Midnight Encounters (18 page)

“Good.”

He led her across the lobby toward a set of heavy oak doors flanked by two large men in tuxedos. At their approach, the men pulled the doors open with a graceful swoop and gestured for them to enter.

Seeing as they were dressed like they were going to the prom, Maggie expected to walk into a grand ballroom. To her surprise, it was a casino.

And not the kind of casino you saw in Las Vegas tourism commercials, with flashing neon lights and ear-piercing sounds jangling out of slot machines. Small and sophisticated, this one offered a fair amount of game tables, waiters with trays of champagne, and a black tie clientele. Aside from the occasional jubilant cry coming from the roulette section, the atmosphere was serious yet relaxed, and it practically oozed money.

“Do you like to gamble?” Ben asked as they crossed the plush carpeted floor toward one of the blackjack tables.

“I don’t know. I’ve never gambled before.”

What would I have to gamble with?
she almost added, but stopped herself just in time. A man as wealthy as Ben wouldn’t understand, anyway.

“Trust me. You’ll like it.”

They paused in front of a table, and a man in a black suit approached and exchanged a few words with Ben. They spoke in murmured tones, but Maggie caught the word “markers” and then raised her brows at the number “two thousand”.

As the bow-tied card dealer doled out a stack of chips and placed them in front of Ben, she leaned over and whispered, “Did you just ask for two thousand dollars worth of chips?”

“Yep.” He split the stack in half and pushed one pile toward her. “This one’s yours.” She gulped. “I can’t take your money. What if I lose?”

“Then you lose.”

Her throat tightened with irritation. “I won’t be in debt to you, Ben.”

“Call it a gift.”

“A thousand-dollar stack of chips is not a gift.” Setting her jaw, she pushed the red circles back toward Ben’s pile. “I can’t accept it.”

He paused for a moment, and then sighed. “Fine, be difficult. We’ll play as a team.”

“And I don’t keep a dime of the winnings,” she added, her tone firm.

“And you won’t keep a dime of the winnings,” he echoed grudgingly.

The card dealer’s lips twitched, and Maggie suspected he found the entire exchange amusing. He’d probably never encountered a woman so willing to kiss a thousand bucks goodbye.

“Ready to play some cards?” the man asked, glancing from her to Ben.

They spent the next hour at the blackjack table, with Ben explaining the game to her with the utmost of patience. After a few big wins, Maggie started to relax. She smiled at the tuxedo-clad men who joined them, sipped a glass of champagne, and stared at a familiar-looking woman in a gold sequined dress for ten minutes before Ben finally whispered that she was the lead anchor for NBC’s evening news.

“You do watch the news, don’t you?” he teased.

“Sometimes.”

The laugh he gave sent a flurry of shivers up her spine. “Don’t you feel alienated sometimes, being so out of touch with the world?”

She shrugged. “I’m too busy to feel alienated.”

He tweaked one of the wavy tendrils framing her cheeks. “We really need to talk about this jam-packed schedule of yours.”

Maggie’s reply was cut off by the sound of a throaty female voice squealing, “Benjamin?” An unbelievably tall, unbelievably beautiful woman with raven hair and sparkling blue eyes sauntered over in an indecent red dress and a pair of three-inch heels. Before Maggie could blink, the giant sexpot threw her arms around Ben and splattered kisses on his cheeks.

“Benjamin! It is you!” With her heavy South American accent, it sounded more like “Ben-ja-meeen, eet eeez you!” Something about the way the woman’s eyes twinkled suggestively hinted that this beauty knew Ben on a very intimate level. In fact, at a closer examination of the black-haired beauty’s face, Maggie realized she was the supermodel at Ben’s side in the picture she’d found on the Internet.

“Sonja,” Ben said in a warm voice, gingerly disentangling himself from the woman’s embrace, “I should’ve known I’d run into you here.”

“Well, of course. This is my second home. Do you remember when we summered here, Benjamin?” Sonja licked her bottom lip, a move so blatantly sexual Maggie wanted to tear out the woman’s tongue.

Meow.

“And who is your lovely friend?” Sonja added.

Maggie had to hand it to the woman. She made the phrase “lovely friend” seem like the most contemptible insult ever composed.

“This is Maggie Reilly.” Ben’s features looked strained, his discomfort evident in his eyes.

