For that, she thought, she couldn’t hate him.
For betraying her, she could. He had used her shamelessly to get his first big story, sitting next to her on the beach, inviting her out, even going to bed with her because he thought she had something to do with the drug dealers operating practically at her toes.
She had to admit that from what she’d heard and read about him since her arrival in Florida, such unethical conduct didn’t seem to be part of his current modus operandi. But that didn’t mean she had to forgive him.
She returned to the den and peeled his picture off her dartboard. It had been stuck with darts so many times it didn’t come easily. She crumpled it into a tight ball and charged to the kitchen to toss it immediately into the trash, hesitating at the last moment. She didn’t know why.
Muttering to herself, she smoothed out the picture and shoved it into her thick Miami Yellow Pages. Later she’d burn it while she was grilling chicken or roasting marshmallows on her deck. Make a ceremony out of it. A cleansing ritual. Prove to herself that Jeremiah Tabak was well and truly out of her life.
Twenty years old, on her first trip over spring break and just so sure she was in love.
Don’t think. Don’t remember.
But she couldn’t stop herself.
She’d spent previous spring breaks in Boston, playing flute in dingy, windowless, sound-proof practice rooms. That week, she’d indulged in Florida sun and sand…and a young, hungry, impossibly sexy reporter. Their relationship was improbable from the start, a future together impossible.
He’d used her to get his drug story, not realizing, until it was too late, that she didn’t even smoke or drink, much less use drugs, and barely knew anyone who did. Her life was music. Hours and hours of daily practice alone and in ensembles and orchestra. Classes in music theory, music composition, music history, all in addition to her regular academic classes.
And, of course, there was her family. Her parents were violinists, her older sister a cellist, her godfather a world-famous tenor. Mollie remembered trying to explain the nuances of Lavender family life to Jeremiah in the predawn darkness after they’d made love, when he’d seemed so attentive and empathetic, so certain of himself. The rivalries, prejudices, expectations of classical musicians-their drive and ambition-mystified him. “Your family and friends back in Boston sound like a bunch of flakes to me,” he’d pronounced, inoffensively.
They were. They were loving, tolerant, devoted to their work and their families and friends, but not tuned into the world in any conventional way, in the way, Mollie finally realized, that she wanted to be.
She smiled, thinking of them.
After Miami, after Jeremiah, she could no longer pretend she shared their passion for music. She was different. She’d packed up her flute, quit the conservatory, and entered the world of communications, expecting never to see her ex-lover again.
She realized she was trembling. Damn. Thirty years old, trembling over a man she’d known for only a week and hadn’t seen in a decade. She’d convinced herself Palm Beach was well removed from the world of crime and corruption in which Jeremiah operated, that she needn’t worry about running into the Miami Tribune’s star investigative reporter.
So why had she?
Why had he been parked outside the Greenaway Club last night?
She frowned, not liking the direction her thoughts were taking. He had to have his share of ex-lovers. Why such curiosity about her?
Jeremiah Tabak, she remembered, didn’t do things for personal reasons. Not ten years ago, not now.
And that could mean only one thing: he was on a story.
3
Jeremiah arrived at his desk at the Miami Tribune wondering how many women had his picture on their dartboards. He supposed he should have told Mollie the truth about himself ten years ago. But she did seem to enjoy thinking of him as scum.
Which, as far as she was concerned, he was. Twenty was young, but twenty-six wasn’t old, and he’d tried to do the honorable thing, even if it had, in retrospect, been awfully damned dumb. Now he had a blonde-haired publicist up in Palm Beach firing darts between his eyes.
“Son,” his father liked to tell him, “remember that more than anything else, what a woman wants from a man is the truth.”
In his twisted logic, Jeremiah had thought because what he’d told Mollie made him look like a snake, he was off the hook as far as telling the truth. He’d acted honorably, in his estimation, trying to soften the blow of ending their weeklong affair by telling her he’d used her to get his drug-dealing story. The truth was, he’d fallen for her just as hard and fast and incomprehensibly as she had fallen for him. Yet he’d known-and saw it before she did-that they couldn’t last.
So he’d lied to her then, just as he’d lied to her two hours ago. Both lies had been expedient. The first, because he’d thought it would be easier to have her hate him than to try to explain the complexities of why they couldn’t be together. The second, because he’d thought he could get out of there without a dart somewhere on his person if he let her believe simple, human curiosity had driven him to her doorstep rather than a story.
“God, what a chickenshit,” he muttered, hitting the space key on his computer, just to interrupt the image of her trim legs and pale, straight hair, her natural, incongruous elegance, apparent even in her sweaty exercise clothes.
He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, namely ferreting out information on Croc’s jewel thief. He was, as his skinny young friend had so accurately pointed out, between stories. In fact, his editor had been urging him to seize the moment and take a vacation, his first in two years. He’d even contemplated where he might go. But it seemed silly to leave south Florida in the dead of winter, and then Croc had approached him with tales of Mollie Lavender as a jewel thief.
Ten years ago, he recalled, trouble had swirled around her, leaving her untouched, like the lone tree standing after a hurricane. Although innocently on spring break and as committed and driven in her life as a musician as he was in his as a journalist, he’d sensed a restlessness of soul and spirit. She was more uncertain and unformed than any twenty-year-old would willingly let anyone know or see, and he’d been drawn to the secret parts of her that she hadn’t yet explored or even admitted existed. Ultimately, he’d let her sort through those complexities herself, without him.
Could she have turned into a jewel thief in the meantime?
Possibly. Why the hell not?
But he could also imagine her right there in the thick of things, oblivious.
Yet the woman he’d seen that morning hadn’t seemed oblivious or airheaded or anything but sharp, professional, and in control.
Except for that picture of him on her dartboard, of course.
Jeremiah grinned, feeling better. How, he wondered, had Croc landed on her as his chief suspect? There had to be more than his common denominator theory. Croc liked being mysterious and in the know. He wouldn’t be above withholding vital information.
Hurling himself to his feet with sudden energy, Jeremiah made his way through the sea of desks and reporters in the big, open Trib newsroom and down the corridor to the separate offices of the arts and entertainment and leisure sections. Helen Samuel had her own office, one, because no one could stand her smoking, and, two, because no one could stand her. Her abrasiveness aside, she was an old-style gossip columnist who prided herself on knowing what was fair game and what wasn’t. A jewel thief on the loose in Palm Beach was right up her alley.