“A fitting tribute,” he mumbled.
Twenty plus years of clawing his way to the top of the theater world, and this is what he had to show for it. Gold and cardboard. Where had he gone wrong?
His phone buzzed. He pulled it out of his pocket to find Jo’s message. “And now come the excuses.”
“Naturally,” he replied, amused that she was texting in the middle of what was bound to be a confrontation.
“Thought she was acting with my full approval.”
“Right,” Ben replied. He crossed to the black leather sofa with its view of the Manhattan skyline and flopped into it.
A few seconds later, Jo typed, “Now arguing that her actions are for the best.”
“Sure they are. Kick-backs are always in the middleman’s best interest.”
He caught himself smiling. Someday, he’d be able to tell people that he and Jo fell in love via texting. How modern of them.
Though the whole idea of falling in love was about as comfortable as that of falling off a cliff.
His intercom buzzed, followed by Roger saying, “Mr. Paul, Kelly from the coffee shop has an order for you.”
Ben jumped up and rushed to the intercom near the elevator. “Yep. Send her up.”
His phone buzzed in his hand. “Begging is a stage of grief, right?”
He chuckled. It felt good, the kind of thing that loosened up all the dark, bitter emotions that pressed in on him from all sides.
The elevator whooshed open, and barista Kelly stepped cautiously into the apartment.
“Ah, Kelly. Thanks for bringing that up.” Ben motioned for her to step deeper into the apartment as he crossed to the kitchen to retrieve his wallet.
“It’s no problem, Mr. Paul.” She followed, her eyes round, looking like she was fifteen years old.
Ben took a twenty from his wallet and walked back to hand it to her, taking the coffees and bag of pastries from her. He’d ordered sustenance for Jo, even though the coffee would be cold by the time she got back from the meeting. It was the least he could do.
“Thanks, Mr. Paul.” Kelly flashed him a hesitant smile.
“No problem.” Ben started to walk her back to the elevator.
Kelly took two steps, then paused. She wrung her hands in front of her like an ingénue at her first audition. “Mr. Paul?”
He wasn’t sure he was going to like anything a girl like her said with a look that anxious on her face. “Yes?”
She tilted her foot to the side a few times, then blurted, “I’m really sorry about the stuff that happened to you.”
With the most gratifying smile he could muster, Ben answered, “It is what it is.” He kept walking to the elevator.
“I know, and the rest of the staff of the coffee shop knows.” She followed him, but paused at the elevator. “A lot of theater people come into our shop.”
“I’m aware.” Ben nodded.
“They tend to talk pretty loud, especially when there’s a lot of them together.”
“I can imagine.”
“Well, the thing is, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about how unfair the stuff that was printed about you is.” Her gaze dropped for a minute. “Okay, and a lot of people talking about how you deserved it.”
“Is that so?” He crossed his arms, not sure if he should be discouraged or amused.
“It all got me to thinking.” She risked looking up at him again. “See, when my mom dropped me off up here for college, she told me that there would always be people who wanted to tear me down and get where I was. But there will always be people who want to help me and who have my back.”
In spite of himself, Ben smiled. “Wise advice.”
Kelly flushed with pride. “Yeah. Mom’s cool. But that’s what all those people talking made me think of. There’s the jerks that are making life miserable for you, but I have heard people—theater people—who are on your side. I don’t want you to go around thinking that everyone hates you and that you’ve flunked out of theater or something like that.”
Of all the things, her sincerity hit him like a bolt in the heart. He smiled, not quite seductive, but not dismissive. “How old are you, Kelly?”
“Twenty,” she answered. “I’m a sophomore.”
Ben remembered a time when he too had counted life in terms of which educational milestone he was in the middle of conquering. “You’re pretty smart for a sophomore,” he said, then reached out and squeezed her arm. “You’ll go far.”
She giggled and blushed. “Thanks, Mr. Paul. I’ve got to get back to work.”
As the elevator doors slid shut, Ben shook his head. Leave it to a girl young enough to be his daughter to remind him that there was more to Broadway than the Pollard brothers, more to the world he’d fought to conquer than the part he’d made his own. He walked back into the kitchen, checking his phone.
“Tears. Not what I wanted to deal with right now,” Jo had typed, followed by. “I need to wrap this up, it’s gotten uncomfortable.”
“Coffee and pastry when you get back,” he replied.
At almost the same time, she typed, “Thank God that’s over! And with a minimum of blood and gore.” And then, “Coffee! Brilliant idea. You’re a saint.”
Ben laughed aloud at that. No one in all his years had called him a saint. “First time for everything.”
He busied himself making a final check of the apartment for personal belongings. He hadn’t had to pack up and move out as fast as he did. Leon had generously given him until the end of the month, which was about three weeks. New York law gave him longer, but once the restlessness had entered his soul, he’d wanted to get out as fast as possible. He sipped his coffee, munched on a croissant, and wondered what the hell his next step would be. Yvonne’s advice to focus on the job in front of him was good, but it would only take a few months to wrap this season of Second Chances. Then what?
