Dark and Deadly

both lawyers, and they worked together at Pratt and Legend before Todd won all the money.”

“Did he have any other kind of relationship with this friend of his?” The words were straightforward, and the detective’s bland countenance gave her no hints to his meaning.

“What do you mean?”

“Was the lawyer involved with your former fiance, in a relationship of any kind?”

“A relationship? Paul was Todd’s lawyer. Paul was Todd’s best man at our wedding. He was Todd’s best friend. They’d talked about going into business someday, but other than that, I don’t know.” The look of sly innuendo on Sorrell’s face led her to another conclusion.

“Oh, no, not that. You mean like lovers? No way.” The idea gave her the creeps. Having slept with Todd, she knew he liked women. As to Paul, he’d been the campus lothario—known as Love-’em-and-leave-’em-Jameson. She told the detectives about both men’s proclivities with as straight a face as she could manage.

“So what do you think of Jameson?”

Cheap shot. Marsden could obviously read body language and tone.

“I don’t like him, but you’ve obviously guessed that. He never approved of me, or of my relationship with Todd.”

She tried to be brief, but Marsden kept prodding her.

“How do you know he didn’t approve?”

She stalled, but he pressed. Finally she gave in.

“In a drunken rant back in our college days, he told Todd that he was a fool to date me. Then later in grad school, he told Todd he was crazy to marry me, and that we’d be miserable together.

“Even up to the day of our wedding, he tried to talk Todd out of it. When Todd came to tell me he was backing out of the wedding, I thought Paul was to blame and I socked Todd and told him to tell Paul Jameson to,” Torie hesitated, but decided since she’d said this much, she might as well get the rest of the sorry, embarrassing story on the table. “Well, I told him to tell Paul to get, uh, screwed. Except I used the other word, the f-word. I’m afraid the whole church heard it because Paul walked in as I hit Todd.”

“Wow. I’ll bet that caused an uproar.” Sorrels’s eyes were dancing with humor, but his face remained bland. She thought she caught the barest twitch of a smile. She was still mortified to have cussed in church, and to have had virtually everyone in the world she cared about hear her do it.

“Understatement of the century, I’m afraid. So Paul still doesn’t like me, nor I him.”

“And Todd called off the wedding because?”

“He won the Lotto jackpot.”

“And didn’t…ah…” Marsden stopped mid-sentence and busied himself making notes. Evidently he was drawing his own conclusions as to why Todd had called it off.

“I believe we’ll want to talk to Mister Jameson a bit more about your situation, and about Mister Peterson’s whereabouts.”

“It isn’t unusual,” Sorrels spoke now, “for one party in a situation to have…unrequited feelings…for another man. It’s possible that Mister Jameson may know more than he’s telling.”

The very idea was ludicrous, and she very nearly told them so. But even all these years later, she still held a grudge against Paul. She was sure that his antipathy had been a factor in the decisions Todd had made when he’d won the money. The first and only person Todd told about his winnings before he told Torie had been Paul.

Given that, she could see why the detectives would see Paul in a skewed light, but the idea that Paul was gay nearly made her laugh out loud. His bearing and demeanor was all male—all red-blooded male. He was very determinedly heterosexual. She knew that intimately. Of course that knowledge was connected with a lot of bad memories.

Then and now, the intensity of his sensuality, the way he sometimes looked at her made her terribly uncomfortable. Between that and his repeated, public declarations that she was all wrong for Todd, Torie disliked him intensely. When she and Todd moved in together before the wedding, she’d asked Todd not to invite him to parties or dinners at their house. Nor did she ever want to be left alone with him.

She didn’t hate him. He made her feel and remember things that she wasn’t prepared to deal with.

Just one more reason Paul hated her.

As if he’d read her thoughts, Sorrels spoke. “So do you know why Mister Jameson doesn’t like you or why he would try to break up your relationship?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m sure you have some idea.” Sorrels shot her a knowing look. “Most women have an inkling about that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know for sure. He thought Todd would stray. Wouldn’t be able to be faithful. Or so he said. I never thought that at all. Todd kept his word, so I thought Paul was being, I don’t know, overprotective.”

“Of you?”

Torie frowned. That angle hadn’t occurred to her. “No, like I said, he doesn’t like me. I guess he was protecting Todd from the possibility of an expensive divorce later. He is a lawyer.”

“Did you and Mister Peterson have a prenuptial agreement?”

“A what? No, that wasn’t Todd’s style. Or mine. Besides, it doesn’t matter now, does it? It was five years ago.”

“Maybe it matters to Mister Jameson.”