“Yes, I know. We’re the subject of intense and lurid gossip.”
“Sorry?”
“Nope. I can get a lot of mileage from having had a mad, weeklong affair with a dark and dangerous Miami reporter. It’ll make me seem more mysterious.” She grinned at him, wondering if he thought she was serious. “I wouldn’t just want to be Leonardo Pascarelli’s goody-two-shoes goddaughter.”
“You think we’re having another mad, weeklong affair,” he said, a palpable seriousness descending over him.
She shrugged, refusing to let his dark mood affect her. “I left my crystal ball in Boston.”
“Mollie…”
“Don’t, Jeremiah. Being honest with me is honorable in and of itself. It allows me to make informed choices. You’re not in the frame of mind to make promises, and I’m not in one to receive them. You’ve taken a hit today.” She eased off the stool, her knees unsteady. “Absorb it first. Then we’ll figure out what next week will bring.”
“When you were twenty, you couldn’t wait to get to next week.”
She laughed. “Nothing like turning thirty to change that. I’m not into hurrying time these days. I’m off to the shower. I still smell like chlorine. If you want, you can throw some darts. I find it relaxing.” She grinned over her shoulder at him as she started down the hall. “Although less so since I took down your picture. It’s tucked in the Yellow Pages if you want to throw a few darts between your own eyes and beat yourself up a little, at least metaphorically.”
He didn’t respond, and she could feel his eyes on her, their intensity making her shudder with awareness on every level, physical, emotional, mental. With Jeremiah, there was no hiding, no pretending, no eluding. From herself, from him.
She darted down the hall and into her bedroom, her body telling her in a thousand different ways that she’d made love to Jeremiah Tabak last night. Her nightmare. Her one dark and dangerous man. Except, after seeing him with his battered young friend, he’d seemed less dark, less dangerous, less volatile and remote and determined never to connect with another human being.
“You’re getting way ahead of the facts,” she warned herself sarcastically and flung open a drawer, staring at her nightgown selection. They came in degrees of utilitarian, some with feminine touches, none with sexy overtones. Well. There was no assurance Jeremiah would even see her in her nightgown. She chose one that was full-length, white cotton, and not too utilitarian, then slipped into the shower, welcoming the stream of hot water on her tensed muscles, the smell of citrus soap and chamomile shampoo. She shut her eyes, forgetting the past, postponing the future, just focusing on the present, her shower, her body.
She toweled off and decided to blow-dry her hair just enough to keep it from becoming a rat’s nest overnight. It was not, she told herself, a delaying tactic. When she returned to her bedroom, she slipped a terry-cloth robe over her nightgown before venturing back to the kitchen and the rest of her wine.
She could hear the rhythmic tossing of darts in the den. She sipped a bit more of her wine and stood in the semidark kitchen, listening. Throwing darts was an effective release, she thought, after a twenty-four-hour period in which you’d been to bed with a woman who’d once, fervently, wished you a long stay in hell and then found a friend in the hospital. Those were enough, without the added complications of a jewel thief, a missing heir, questions from the police, and a journalistic reputation on the line.
When she went into the den, she wasn’t really surprised to see that Jeremiah had pulled out the sofa bed.
“I’ll get sheets,” she said without preamble.
A dart thwacked home. A bull’s-eye. Others, she saw, had gone wide. “Mollie.” His eyes pinned her as surely as any dart. His dark mood hadn’t lifted; if anything, it had intensified. “I want you to know I don’t regret last night. And it wasn’t a fluke.”
“I understand.”
“But I don’t know if I can be what you need.”
“I don’t want you to be what I need.” She walked around the sofa bed and stood in front of him, close, seeing every tensed muscle, every line, every speck of gray in his cropped, dark hair. She imagined that straight line of a mouth on hers, sliding over her body, bringing her to a kind of ecstasy she’d never known with anyone else. “Just be honest with me, Jeremiah, and be who you are. That’s all anyone has a right to ask.”
The straight mouth twitched, almost imperceptibly. “That’s all?”
“Well, who you are is sexy and not exactly celibate and—” She smiled, raising her eyebrows at him. “Do I really need to get sheets?”
“I have amazing self-restraint, you know.”
“About some things, I’m sure.”