benton was speechless but his eyes were the same color as the ocean.

  Imogen, almost as surprised as he was, put her hands to her lips. “I should not have done that.”

  “Not if you want me to wait until the end of the investigation to pursue you.”

  “I do. It was just the perfect moment for it.”

  “It was,” Benton agreed. “You can do it again if you want. I’ll keep my eyes closed.”

  Imogen shook her head. “Benton, if this goes wrong, if we don’t get him before—”

  “You’ll get him,” Benton told her.

  “No. Listen to me. If I don’t, you are going to hate me. No matter how you feel about me now. You are going to hate me more than you ever thought you could hate anyone.”

  “Not possible,” Benton told her, unconcerned. He unlocked her door and held it open for her. When she was in he slid into the driver’s side.

  Imogen’s neck was craned to catch a last glimpse of the beach when Benton said, “Do you mind if we make one last stop before we go back to Vegas?” She shook her head and as they drove, listening to Tom Jones, top down, along the beach in the fading twilight Imogen felt oddly, inappropriately, at peace.

  “Sam loved Tom Jones,” she said, looking out to sea.

  “I know,” Benton said. “We talked about it during training. He said that his sister liked him too.”

  “Sam talked about me?”

  “All the time. His brilliant younger sister who skipped third grade and went on to win a full scholarship to the University of Chicago. Plus a research position.”

  “It wasn’t that big a deal,” Imogen said. “They gave out two of them.”

  Benton opened his mouth to point out that two out of a freshman class of one thousand was a very big deal, but he knew she wouldn’t listen. Instead he said quietly, “It was a big deal to him. He was proud of you.” He heard a sharp intake of breath and looked over at her quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Imogen touched the corner of her eye and shook her head. “You didn’t. It is nice to hear people talk about him. It makes him feel more—makes him feel closer.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes until Benton took a right turn into an alley, waited for a gate to slide open, and pulled the car into a covered parking area.

  “Where are we?” Imogen asked.

  “My house.”

  “But you live in Detroit and New York City.”

  “No. I work in Detroit and New York City and I have apartments there and that is where I do all my entertaining. This is my house.”

  As he spoke he punched in a security code and a door clicked open. Imogen noticed that the mat in front of the door said, Home Sweet Home, in curly writing at odds with the sleek modernity of the structure.

  They entered a huge glass-fronted room with double-high ceilings that looked right out onto the beach. The floor was bleached oak and all the chairs and couches were covered in smoky suede and framed by sandstone planters filled with spiky bamboo. They were all arranged around a square fire pit that extended from inside the room onto the terrace outside and was filled with smooth black stones. On one wall, which ran to an open kitchen, there were ten drawings, each in its own square black frame, each with the words, Happy birthday Benton! Love, Jason, scrawled across the bottom in increasingly more grown-up handwriting. The house was absolutely restful, ordered, peaceful, and yet intensely personal. It was not what Imogen would have expected. It tasted to her like the perfect balance of sweet and sour, heavy and light.

  Benton handed her a bottle of water and, sliding open one of the enormous front windows, climbed up the stairs that ran along the fire pit onto the terrace. The railing was solid, clear glass topped with steel. He leaned his elbows on it and looked out across the bike path, over the sand at the sea.

  “This place is wonderful, Benton,” Imogen said, coming to join him.

  He smiled. “I like it. I don’t get here very often, but whenever I do, anything bothering me just seems to slip away. It always clears my head.”

  “I can see that.”

  They stood next to each other, not touching, sipping water and staring at the ocean and thinking their own thoughts for half an hour as the sun went down. When it was just a beam of light on the horizon Benton said, “I knew it would be good.”

  “What?”

  “Being quiet with you. Vegas is so loud all the time it’s hard to tell.” He leaned on one arm and faced her. “We could spend the night here.”

  Imogen looked at him warily.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “There is a guest room.”

  She continued to study him in silence.

  “I’m not going to lie to you, Imogen,” he went on. “I would like to go to bed with you. And wake up with you. And maybe spend the rest of my life with you. But I would rather have nothing than just your company between the sheets. I want a lot more than that from you, and I am willing to wait until after the investigation is finished to convince you that you want that too. I am not used to being patient, but I’m good at it when I have to be. Don’t think, though, that when this is all over I am going to just let you slip away. As soon as you give me leave I am going to pursue you like you’ve never been pursued before.”

  “I’m good at hiding.”

  “I have noticed. But I’m very good at hide-and-seek.”