“It is wonderful to meet you, Maggie.”

Damn, even her name coming out of Sonja’s lush red lips sounded like an affront.

“Yeah, same here,” she replied.

“And are you also a model, Maggie?”

She swallowed, feeling horribly exposed as Sonja looked her up and down. “Actually, I’m a waitress.

From New York.”

There was a moment’s silence, finally broken by a long tinkling laugh from Sonja, who turned to grin at Ben. “So you’re—how do you Americans say it? Slumming it?” The callous words sliced into Maggie’s chest like a blade and caused her breath to jam in her throat.

She no longer felt exposed. She felt gutted, humiliated, and even though nobody was looking their way, she felt like every eye in the room was glued on her.

Her hands started to tremble. She wanted to reply with a catty comment, slap this Brazilian bitch the way she’d slapped Robbie Hanson when he’d called her a foster-freak back in the ninth grade, but for the life of her she couldn’t make her vocal cords work.

So she did the only other thing she could think of. She straightened her back, lifted her chin and walked away as steadily as her legs would allow and with as much dignity as she could muster.

“Oopsy. I seem to have upset your little friend.”

Ben’s heart shrank in his chest as he stared after Maggie’s retreating back. Next to him, Sonja looked pleased as punch, which made him rethink every positive thing he’d ever thought of the woman. She was a snob, yes. Self-absorbed, totally. But he’d never taken her for downright cruel.

“That was uncalled for,” he snapped.

Sonja just laughed. “Oh, Benjamin, I was only—how do you say?—goofing around. Your friend is much too sensitive. This is why you need a real woman,
caro
.” The air sizzled from the hot sparks of fury he shot in his former flame’s direction. “I have a real woman.” He hooked his thumb at the exit. “She went thataway.”

Without another word, he left Sonja by the blackjack table and marched out of the casino, quickening his stride when he entered the lobby and found it empty. One of the clerks at the front desk discreetly nodded toward the glass doors at the lobby’s entrance.

Ben stepped outside just in time to see Maggie stalking towards the golf cart parked in front of the building. She looked so achingly beautiful in that green dress, so goddamn sexy in those strappy heels, that he had to restrain himself from pulling her into his arms. She wasn’t crying, but the look of ice she gave him when she noticed his presence clearly said ‘back off’.

“Maggie…” he began timidly.

She bunched the hem of her dress with her hands so it wouldn’t drag on the cement on her way to the waiting cart. “Don’t bother. It’s not your fault she spoke the truth.” He almost keeled over backwards. “What? You think what she said was the tru—” He quit talking when he saw her flop onto the back of the golf cart and signal the driver. Chest tight with anger, he pushed forward and leaped into the cart before it sped off.

He shifted so that he faced Maggie and forced himself to take a calming breath, but it didn’t ease the tension constricting his jaw.

“There wasn’t an ounce of truth to what Sonja said,” he snapped, stunned that Maggie would even suggest such a thing.

“Maybe not. But it is something I’ve been wondering myself. What are you doing with me, Ben? You’re a big movie star, I’m a waitress. You’ve got ten million dollars in your bank account, I’m lucky to see a hundred in mine. You know Brazilian supermodels and bling rappers, I spend my days with poor and abused kids.”

She let out a strangled sigh and scrunched up the material of her dress with one hand. “This isn’t me, Ben. This dress. Being pampered in a spa. Throwing away money at casinos. It’s not
me
, and you don’t seem to get that.”

“I don’t seem to get it?” he echoed, growing angry. “Why would I? From the day we met I’ve been trying to impress you! Since nothing else seemed to work, I thought whisking you away to a tropical resort might.”

“Why would you want to impress me?” Her voice came out strained. “I…I don’t get what you want from me, Ben.”

He could see her pulse thudding in her throat, could hear the ragged breaths exiting her mouth, and a thread of confusion stitched his insides. She’d just raised the one question he’d been avoiding for days.

What did he want from her?

Sex
would’ve been the answer a week ago.

More sex
would’ve been the answer last night.

Yet, if he were honest with himself, he’d admit that it had always been about more than sex. He’d liked Maggie from the moment he met her. Liked her sass, her confidence, her complete disinterest in his celebrity. He liked that she wasn’t scared to tell him off, and he especially liked how she made him
work
.

