“Blackbeard was known for weaving hemp into his beard, then setting it on fire during a battle, so his whole head would smoke and glow satanically,” Molly said. “He was one of the most feared and hated pirates of all time. He allegedly made a prisoner eat his own ears once.”
Jake nodded. “That sounds like Ed, all right.”
Molly looked puzzled, so he explained the situation with Ed Thatcher, Atlas Group, and the potential takeover.
“How odd,” Molly said. “Does he have black hair? Does he wear brocade?”
Jake shook his head. “Nope. Gray hair, and he wears madras golf pants with embroidered ducks.”
“No,” Molly said, looking appalled. “Not really.”
“Yes,” Jake said. “I'm telling you, the man is pure evil. Blackbeard didn't run a line of cruise ships, did he?”
“I don't think so,” Molly said. “He had a fleet of ships, but I'm pretty sure that none of them had shuffleboard courts. I'll check that with my sources, though.”
“Thanks,” Jake said. “If you could uncover some kind of outstanding arrest warrant from the eighteenth century, you could save me a lot of trouble.”
Molly laughed. Her eyes were warm and approving, and Jake couldn't help grinning back at her. They stood like that for a long moment, gazing at each other, and Jake realized that the feeling rising in his chest was anticipation. Molly Shaw was difficult and often incomprehensible, but she was also the most interesting woman he had met in a long, long time. His eyes dropped to linger on the curve of her mouth.
“I want to know something,” Molly said. She was looking at him as if she, too, had just stopped being aware of the crowd surrounding them. “That day, when I was dressed as Sandra…”
“Which day?”
“The one when you…I mean, when we…” She frowned. “You know.”
Jake thought that he did know what she meant. If so, it was provocative to hear that Molly had also been thinking about their encounter at Falcon's Point.
“Why did you kiss me?” she asked in a sudden blurt.
He raised his eyebrows.
“Why?”
“If you thought I was from the press, kissing me was about the last thing you should have done. It was reckless, but you're usually very deliberate. So why did you do it?”
Jake wondered what she expected him to say. That he had been overcome with lust for the seductive Sandra? That he had been curious to see the professor's reaction? That Molly's mouth had simply been as appealing then as it was now? If anything, the question should be why had he kept kissing her, long after he'd made his point. She was right—despite his image, he wasn't generally a reckless person. He had too much to lose to risk it with foolish behavior, and molesting a tabloid journalist—as he had believed her to be at the time—was foolishness writ large.
“I wanted to see if you lived up to your padding,” he said finally.
Her cheeks reddened, but she held his gaze archly, with a boldness that seemed forced, almost experimental. “I see. And did I?”
He nodded. “Yes. Definitely.” He paused for a moment, watching her color deepen. If Molly wanted to play games, he was more than willing to join in. He reached out and touched her mouth, feeling the softness of her lips against his index finger. “But too briefly.”
She looked shocked, and the boldness fell away from her face like a mask dropping. Her mouth opened slightly under his touch, and Jake lightly traced the arc of her lower lip before pulling his hand back.
“We should go,” he said. “We have a plane to catch.”
“T
hat woman is impossible,” fumed Tom Amadeo, pacing up and down the length of Cora Berenger's terrace. Molly and Jake were sitting at the table, drinking tea and coffee respectively, and watching Tom rant. He had been at it for ten minutes now, ever since Elaine had left the villa.
“How the hell am I supposed to work with her breathing down my neck?”
It was Saturday afternoon, one week after the Berenger Grand opening, and Elaine and Carter had just returned to Gold Bay to be reinstalled in Cottage Five. Over the next few days, Carter would be taping an interview with Jake as part of an extensive profile that he had already sold to
Vanity Fair.
Carter had told Molly that the editors at the magazine were so impressed with his work and his connections that they were considering offering him a position as a staff writer. It was a world above the
Tribune,
and Carter was high with excitement.
Tom had surveyed Carter's work, spoken with him at length, and then given him the official nod of approval. Tom liked Carter, specifically Carter's willingness to do exactly what Tom told him to do, and he made no secret of the fact that he was pleased to have Carter on the Operation Family Man team.