He was still contemplating the question when the intercom buzzed. “Mr. Paul, there’s a woman down here who wants—”
Ben was close enough to the intercom to cut Roger off with, “Yeah, send her up.” He would have thought Roger would recognize Jo by now.
He returned to the kitchen, taking Jo’s coffee from the cardboard carrier and popping it into the microwave to reheat it. She must have hit the subway exactly at the right time, or if she’s taken a cab, they must not have encountered traffic.
The elevator slid open, the staccato clip of heels followed, and then a smooth, female purr of, “Benjamin Paul. I’ve been looking for you for weeks.”
Ben swallowed his coffee wrong and sputtered, “Pamela. What are you doing here?”
The microwave beeped, but he ignored it. He set his own coffee on the kitchen counter and crossed to meet Pamela Parsons in the hallway—or to stop her. She misinterpreted his haste and slipped herself into his arms, sliding her hands into his hair. Before he could catch up, she planted a big, sultry kiss on his lips.
“Pamela.” He did his best to extract himself, mind spinning. “I thought you were in trouble these days.” He backed off, setting her at arm’s length.
Undeterred, Pamela shrugged. “Trouble is a relative term. Daddy threw a fit, of course, but he wrote a few checks, cleared my debt, and I only have to spend weekends in a minimum security prison for a year.”
A flash of anger at the injustice of someone like Pam getting out of fraud so easily while a girl like Kelly worked her ass off serving coffee to pay her way through college bit at him. It made him harsher than he should have been when he snapped, “What are you doing here?”
She ignored his temper with a coy shrug and stepped toward him, aiming to get back in his arms. Ben took a step back. She followed. “I don’t have to be in prison during the week as long as I’m working, so daddy sent me to work.”
“Doing what?”
“Pursuing you, silly.” And pursue she did, all the way into the living room, until Ben backed into the sofa.
“I’m not on the market to be purs
ued right now, Pam.” He held up his hands to warn her off.
Pamela blinked, crossing her arms. “What’s wrong? You’ve never been so cold before. Is it that mess with Jett and Ashton?”
His phone buzzed in his pocket, but he couldn’t answer. He needed to concentrate to stop the sensation that he was falling all over again. “That mess with Jett and Ashton is pretty much the end of my career,” he answered, keeping Jo and the raw, new, beautiful, terrifying, essential part of his life that she represented out of things.
“That’s why I’m here.” Pamela laughed as if he was stupid. The fact that he hadn’t sent her packing yet might have made her right. “Daddy thinks now is the perfect time to bring you on board with a play he wants to mount. It’s a new production, new talent, and I know that it’s not what you really want to be doing right now, but he thinks it’s the perfect way to shift your perspective on Broadway and to prove the naysayers wrong.”
“Why in God’s name would you or your father want to work with me when the world thinks I’m the one that tipped the Feds off to your credit card game?”
Pamela shrugged. “They may think that, but I know it wasn’t you.”
“What?” Ben swallowed, mouth and throat dry. “Why would you be so quick to believe it wasn’t me?”
For the first time since entering the apartment, Pamela’s siren persona slipped. “It was my own damned fault. I knew the Feds were on to me, but I was having too much fun seeing how far I could push them. Especially since one of the agents on the case was this hot, young, eager—” She stopped, brushing her sordid past away with a wave. “The biggest surprise of the whole thing was that the press pointed a finger at you.”
“Some surprise,” Ben growled.
“I keep telling Daddy to get a retraction printed, but you know how he is. He really wants you for his show, Ben. I really want you. For the show.” Her dusky eyes sparkled.
Ben blinked. The slow sensation of freezing from the inside out, then melting with the fire of promise left him breathless, his pulse pounding. Suddenly, Kelly’s words had more meaning. There were elements of his old world that would support him, whatever the Pollards had tried or were still trying to do. Pamela and daddy dearest were part of those elements. He hadn’t lost everything the way he thought he had.
He could get it all back.
“So what do you say?” Pamela took a step closer to him. Her proximity forced him to sit on the back of the sofa, and when she wedged herself between his legs, he had to grab her to keep himself from tumbling backwards. “Wanna play?”
The elevator door swished open. Pamela bent closer, those tempting, red lips of hers brushing near.
“I swear, I’d just as soon not have an agent then have one that—”
The abrupt end of Jo’s thought was all Ben needed to know that, up until that moment, his troubles had been child’s play. Now he was truly fucked.
Pamela flinched and pivoted away from him. “Oh. Who’s this, Ben?”
As soon as Pam moved, Ben could see Jo fully, see the shock and the hurt in her eyes. He jumped to his feet, putting as much distance as he could between himself and Pamela as possible.
“Jo, this is Pamela Parsons. I might have mentioned her before.”
Jo remained speechless, color rising on her face as fast as the panic rose in his gut. Across the room, understanding dawned in Pamela’s eyes, and with it a fair share of remorse.
“Pamela, this is Josephine Burkhart, the author.” He finished the introduction, giving Jo as much prestige as he could muster. It was as close as he could come to outright telling each woman what he thought of them and where they stood.
“Please to meet you,” Pamela said with all her debutante’s grace, clicking across the room on her heels to extend a hand to Jo.