For her body, her trust, her time.

Women constantly threw themselves at his feet, but not Maggie. She knew who she was and what she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to say it. That’s probably what he liked most of all.

“I want to be with you.” He raked his fingers through his hair, frazzled. “I’m with you because I like you.

Because you’re…
real
. Don’t you get it? I’m surrounded by plastic people. Fake, shallow people who think they know me, who pretend they
care
about knowing me. Do you realize you’re the first person other than a reporter who actually wanted to know where I grew up?” She didn’t answer.

“Hell, even my own agent doesn’t bother to dig deeper.” His mouth twisted in a bitter frown. “He hasn’t once asked for details about my recent inheritance. He just assumes—like the rest of the world—that I fucked Gretchen Goodrich.”

“And you expected something different?” Her voice sounded cool. “You’ve got a reputation for sleeping around, it’s not so shocking that people believe you went to bed with a married woman.” Something inside him hardened. “And what about you, Maggie? Do you believe that line of bull?”

“I don’t know what to believe. I don’t know you, Ben, outside of the biblical sense, anyway.” His nostrils flared at her dismissive tone. “And in the entire week we’ve spent together, you didn’t get a sense of who I am, that I might be a decent guy?”

She tilted her head and shot him a look full of distress and far too much wisdom for her age. “Very few people are decent, Ben. In the end, the only person you can count on is yourself. Sex, relationships, even love, they’re not tangible, they disappear in the blink of an eye.”

“So what, you avoid it all for fear that it might disappear?” He shook his head. “Is that why you hide behind your job and your volunteer work and school, because those are the only things you can count on?”

She just frowned.

“Well, I say it’s bullshit,” he continued, gulping in the late night air. “You
can
count on relationships and other people to be there for you. Some connections can never be broken. Take my mother, for instance.

She had a hard life, raised me on her own, struggled to put food on the table, and she never complained, never packed up and left, even though I know there were times she must have felt like it.”

“You want to talk about mothers, Ben?” Maggie shot back, pure venom lining her voice. “Well, mine abandoned me in front of a convenience store when I was five. She told me to wait outside while she went over to the bank, said she’d be back in ten minutes. You know how long I waited out there for her?”

He faltered, completely taken aback by the shards of raw pain slicing her features.

“Thirteen hours. I waited for thirteen hours before the owner of the store finally called the cops, who carted me off to social services.”

The driver pulled the little cart to a stop in front of their bungalow, and Maggie hopped out without another word. Quietly thanking the man behind the wheel, Ben shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers and climbed the porch with slow, heavy steps. Maggie was already inside by the time he entered the room, but he still had no idea what to say to her.

Her confession reverberated through his head. It brought a knot of sickness to his stomach, a tight squeeze to his heart, and for a moment he had to wonder how this perfect night he’d planned had ended up in shambles.

Ben couldn’t wrap his brain around it. His own father had walked out on him, but growing up with a warm, loving mother had dulled the ache his dad’s desertion had left in his heart. He couldn’t even imagine how Maggie must feel, knowing she’d been abandoned on the sidewalk like a piece of trash.

“I lived in sixteen foster homes during the thirteen years I was part of the system,” she said, continuing as if they’d never been interrupted.

She paused in front of the armoire and reached for the overnight bag she’d stowed on the bottom shelf.

As she rummaged in the bag, she glanced at him over her shoulder, her expression unreadable. “I’ve been on my own since I was five years old, Ben, so don’t talk to me about connections and lasting relationships. In my life, there’s no such thing.”

The Gulfstream jet cruised the morning sky at thirty-thousand feet, heading back in the direction of New York, but Maggie couldn’t decide if she was looking forward to the prospect of going home, or dreading it. The events of last night still haunted her. Sonja’s harsh words, the blow-up with Ben that followed. He hadn’t tried to kiss or touch her after that, just slid into bed and went to sleep, while Maggie lay awake half the night and thought about everything she’d said to him.

Her head told her she’d spoken to truth, and years of being alone only strengthened her belief that relying on others was a mistake. Yet her heart spoke differently. Her heart argued that she shouldn’t allow the past to affect her future. That sooner or later she’d need to lower the walls she’d raised and let someone in.