White Hot (27 page)

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 with 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

T
hey 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. “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?”