  Imogen’s mind grappled onto the words Hide-and-Seek, shutting off her other thoughts. Hide-and-Seek. Work. Safe. Good. She said to Benton, “I told you about my childhood. Now tell me about yours.”

  Looking back out to sea he said, “You’ve seen my FBI file.”

  “Yes. Man who commutes to work in helicopters, who’s been engaged to two princesses—”

  “Just one, and that was only for show,” he interrupted her. “Artemis really wanted to marry a horse breeder named Rolf, but she knew her mother, Queen Patrice, would never approve it. There was only one person Queen Patrice disliked more than Rolf, and that was me, because— That doesn’t matter. Anyway, Artemis figured that if she announced she and I were engaged, when we called it off her mother would be so relieved that she would welcome Rolf with open
arms into the family.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Don’t you read the tabloids? Bad question. Sorry.”

  Imogen shook her head at his apology, but looked at him seriously. “Doesn’t it bother you to be followed around by those people? By the press? To have everything you do documented?”

  “No. Despite your parents’ experience, the press can be your ally if you play them right. It’s just a public persona. And it’s good for sales and stockholder confidence. Plus, if I disappeared someone would be bound to notice. At least, that’s what I tell myself.”

  Imogen considered this. “Okay, you were only almost engaged to one princess. And you fly a helicopter to work. Julia says it’s because you’re too controlling to take an elevator. Is that true?”

  “Sort of. I don’t like elevators.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was trapped in one once. It was—unpleasant.” He scrounged in the pockets of his jeans and came out with a pack of Juicy Fruit. “Want a piece?”

  Imogen shook her head as he folded two sticks into his mouth.

  “How did you get out?”

  “It is a long story. Some building-maintenance people found me finally.”

  “How long were you stuck?”

  “An awfully long time,” Benton said. His tone made it clear he wasn’t saying anything else.

  Imogen looked for another way in. “Your dossier doesn’t say much about you when you were younger except that you lived with your father outside of New York City. What was that like?”

  “Cold.”

  “Do you mean lonely?”

  “I mean cold. My father managed to blow most of his fortune, but he didn’t want anyone to know he was broke. So we had to keep living in the family mansion, this huge house, even though we couldn’t afford to heat it. Only my father’s study was heated, and kids weren’t allowed in there. I spent most of my time in the kitchen with the servants because we had to keep a butler and a cook and a chauffeur for appearance’s sake.”

  “How old were you when your parents divorced?”

  “Ten. A little past ten. It was just after my tenth birthday.” He paused. “After that it was just my father and me. Just the men.”

  Imogen tasted discomfort from him. “Did you see your mother often?”

  “Not then. She was always away. On a cruise or a world tour. She had money of her own and married more of it.”

  “What about your father? Did he date?”

  That made Benton laugh. “No. The only women my father had time for were the bitches who gave birth to the greyhounds that ran at the dog park.”

  “He gambled?”

  “When he had money. Once I was older, I was able to control it.”

  “Didn’t he have a company to run?”

  “After a certain point, the company was better off without him. When my mother left, my father became strange. He managed to alienate the rest of our family, so they were just thrilled to watch him run Arbor Motors into the ground. Family fun, Arbor style. That’s what ruined my father. He needed an audience, and as his power and influence slipped away, he had to stoop lower to get one.”

  “Benton, the other day, when I said what I did about the way you are with the press and—”

  “You were right. I do like to be the center of attention. To be needed. But I was right too. You strike out at others when you are feeling bad. “

  “That’s one of my better habits. You should know the bad ones.”

  “I intend to,” he said. He looked out to sea. “We were talking about my father. He reacted a little like you when he felt bad, only he didn’t just lash out, he got paranoid. His paranoia got worse and he decided that everyone at the office was ganging up on him behind his back, so he wouldn’t go there anymore. That was when he started spending his days at the dog track. He got a whole new audience there, mostly men in slick suits. At first he only saw these new friends at the track, but later they came to the house. I’d be trotted in to perform for them.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Card tricks mainly. Three-card monte sometimes.”

  Imogen faced him. “You performed magic tricks for your father’s loan sharks?”

  “Yep. I’ve got quick hands.” He waved his fingers at her. “I think my father’s master plan was to convince them not to kill him because he had such a promising son.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Either that or the fact that I would hand them some of my mother’s jewelry as they left for payments.”

  “You make it sound so jolly.”