Elaine was another story. She had arrived with two trunks of clothes and accessories that she deemed “more suitable” for Molly, and then had inserted herself into Friday morning's planning meeting. Worst of all—according to Tom—she had even had the nerve to make friends with Cora Berenger, who agreed that marketing Molly would be a useful way of improving Jake's image by association.
By necessity, Tom was coldly polite to Elaine, but as soon as she was out of hearing range, he let loose.
“Whose show is this?” he demanded, then answered his own question without pausing for breath. “Mine! Does the New York Philharmonic have two conductors in the orchestra pit at the same time? No! I don't work with amateurs. I especially don't work with bleached-blond, fashion-fixated, multiply-married socialites who think they know something about my business, but don't.”
Elaine's latest sin was that she hadn't consulted Tom before she contacted another one of her myriad ex-sisters-in-law, this one being an assistant producer for
Good Morning, America,
which Elaine said would be a perfect venue for Molly to be interviewed about her book and—of course—Jake. She had already taken the liberty of discussing the idea with Molly's agent.
“Has she done this before?” Tom asked the air in front of him. “No. Have I? Only for twenty years! Remember Russell Hayes, the Chicago Bulls center who got caught in Vegas with the eighteen-year-old twins? They called me in, and now he's doing Pepsi commercials. I did that. I told the world that Russell Hayes was a Family Man, and the world listened.”
Tom had been doing a lot of histrionic complaining, but despite what he said, he seemed to have resigned himself to the situation. On Saturday morning, Molly had caught him staring at Elaine, pinching his beard as he did when he was deep in thought. His pensive look quickly became a scowl as soon as he realized that Molly was watching.
“Ow! God damn it!” Tom stopped pacing and started hopping. He had just stubbed his toe. He limped over to the table and sat down next to Jake. “Let me tell you,” he said. “I am not at all surprised that that woman can't keep a husband.”
“Actually,” Molly said, “it's been the husbands who can't keep her.”
“Hah,” Tom said forcefully.
Molly glanced at Jake, who shrugged philosophically. She had learned from quizzing Cora that Tom was a confirmed bachelor with a history of dating starry-eyed marketing interns fresh out of college.
“Oh, Tom,” Cora had sighed, shaking her head. “Oh, dear. He gets older and older, and the girls just stay the same. I remember a dinner party I gave in New York last year. I made the stupid mistake of calling his date Amber, which was the name of the girl he'd brought to my
last
party. I was so embarrassed, but nobody even batted an eye. It turned out that this one's name was also Amber.”
Tom and Jake had arrived late on Thursday night, and although Tom had been scheduled to fly back to Manhattan on Friday after the meeting, they were now well into the weekend and he was still occupying one of the villa's guest rooms. Molly hadn't been able to resist inquiring about his extended visit, and he had muttered something about not wanting to give that woman the impression that he was leaving her in charge.
Cora was highly amused by it all. “He'll have to go home sometime,” she had said to Molly at breakfast. “He has a business to run. We'll see what happens.”
Molly had spent the week writing. It was a novelty to work so openly, sitting at the table under the bougainvillea vines, and not worrying one bit about prying eyes. Cora's butler brought her tea and sandwiches whenever he decided that she was looking weary, and she was producing pages at a respectable rate. It would have been an idyllic situation, but two worries were lurking on the edges of her mind.
One was that her father had phoned on Wednesday morning and left a message requesting that she call him. It was the first that Molly had heard from him in weeks—her outing as Sandra St. Claire and her departure from Belden had come and gone with no reaction but a stony silence from the Shaw household. Molly was uncomfortably aware that the mature reaction would be to call home and make the first attempt at reconciliation, but on further consideration of the idea, she had decided that maturity was overrated. The truth was that she was too terrified to pick up the phone. She was sure that she could feel an icy wave of disapproval seeping across the two thousand miles separating Gold Bay from Belden.