“And you,” Jo managed in a tight voice, next to a growl. She wedged a bag from the coffee shop under her arm and took Pamela’s hand. The contrast between the two women was pointed. Pamela was shiny, polished, and expensive. Jo was honest, real, and on the verge of kicking him in the balls.
“Well, it seems I might have walked in on the middle of something,” Pam said. She turned to flutter her eyelashes at Ben. “Sorry about that. I didn’t know. I’ll show myself out. You have my number.”
“Thanks, Pam,” Ben mumbled after her, already mentally preparing for battle with Jo. It was a battle he damn well knew he should lose. As soon as the elevator doors slid shut, he said, “She was just here to discuss business. Her father wants me to direct a new play that he plans to produce.”
Nothing. Jo was completely silent, completely furious, staring at him.
It took him a moment to register the large coffee she held in one hand and the bag in the other. “You didn’t need to get that. I meant that I already got some.” He nodded to the kitchen.
He reached to take the coffee from her, but she backed up.
“That’s what they were talking about down there.”
He wasn’t at all relieved to hear her speak. “Down there?”
“In the coffee shop. While I was waiting to get this. That’s what they meant.”
“Who?” He didn’t want to know.
“They were talking about how you actually got away with it. Benjamin Paul, the man who could screw a woman over and still have her lapping at his heels for more.”
His panic took on a sharper edge. He held his hands out, saying, “I think you need to tell me exactly what you heard people talking about downstairs.”
Jo blinked, then shook her head and let out a breath. She marched for the kitchen, slamming the coffee and bag on the counter so hard that the lid popped off and coffee spilled like blood across the black marble.
“You did it, everything they accused you of, didn’t you?”
“Please tell me what you heard downstairs so that I can tell you the truth,” he demanded, following her. He wasn’t about to lose the one good thing in his life right now because of a rumor.
“You really did sleep your way to that best director award.” She crossed her eyes, staring daggers at him.
Icy prickles carved their way down his back. “Not intentionally,” he said at last.
“What is that supposed to mean?” she demanded.
There was nowhere to run anymore, not if he wanted any chance of keeping Jo in his life. And yet, the truth was just as likely to push her away as any lie he could tell, any rumor someone else could make up.
“Yes, I’ve slept with a lot of people, most of them connected to the theater world,” he admitted, hating the way it sounded when spoken aloud. It was a shock to hear how seedy his life sounded. “A lot of people sleep around in this business. It’s not pretty, but it happens.”
“That’s your truth?”
“It is.” He nodded, the prickles down his back beginning to ache with guilt.
“Did…did you make women sleep with you to get parts in your shows?” she asked, her voice small and strangled.
He grimaced. “No. I never coerced anyone to do anything. But I didn’t turn down unsolicited offers. And I did what I needed to do to get the things I wanted.”
“That’s disgusting,” she whispered.
“When you look at it that way, yes. But it’s how some people operate in this world.”
“And you want to be a part of that world.” She spoke as if it was fact, but Ben was far from certain.
He let out a breath, his shoulders dropping. “I don’t know what I want anymore, Jo. I spent so long working to get what I had that I didn’t see there was anything else.” He rubbed his hand over his face, hoping to wipe away the confusion that hurt worse and worse with every breath he took, but to no avail. “When I lost it and ended up on your doorstep, hazy though it was at first, I started to see that there were other choices I could have made, other lives that people lived.”
“You’re a director, Ben,” she hurled at him. “Your whole life is making other worlds appear on the stage. How could you spend your whole
life doing that without realizing that those worlds are more real than the one you were living?”
He threw his arms out, heart sinking. He was losing the battle, losing Jo. “I don’t know. Blindness, I guess. But now I see.”
“See what?” Her anger hadn’t lessened by a hair. She towered in front of him as if she were twice as tall as he was, eyes radiant with betrayal. She had every right to feel betrayed.
“I see that I don’t have to be the man who charmed the panties off of half the voting board for the awards. I don’t have to be a pawn of whatever games the Pollard twins want to play.”
Through the misery of watching the chasm between him and Jo widen, a spark of hope caught hold at those words. He didn’t have to play by the Pollards’ rules. Toxic though she was, Pamela had made that much clear. So had Kelly, in her own, innocent way. All was not lost.
“So what does that make me?” Jo raged on, hugging herself as tightly as he wanted to hold her. “Am I just someone else you’ve charmed the panties off of? Did you get what you wanted from me?”
“No,” he snapped, letting his frustration drive him. “No, I haven’t gotten what I want from you. Because what I want when I look at you, what I dream of when I hold you in my arms and make love to you is something that defies everything I know.”
She clamped her jaw tight, the tears that came to her eyes killing him.
“I love you, Jo, and though I’m sure you won’t believe it, I’ve never said those words to anyone before in my life.” Saying them now left him panting with fear. “I love you, and I’m pretty sure I just screwed that up beyond repair. And that hurts far more than any blow to my reputation or the decimation of the career I’ve worked for all these years. That’s something I don’t think I’ll ever recover from.”
She turned to the side, holding a still-gloved hand to her mouth and squeezing her eyes shut.
Catch a Falling Star (Second Chances Book 3) Page 23