“Jeremiah, I have a right to know everything you know about this story. You’re not compromising your ethics. It’s not as if you’re going to write it.”
“Mollie. Let’s go eat. We’ll talk.”
His calm seemed only to inflame her further. “I don’t think this thief is about you-or even me.”
“Mollie.”
“We must be missing something-some clue-”
“Mollie.”
She paused, frowned. “What?”
“Our ten minutes are almost up.”
The restaurant was small, simple, and within easy walking distance of Jeremiah’s building. The good, inexpensive Cuban food reminded her of the lunches and dinners they’d had together ten years ago. Their waiter brought her cup of black bean soup, and Mollie, feeling more in control of herself, spooned into it as she cast Jeremiah a dubious look. “You were bluffing. You wouldn’t really have dragged me off to bed.”
He smiled, amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes, reminding her he was no longer twenty-six. “I don’t think I’d have had to do any dragging.”
“It’s because of our past.” She tried her soup, which was thick and spicy and steaming hot. She was being pragmatic. With Jeremiah Tabak, pragmatism was the only sensible approach. “If we hadn’t already slept together, you wouldn’t be tempted.”
An eyebrow quirked. He’d ordered a margarita, no soup. “Mollie, that’s the most twisted logic-”
“No, it makes perfect sense. One, I’m not your type. I’m a publicist. You’re a hard-news journalist. I live and work in Palm Beach. You work for a tough, urban newspaper, and you live with Bennie and Albert and Sal.”
“I don’t live with them. We simply share the same building.”
“Because you don’t care where you live. It’s immaterial. Jeremiah, I grew up with people like you.”
“Are you comparing me to your parents?” He laughed, giving a mock shudder. “I need another margarita.”
“You’ve never even met my parents.”
“They’re violinists. Flakes.”
“The point is,” she said, refusing to be distracted, “that you and I have and want different things out of life. I listened to Carmina Burana on the way down here. I looked at your CD collection while you were in the shower. Rock, blues, jazz. All stuff I like, but no classical, which I love, which I used to live.”
He frowned. “How can you live classical music?”
She threw up her hands. “There. I rest my case.”
“Mollie, you have no case.”
“I do. The reason you and I would have ended up in bed together is because of some kind of hormonal memory or something. Probably some chemical. A throwback to our week together. You know, it was so fast and furious that-” No, best not to go down that road. She grabbed the pepper shaker. “I’m sure it’s chemical.”
“Right.”
She felt warm and tried to blame the soup. “Well, that was the first reason why we wouldn’t have ended up in bed if we already hadn’t. The second reason is business. You’re more experienced than you were ten years ago. You wouldn’t sleep with me now because it’s too risky. It’d look bad. You’ve a reputation to maintain.”
“Mollie.” He leaned across the table, the candlelight bringing out even more colors in his eyes. A fiery yellow, a gleam of black. “I don’t give a rat’s ass about my precious reputation. I do what I do because I think it’s right. Ten years ago, I thought it was right to sleep with you. Twenty minutes ago, I didn’t. Twenty hours from now…” He shrugged. “Who knows?”
She swallowed, her throat dry. “What about me?”
“You’ll have your say.”
Just as she did ten years ago. She’d been caught up in her righteous anger over his duplicity for so long that she’d neatly forgotten how solicitous he’d been about making sure she knew what she was doing, wanted it. It was that same peculiar sense of honor that had compelled him, a week later, to tell her he’d used her to get his first front-page story when he hadn’t. He’d tried to spare her regrets that he simply didn’t realize he had no power to spare.
The waiter brought their meals, and Mollie inhaled the delicious smells of the fried plantains, yellow rice, and grilled lime chicken. Jeremiah ordered another margarita. She asked for more water and seized the opportunity to make a smooth transition out of a subject she’d stupidly brought up. “Tell me about this Croc character and why he’s above suspicion and I’m not.”
“I never said he was above suspicion.” Jeremiah sipped his margarita, his expression all business, the professional journalist at work. “I go where the facts lead me. I’ve know Croc for about two years. He thinks of himself as my secret weapon.”
“But you didn’t put him up to following me,” Mollie said.
“No, that was his brilliant idea.”
“Because he suspects me.”
“Croc suspects everyone. It’s his nature. He doesn’t have much faith in people.”
“He must in you.”
Jeremiah set down his margarita, suddenly looking troubled, distracted. “That doesn’t give me a great deal of comfort, you know.”
Mollie considered his words. “You don’t want to feel responsible for him.”
“I’m not responsible for him. What Croc does, Croc does on his own.”
“But if he’s living vicariously through you-”
“He’s not. He just brings me what he hears.”
“What’s his real name?”
“He says it’s Blake Wilder. I don’t know if it is or isn’t. I don’t even know where he lives.”
Mollie started on her food, which was hot, spicy, and perfect for her mood. She felt that Jeremiah’s relationship with his young source was more complicated than he was willing to admit. She wanted to press him, but when Jeremiah commented on the food, she took the hint and let the subject shift to innocuous things. Favorite restaurants, the weather, movies they’d recently seen, books they’d recently read. Mollie found him insightful, thoughtful, less black-and-white in his outlook than she would have expected. A man of many different facets was Jeremiah Tabak. She’d had such a straightforward, uncomplicated view of him for so long that getting used to him as a complex, real, live, breathing man wasn’t easy.
He paid for dinner. He insisted, because if they hadn’t had to leave on short notice he’d have cooked for her. Mollie didn’t remind him that she’d never expected to stay for dinner at all.
She relished the warm evening air on the walk back to his apartment, enjoyed the bustle of the crowded streets, imagined how different a late February night in Boston would be. A year ago, she’d have worked late, maybe gone out for dinner with friends, or to a concert with her parents or sister. There had been no steady man in her life. Jeremiah Tabak was a distant, if still very real, memory.
There wasn’t a steady man now, she reminded herself, glancing at Jeremiah as he strode beside her, preoccupied with his own thoughts. She had no illusions. He was driven and utterly focused on one thing: investigating the Gold Coast thefts. Just because he couldn’t do the story didn’t mean it didn’t absorb him. The physical part of their relationship was just an extension of that focus and drive. If it became a distraction, something apart from the story, it would end. The story determined everything. And when it ended, so would his interest in her. As much as he might want to believe she was his reason for being on the jewel thief story, she wasn’t. He was the reason. His need to know things, his need to unravel and solve and figure out and just know.
When they arrived back at his building, the guys were all still outside, Bennie smoking a fat, putrid-smelling cigar. “Old habit,” he said. “My wife never let me smoke inside.”