But Croc wasn’t the problem. Mollie, Jeremiah knew, was the problem. He’d picked her off a beach filled with college students ten years ago because something about her had grabbed at his soul.
He groaned at his own romantic idiocy. A decade hadn’t made him any smarter about her. He grabbed his own whittling knife and went down to join the boys on the porch. Four eighty-plus-year-olds and him. They passed him a cigar and a hunk of wood, and Jeremiah figured it beat driving back up to Palm Beach and sneaking around Leonardo Pascarelli’s house just in case his big-eyed ex-flute player ventured out tonight. He could follow her, search her house, or just sit out on the street talking to himself like a damned fool. Best he just sit out with the guys instead and let the night sort itself out.
It wasn’t until after eleven that Mollie got the brush of Jeremiah’s lips off her mind. She couldn’t even characterize it as a real kiss, and yet she’d obsessed on it for hours. Work had not served as a distraction. She made her West Coast calls, brainstormed with pad and pen, and spent thirty minutes updating her contacts database. Then she threw darts and, finally, sank into a hot, scented bath. As a means of restoring her universe to some semblance of order, she projected herself five years into the future. She’d have a cute little house, an office, a small staff, talented clients, and a fun man in her life. It wouldn’t be Jeremiah. It couldn’t be Jeremiah, no matter how dark and sexy she still found him.
Jeremiah, she reminded herself, wasn’t fun.
When she bundled up in her bathrobe and slid into bed to watch a late-night rerun of I Love Lucy, she found herself almost wishing for a Boston winter. Winds howling. Radiators hissing and knocking. Thermometer plummeting. Instead a cool breeze filled the room with the scents of the tropical night and the sounds of the ocean not far off, and crickets chirping madly, dozens of them, as if to remind her she was up above Leonardo’s garage, all alone.
The telephone rang, jolting her upright, sending the remote flying out of her hand. She picked up, heart racing wildly.
“Mollie, sweet Mollie,” Leonardo Pascarelli crooned.
“Leonardo! Good heavens, you almost gave me a heart attack! Isn’t it the crack of dawn or something in Italy?”
“Or something. I’ve been wandering and pacing in my suite for hours. I sang La Bohème tonight.” He hummed a few bars of the overture. “Now I’m having a drink on my balcony and unwinding. Did I wake you?”
“No, I’m in my room watching I Love Lucy. It’s the episode with Lucy and Desi in London and she wants to meet the queen.”
“Yes! I remember! And she makes Desi let her perform with him. Ah, those were the days of the great shows. Sometimes,” he went on in his wonderful voice that even when not performing resonated in the listener’s soul, “I wish I’d stuck to singing in the shower and worked in my father’s butcher shop.”
“Your father’s butcher shop went out of business twenty years ago.”
“I could have sold lamb chops in Haymarket Square and sung Desi Arnaz songs to snotty young conservatory students.” Mollie could hear him gulping his drink, his melancholy palpable. He had always wanted more—more love, more romance, more acclaim, more everything—and yet wished he didn’t, wished the abyss inside him, that he could neither define nor ever fill, would just vanish, even if it took his drive and ambition with it. He sighed heavily. “If Papa could see me now…”
“He’d be proud of you, Leonardo.”
“I don’t know. No wife, no children. I forget even where I am. Florence, Venice?”
“Leonardo, this isn’t your first drink, is it?”
“It is. I’m just being mournful because I haven’t been to bed yet and I’m alone in the country of my ancestors, and I’ve just sung Puccini.” He cleared his throat, pushing through his dark mood. “But never mind me. Tell me about you, sweet Mollie. How are you? How’s your business? How’s your life?”