She'd had an e-mail from her mother, reporting breathlessly that Stanford had refused to speak or to come out of his study for several days following Molly's dramatic helicopter departure. On Wednesday, however, he had put on the herringbone tweed suit that he had acquired during his sabbatical year at Oxford, and then marched off to an extended meeting with Dean Fowler and President Dickerson. Stanford wouldn't say what had transpired, but Mrs. Shaw hoped that a compromise had been reached. She also hoped that Molly would write and tell her a little bit about this Jake Berenger person, who didn't seem like a very nice man, judging by the things Mrs. Shaw had seen when she looked him up on the Internet.
So far, Molly had not been able to summon the nerve—or the desire—to call her father back, but every day that she delayed made the discomfort worse. At some point, she knew, she would have to face the inevitable.
The other problem plaguing her was that Jake had hijacked her brain. She kept catching herself remembering the way he had looked at her when they were standing together in the museum. All he had done was run one finger lightly over her mouth, but that tiny gesture had released a tidal wave of longing inside her.
Molly was no innocent teenager, though, and she knew an extremely unwise attraction when she felt one. Diligently, she set about curing herself, as if a crush were similar to a head cold. Instead of bed rest and chicken soup, she tried to ward off the illness by focusing on Jake's flaws. She reminded herself that he had done her a bad turn, that he was unscrupulous and untrustworthy, and that she would enjoy his misery when she produced her Mary Morgan proof and triumphantly demanded her museum. Unfortunately, she was somehow able to acknowledge all of that and still think about how good it had felt to kiss him, and how much she wanted to do it again. The opportunity had not presented itself, though. Jake had not made a single move toward her since returning to Gold Bay, possibly because Molly had been making a point of always keeping her laptop nearby, opened in front of her like a portable castle wall.
Tom sighed heavily. “Am I the only one who finds that woman unbearably smug?” he asked.
Jake nodded. “She doesn't bother me.”
“Me either,” Molly said. Elaine could be pushy, but she seemed to be insisting that Tom allow Molly to be herself, instead of trying to mold her into yet another caricature. Molly was touched by her unexpected advocacy. Her opinion had gained some ground over the past week, as it had become obvious from the tone of post-party news stories that Tom's canned message hadn't quite done the job. The
New York Times
had come through with the positive profile of Jake, and Tom had wangled a Larry King interview and an upcoming
Fortune
cover story, but it was not enough. The general press remained skeptical about Jake's credibility. “A Timely Shift in Strategy?” asked the
Washington Post
archly, referring to the engagement. Skye Elliot had finally rallied and informed the
Daily News
that she knew that the engagement was only a publicity stunt, because Jake had tried to convince her to do it first. The fact that her latest story contradicted everything she'd said a month earlier didn't seem to bother anyone.
Molly had been wondering what Jake thought of Elaine's idea of putting her on television. After what had happened at the Berenger Grand opening, she suspected that he might feel more inclined to lock her in a closet for the next two months. He had said very little in Friday's meeting, although admittedly it had been difficult to get a word in edgewise while Tom and Elaine were arguing. Cora had watched the whole thing as if it were a comedy act, occasionally speaking up in support of one point or another. Molly had become distracted by the pressing question of whether or not she even
wanted
to be on television, and Jake had simply stared through the window with a remote expression.
Looking at him in the bright daylight, Molly could see dark circles under his eyes. She had noticed on Friday morning that he looked tired, and the previous night's sleep—or the lack thereof, in his case—had not helped. She had seen light leaking through his curtains at two in the morning when she had awakened and gone to get a glass of water.
“You're working too hard,” she said. “Can't you take a break?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not yet. Later, maybe.”
“What's going on? More business problems?”
“The same business problems. And now I have the added pleasure of doing two or three interviews a day.”
“Hey,” Tom said. “No whining. You hired me, chief. Keep on going, and one of these days you'll learn to love it.”
It was a topic that Molly had wondered about for a long time. “Why did you spend such a long time refusing to give interviews?” she asked Jake. “Carter told me that you hate the press. Is that it?”
“No,” he said. “That's not the reason.”
“Then why?”
“I don't know. I didn't want to.”