  “It was, sort of. As you like to mention, I don’t mind attention and I rarely got any from my father. And he was less prone to one of his moods when there were other people around. Plus, it was not like I was going to wear the jewelry. My mother had left it behind, with everything else, because she did not want it anymore. It was good training too. I learned how to read an audience. Comes in handy at stockholders meetings.”

  “Julia says you rebuilt Arbor motors single-handedly.”

  “Oh sure. Never believe a publicist. It was me and about nine hundred other people. And Cal. He is invaluable. My mother and grandmother were not thrilled when Julia decided to marry him. I guess they thought he was below her, but I personally was overjoyed. Not only does he make her happy, which is no mean feat, but it also meant that no one would be able to woo him away. He would be worth several million dollars to any of our competitors.”

  “Don’t you have the same training?”

  “More or less. We both have an engineering background, although he went to MIT while I only went to Harvard, but that’s what makes him so remarkable. What he does goes beyond training. I had to learn everything, but it all comes naturally to him. When we worked at the garage together during college, a car would pull in for service and, just listening to it as it parked, he could guess what was wrong. And he never made a mistake—we used to bet on it. He’s kind of like you with killers.”

  He brought it up casually. It was the first time anyone had mentioned it that way, in passing. Even Sam had never done that. He’d been too nervous about upsetting her. But Benton acted as if it were normal that she could think like bad people. As if she were normal.

  “Okay,” Imogen said.

  “Okay?”

  “Okay, we can spend the night. Me in the guest room.”

  Benton gave her a crooked smile. “It is an honor to have you as my guest, Imogen Page.”

  “It’s an honor to be your guest.” Guest was safe.

  CHAPTER 68

  Night had fallen while they were talking and the bike path in front of the patio cleared out. A woman Rollerbladed by behind a large woolly dog; then there was silence. The houses around Benton’s were dark.

  “Want to go for a walk on the beach?” he asked.

  “Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “Not with your left jab.”

  They both changed into sweatshirts and sweatpants—his huge on Imogen—and headed out barefoot onto the beach. Occasionally they would exchange a word but mostly they just walked next to each other listening to the ocean. After nearly an hour they turned back. When they were about even with Benton’s house he stopped.

  He looked her up and down. “Are you ready?”

  “For what?”

  “A swim. It’s the traditional end to a walk on the beach.” He was out of his sweatshirt and sweatpants and into the surf in a flash of lightning. “Oh boy, that feels great,” he called out to her. “Come on. No, don’t think about it, just do it.”

  Imogen stood hesitating on the shore. The water tickling her toes was arctic. “It’s February,” she pointed out to him. “It’s too cold for swimming.”

  He cupped his hand over his ear, and shouted, “What? Come on, it’s great! Trust me!”

  Imogen retreated up the shore, stripped off her clothes, and ran in after him. She stopped abruptly. “Oh God, oh God, this is freezing,” she yelled as the water splashed her knees
.

  Benton, a head floating on the surf in front of her, cackled. “I made you get in, I made you.”

  She just looked at him, adult to immature boy. “But I’m not in. You are.”

  The cackling stopped. “Are you chicken?”

  “That isn’t going to work this time.”

  “You mean I got into this freezing water for nothing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh man.”

  He sounded so sad, and so much like a disappointed boy, that Imogen dove in and swam toward him.

  “That’s better, isn’t it?” he asked her as her head spluttered to the surface.

  “No. This is deadly.”

  “I told you you’d be glad.”

  “I’m not glad.”

  “Yes, you are. And so am I.” Benton bopped over, kissed her fast on the cheek, and disappeared.

  “Benton?”

  Nothing. It was suddenly very cold.

  “Benton?”

  Something brushed against Imogen’s ankle.

  “Benton!” she called out to sea.

  “Right here,” a voice behind her shouted. She turned and saw him standing on the shore. Moonlight glittered over his naked body.

  It was quite a body. It appeared that there was a lot to be said for taking the stairs. For all her self-control, Imogen was normal, and a normal woman faced with a body like that might—

  No, she told herself.

  Benton held his sweatshirt out to her like a towel as she walked up the sloping shore and wrapped her in it. When she’d stopped shivering, he put it on. He pretended to look modestly away so she could get dressed.

  “I see you peeking,” she told him as she climbed back into his sweatpants and sweatshirt. She had never felt more like a teenager in her life. Especially when she was a teenager.

  “You looked too.”

  “I did,” Imogen admitted.

  “Well?”

  “Are you asking for compliments?”

  “No, I just want to know if you find me disgusting.”

  Imogen thought about it. “No.”

  Benton’s grin was huge. “Excellent.”