“Accusing me of being involved with a jewel thief is caring about me?”
“I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just letting you know where I stand.”
As he hadn’t, not with any honesty, ten years ago. He’d let her believe the worst about him. Now, he was getting it all up front and center. “You’d better leave now, Tabak, before I…” Too incensed to think clearly, she didn’t know what she’d do. “Well, you can imagine.”
“I sure can, sweet pea.” He smiled sexily, knowingly, incensing her even more. He touched her cheek with the back of a knuckle. “If you’re in trouble, you have my number. You have my address. Call me, find me. I’m after the truth, and if it hurts you, it hurts you. But I’ll still be there for you.”
“Lucky me,” she said bitterly.
A glint of humor sparked in his eyes. “You’re right on there, darlin’. Right on. I owe you for lying to you ten years ago. It’s a debt I aim to pay.”
He blew her a kiss, and Chet’s fingers stumbled on the keyboard. He recovered quickly, and again the room filled with his music. But Mollie was still reeling.
Jeremiah, in total control, left.
After a few seconds, Mollie was able to return to her booth. Well, she thought. Didn’t that serve her right? She’d been starting to think of Jeremiah with a soft and tender side, and he’d just shown her. Probably acted out of a sense of honor. Had to let her know up front what was what. If she was guilty, she’d hang. But he’d feel bad about it.
During his break, Chet beelined for his publicist’s table. “What the hell was that all about?”
“I don’t know.” She’d ordered another margarita, this one with alcohol. “I’m as taken aback as you are.”
“Should have slapped the son of a bitch.”
“I thought about it.”
His eyes narrowed on her. He was stocky, fit, in his late fifties. “There’s a history between you two.”
Mollie felt her shoulders sagging. A history. She’d talked herself out of believing a weeklong affair was any kind of history. But there was something about Jeremiah, something about their history, that still ate at her, still intrigued and agonized her.
“It’s none of my business,” Chet went on, “but guys like that, they feed on vulnerability. They can’t help it. They sense it, they swoop in for the kill. It’s just the way they’re made. Tabak knows every button to push to get the information he wants. He’s on this jewel thief story, isn’t he?”
“It’s not his sort of story—”
“He’ll make it his sort of story. Mark my words, he’ll find an angle that’s pure Jeremiah Tabak.” Something caught his eye, and his face lit up. “Ah, here’s my bride. Excuse me, Mollie, won’t you?”
“Sure, Chet.”
She watched him greet his wife, who sat with Mollie and didn’t ask about Jeremiah or Friday night. But after Chet had played the first piece of his second set, Mollie gave up on returning to solid form and just went home.
Driving north on 95, she played Leonardo’s collection of his favorite tragic, romantic arias and turned up the volume high. At first she blinked back the tears, then she just let them flow as her godfather’s incredible voice filled her soul and forced out all the emotions she’d bottled up since first spotting Jeremiah at the Greenaway. Frustration, loss, fear, anticipation. She even cried for the young woman she’d been at twenty, the path not taken, the dreams not realized. Her week with Jeremiah had slammed her up hard against reality. She didn’t want a career in music. She didn’t have good judgment in men. She wasn’t as worldly and sophisticated as she’d thought.
Now here she was, ready to make the same mistake all over again. Wanting a man she was crazy to want. Desperate to trust him, even when he suspected her of knowing something about a jewel thief, even when he promised if the truth led him where she didn’t want him to go, so be it.
She reminded herself that love and romance and physical attraction didn’t necessarily respond to logic and will. If she’d once loved Jeremiah, if a part of her loved him still, there was nothing to be done about it beyond accepting it and moving on.
And not giving in, she thought.
Never giving in. She was thirty, and she liked her life, and she wasn’t in the mood to let falling for the wrong man turn it upside down all over again.
8
The telephone didn’t stop ringing in Mollie’s living room office all Monday morning, but most of the calls were about business, none were about Jeremiah, only two were from friends about her Friday-night attack—and Deegan was there to answer them all.
“You are a godsend,” Mollie told him as he left with a stack of stuff for the printer.
He laughed. “Nice to be appreciated. You’ll manage without me the rest of the day? I don’t mind coming back this afternoon.”