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such curiosity about her?
    Jeremiah Tabak, she remembered, didn’t do things for personal reasons. Not ten years ago, not now.
    And that could mean only one thing: he was on a story.

3
    J eremiah arrived at his desk at the Miami Tribune wondering how many women had his picture on their dartboards. He supposed he should have told Mollie the truth about himself ten years ago. But she did seem to enjoy thinking of him as scum.
    Which, as far as she was concerned, he was. Twenty was young, but twenty-six wasn’t old, and he’d tried to do the honorable thing, even if it had, in retrospect, been awfully damned dumb. Now he had a blonde-haired publicist up in Palm Beach firing darts between his eyes.
    “Son,” his father liked to tell him, “remember that more than anything else, what a woman wants from a man is the truth.”
    In his twisted logic, Jeremiah had thought because what he’d told Mollie made him look like a snake, he was off the hook as far as telling the truth. He’d acted honorably, in his estimation, trying to soften the blow of ending their weeklong affair by telling her he’d used her to get his drug-dealing story. The truth was, he’d fallen for her just as hard and fast and incomprehensibly as she had fallen for him. Yet he’d known—and saw it before she did—that they couldn’t last.
    So he’d lied to her then, just as he’d lied to her two hours ago. Both lies had been expedient. The first, because he’d thought it would be easier to have her hate him than to try to explain the complexities of why they couldn’t be together. The second, because he’d thought he could get out of there without a dart somewhere on his person if he let her believe simple, human curiosity had driven him to her doorstep rather than a story.
    “God, what a chickenshit,” he muttered, hitting the space key on his computer, just to interrupt the image of her trim legs and pale, straight hair, her natural, incongruous elegance, apparent even in her sweaty exercise clothes.
    He tried to concentrate on the task at hand, namely ferreting out information on Croc’s jewel thief. He was, as his skinny young friend had so accurately pointed out, between stories. In fact, his editor had been urging him to seize the moment and take a vacation, his first in two years. He’d even contemplated where he might go. But it seemed silly to leave south Florida in the dead of winter, and then Croc had approached him with tales of Mollie Lavender as a jewel thief.
    Ten years ago, he recalled, trouble had swirled around her, leaving her untouched, like the lone tree standing after a hurricane. Although innocently on spring break and as committed and driven in her life as a musician as he was in his as a journalist, he’d sensed a restlessness of soul and spirit. She was more uncertain and unformed than any twenty-year-old would willingly let anyone know or see, and he’d been drawn to the secret parts of her that she hadn’t yet explored or even admitted existed. Ultimately, he’d let her sort through those complexities herself, without him.
    Could she have turned into a jewel thief in the meantime?
    Possibly. Why the hell not?
    But he could also imagine her right there in the thick of things, oblivious.
    Yet the woman he’d seen that morning hadn’t seemed oblivious or airheaded or anything but sharp, professional, and in control.
    Except for that picture of him on her dartboard, of course.
    Jeremiah grinned, feeling better. How, he wondered, had Croc landed on her as his chief suspect? There had to be more than his common denominator theory. Croc liked being mysterious and in the know. He wouldn’t be above withholding vital information.
    Hurling himself to his feet with sudden energy, Jeremiah made his way through the sea of desks and reporters in the big, open Trib newsroom and down the corridor to the separate offices of the arts and entertainment and leisure sections. Helen Samuel had her own office, one, because no one