White Hot Page 21

  “You took him on his own terms. Maybe that’s all he wanted from you.”

  “Maybe.”

  She climbed out of the pool and grabbed her composers’ towel, so caught up in her own thoughts she didn’t notice him watching her. Her wet suit clung to her curves, her flat stomach. Water glistened on her arms and legs. She slung the towel over her shoulders. “I’ll be down in ten minutes, tops.”

  She made it in seven. She had on a little sheath of a sundress, in dark blue, and sandals, her legs bare, her hair pulled back and still damp. She’d dabbed on pale lipstick and a touch of mascara, and Jeremiah couldn’t imagine what had possessed him to put this woman on a plane to Boston ten years ago. Except that if he hadn’t, there’d be no hope for them now. She’d needed those ten years. Probably so had he. And that still said nothing about the next ten years.

  They took the Jaguar to the hospital, and Mollie, saying she was tired from her swim, let him drive. “You just want to see if I can really handle this thing,” he said, grinning at her.

  “Not true. If that truck of yours doesn’t intimidate you, nothing will.”

  On their way, she told him about her “spontaneous” cocktail party tomorrow night. She, Deegan, and Griffen had worked on it that afternoon. “Deegan didn’t stay-he went back to the hospital to see his brother.”

  “You’re baiting him,” Jeremiah said.

  She glanced sideways at him, mystified. “Who, Deegan?’ ”

  “The thief. If he’s still out there, this ‘spontaneous’ party is a way of baiting him.”

  She sat back, miffed. “So what if it is?”

  He shrugged. “So what is right. Let’s just not be disingenuous.”

  “I.e., don’t lie to you.”

  “I.e., don’t bullshit me. And don’t bullshit yourself.”

  “You do feel free to speak your mind, don’t you?”

  “Always, Mollie,” he said without remorse. “Not just with you.”

  “Must be from growing up in a swamp. I mean, if you’re surrounded by poisonous snakes and alligators and big ugly bugs, you learn pretty quick to tell it like it is.” She glanced over at him, the glint of the devil in her eyes. “Am I right?”

  He smiled. “From a certain point of view.”

  When they arrived at the hospital, he was surprised to find it wasn’t crawling with reporters. Word was out about the police finding Leonardo Pascarelli’s necklace on “Blake Wilder,” but not that Blake Wilder was Michael and Bobbi Tiernay’s long-missing older son, Kermit. Helen Samuel was either being remarkably discreet or not tipping her hand. Knowing her, Jeremiah suspected the latter.

  Croc was looking marginally better, definitely more alert. His father, still in his business suit, was at his son’s bedside and when he glanced at Jeremiah and Mollie, tears shone in his eyes. The resemblance between father and son was there, in the way their eyes crinkled, in the lines of their jaws. Jeremiah just hadn’t seen it when he’d met Michael Tiernay at his mother-in-law’s cocktail party.

  “We can wait outside,” Jeremiah said.

  “No-no, it’s all right.” Michael smiled tentatively. “You’ve been a better friend to Kermit in the past two years than I have. Please, stay. I…well, there’s no excuse. If I’d wanted to find my son, I could have found him.”

  Croc moved the arm with the IV in it. His lips were swollen and cracked, but he managed to say through his wired jaw, “Forget it.”

  “Kermit, whatever you need-a place to stay, an attorney, anything-you let me know. You tell me.” His voice faltered, and he blinked back tears. “I’m in it for the long haul this time, son. It won’t be so easy to get rid of me.”

  “Dad…” Croc spoke haltingly, barely able to get the words out. “Thanks.”

  Mollie took a step forward. “What about his mother?”

  “She got as far as the elevator before she had to turn back,” Michael Tiernay said without looking around at her. “It’s difficult…I don’t know if you can understand, or I can explain. We were afraid he was dead. We would believe it one day, and then decide it couldn’t be true the next.”

  “He never got in touch with you?”

  “No. We’d made it clear we didn’t want him to unless it was on our terms. We thought-” He broke off, a proud man fighting for composure. “We thought we were doing the right thing. Helping him become independent.”

  “Mr. Tiernay,” Mollie said gently, “I’m not in a position to judge you.”

  “You should judge me, Mollie. We cut our son out of our lives. We insisted our friends and family do the same and cut him out of their lives. He was a troubled nineteen-year-old boy, difficult, hypersensitive, recalcitrant, failing at everything he did, refusing to live by our rules and standards. We didn’t see another choice.”

  “What would have been another choice?”

  Such a simple question, Jeremiah thought. Michael Tiernay gave a bitter laugh. “Love him.”

