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.