  “But you didn’t stop loving him-”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean love as a feeling. I mean love as something we do. And we stopped. If he had been engaged in criminal activity, drinking and doing drugs, perhaps our alternatives would have been starker. But he wasn’t. He was simply…” He smiled meekly, turning back to his son. “He was simply a pain in the ass.”

  Mollie was frowning, not fully understanding.

  Michael Tiernay touched his son’s hand. “I’ll let you visit with your friends. I’ll be right out in the hall. It’s a clean slate, Kermit. In my eyes, we’re starting fresh.”

  “Croc.”

  “What?”

  “You can call me Croc.”

  His father laughed softly, his pain almost palpable. “Then Croc it is.” He turned to Jeremiah and Mollie. “Please, take your time. I’m not going anywhere.”

  “The police know anything more?” Jeremiah asked him.

  “Not yet.” His gaze went steely, and Jeremiah could see his pride, the core of a man who’d built Tiernay & Jones into a formidable force in international communications. “But it doesn’t matter what they find out. I’m here to stay.”

  He left the room in long, determined strides, and Jeremiah glowered at Croc. “Blake Wilder. You lying little shit.”

  Croc gave him a crooked, miserable grin and flipped him a bird.

  Jeremiah laughed. “I guess if I had a name like Kermit, I might head to fantasy land myself.”

  “I’m named after my grandfather,” Croc said slowly, laboriously, “not the frog.”

  “Kermit Atwood,” Mollie supplied. “Diantha’s husband.”

  “Well.” Jeremiah straightened, felt the emotional and physical agony Croc must be feeling. “You’re here. You’re alive. And your father’s at your bedside eating some crow. You going to forgive him?”

  “Already did.”

  “Were your parents authoritarian? Did they beat you, make you toe the line?”

  But Croc sank deeper into his pillows, drifting in and out, his pain medication, fatigue, and injuries taking their toll.

  “We were disengaged,” Michael Tiernay said from the doorway. He walked into the room and adjusted the blanket over his son as if he were still a small, innocent boy, not a young man with a policeman outside his hospital door. “He would do anything to get our attention. And did. Positive, negative-it didn’t matter what kind of attention he got. When we finally did focus on him, we decided he wasn’t worth our effort and kicked him out.”

  Jeremiah stared at him. “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself?”

  “No, I’m not. That’s why my wife couldn’t come up here, not because of what Kermit-of what Croc might have done, but because of what we’d done. He was still so young at nineteen. He needed us to love him-not without rules and standards, but unconditionally.”

  That wasn’t how Jeremiah and his father had operated, not even in the dark, pain-filled years after his mother had died. When they had problems, they’d go off in the swamp together wit
h a jackknife and matches. After a few days, everything would sort itself out.

  Michael Tiernay gently stroked his son’s ratty hair. “He had everything. Boarding school, the best camps, trips to Europe, everything electronic a boy could want, his own private suite at home. Harvard. But he wasn’t a part of our lives, and he knew it.” He looked back at Jeremiah abruptly, as if he’d tried to contradict him. “We’re not bad people. In fact, we’re very good people. We loved him in our own way.”

  “Mr. Tiernay, Croc never discussed his past with me.”

  Tiernay might not even have heard him. “It’s not the money, you know.”

  Jeremiah nodded. That much he did know.

  “The money just made it easier for us to think we were doing everything for our son when what we’d done was nothing.”

  “What about Deegan?” Mollie asked.

  Tiernay shifted to her, as if he’d forgotten she was there. “Deegan’s always been different. You don’t have children, but they come…I don’t know, they come with their own personalities. Kermit was always sensitive, creative, intuitive. Deegan’s more action-oriented, more direct, not at all introspective. That made him easier for reserved parents like Bobbi and myself to raise.”

  She smiled, her naturalness not unexpected but infectious. “Croc would have done well in my family. Things were always chaotic, there was never enough money, and my parents and sister are the quintessential flaky musicians. I guess they’d have had fits with a kid like Deegan, though.”

  Tiernay seemed to relax at her warmth and clarity. “Perhaps we all just have to play the cards we’re dealt. You’ve been good to him, Mr. Tabak. I gather he looks up to you.”

  “Mr. Tiernay, I’m responsible for him being here. If I’d taken his warnings more seriously, worked harder-”

  But Michael Tiernay was shaking his head. “I’ve known Kermit-Croc-all his life, and he has a mind of his own, which he’s willing to use. Which he’s desperate to use. He wants, and deserves, to take responsibility for his own decisions. It wasn’t his decision to abandon us. It was our decision to abandon him. In any case, unless he’s changed drastically-and my wife and I had nineteen years of trying to change him-it’s my guess he would only be annoyed if you tried to take the blame for his condition.”

  “You’re probably right. Will your wife be in later?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s fair to ask of her what she can’t give.” A tear traced its way down his handsome face, but he made no move to brush it away, seemed unembarrassed. “Whoever did this to him…”

  “I’m going to find out,” Jeremiah said, meaning it.

  “Yes. I believe you will. Thank you for being his friend.”

  Jeremiah stared at the battered, broken body in the hospital bed and had to fight back a tear or two of his own. No matter how many times he saw young men shot, knifed, beaten, drugged, and drunk, he had this same twisting pain in his stomach, this same overwhelming sense of loss and waste. When he didn’t, he promised himself he’d quit. Control and objectivity were one thing. A loss of compassion was something else entirely.

  “That’s a two-way street, Mr. Tiernay. Your son’s been a friend to me as well.”

  15

  They picked up sandwiches in a little shop that had Griffen’s stamp of approval and ate them on the deck above Leonardo’s lush backyard. Roasted vegetables on flatbread for Mollie, plain old roast beef for Jeremiah. She’d filched a bottle of pinot noir from her godfather’s wine closet, knowing he would not only have approved but insisted, and poured two glasses. Jeremiah held his in one hand, his fingers so rigid she thought he might shatter the glass. She understood. He wasn’t irritated or unnerved or anything that she might have been in a similar position.

  It wasn’t his mood, she realized, fascinated, but his mind at work.

  Jeremiah Tabak was doing what Jeremiah Tabak did, which was sort his way through facts, bits and pieces of information, scenes, comments, vignettes, anything and everything that came his way, then sit back and process them into a coherent whole.

  Mollie suspected that the coherent whole wasn’t materializing. He could speculate, perhaps, and come up with a variety of possible wholes, but he would avoid getting too far ahead of his precious facts.

  She also suspected-no, she thought, she knew-that he wasn’t really quite out on the deck with her. He couldn’t smell the greenery and flowers in the warm evening air, couldn’t hear the cry of the seagulls, the hum of traffic, the not-too-distant wash of the tide. He was in his story that he would never write. An occasional sip of wine was all that told her he hadn’t gone catatonic.

  But this altered state, of course, was familiar to her. She’d grown up with people who would stare off into space-not over crime and corruption, perhaps, but over music. A difficult phrase, an elusive cadenza, a new interpretation of a favorite sonata. These were the things that would occupy her parents and sister, her godfather, and take them mentally out of the room. She’d had these experiences herself, particularly when she was playing flute, but also, although less often, when she was brainstorming on behalf of a client. Definitely, however, her mind didn’t have the same tendency to wander as her parents’ did.

  And Jeremiah would disagree that his mind was wandering at all. He would say he was concentrating. Deliberately focusing. And maybe he was, but she didn’t believe it was strictly a matter of control or choice on his part. He was a reporter, she realized now, because of the way his mind worked, the way he took in the world around him, not the other way around.

  She pictured Croc’s battered face, his skinny, beaten body, his father in tears at his bedside. Gut-wrenching. Appalling. Who would do that to a defenseless human being? And especially miss a diamond-and-ruby necklace in his back pocket in the process? She didn’t buy the theory that the attacker had been interrupted before he could find it, or before he could get Croc’s body to wash out to sea. He’d wanted Croc found with the necklace on him, if not necessarily found alive.

  Which, she acknowledged and accepted, was getting herself way ahead of the facts.

  Jeremiah shifted, his jaw set hard, and with an abruptness that made her jump, he polished off the rest of his wine in a gulp. Then the tension went out of his body, and he rolled up out of his chair and stalked into the kitchen. She heard him rinse his glass in the sink and set it on the drainboard.

  He was back here in Leonardo’s guest quarters with her, tuned in to his surroundings.

  Mollie followed him inside, her own wine half drunk. She slid onto a stool at the breakfast bar, the counter between them as he stood staring out the window. The crickets had started. She knew he would stay tonight. He’d arranged for the elderly men in his building to take care of his animals, and he’d need to stay close to Croc. He’d left her number with the police. But he’d said nothing about staying, and given his preoccupation, she hadn’t brought it up.

  He pulled his gaze from the window and turned to her, his eyes a swirl of color, none of the grays and golds and blues distinct. “Your deep, dark secret’s out, sweet pea.”

  “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. “Abs
orb 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.