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He studied their clasped hands. “You probably won’t believe me, but I swear, for all my tomcatting, I’ve never been with a married woman. You’re my first adultery, and I wouldn’t break my personal moral code just to score points against Jasper.”
“But you were unfaithful to your wife.”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“You told Jasper—”
“I’ve never had a wife to cheat on.”
Her head went back an inch. “What?”
“I’ve never been married.”
She was stunned by the joy that spread through her from knowing that. “No one special enough to make you stop tomcatting?”
“No time or inclination to let anything special develop. Besides, I wouldn’t drag a good woman into my particular hell.”
“Into that dark place you have to go?”
He nodded. “Hazard of the trade.”
“You didn’t drag me into it this afternoon. In fact you shut me out.”
“Because it’s hardly conducive to
foreplay, and I was hoping to get lucky.”
She smiled, but didn’t let him flirt her away from the subject. “Mike and I talked.”
“Oh, great. Did he go into his maiden aunt persona?”
“A little. Dr. Easton.”
She recapped her conversation with Mike. When she finished, Drex said, “I started looking for Weston Graham long before I earned my doctorate.”
“When you learned he had killed your mother? How did that come about?”
“Are you sure you want to hear that?”
“Yes. I’d like to know.”
“You accept that Weston Graham and Jasper Ford are one and the same?”
“You’ve convinced me. No, actually, he’s convinced me with his actions over the past two days.”
He reflected for a moment, then said, “Although I’m not certain he launched his career with my mother, I suspect it. Maybe he hadn’t consciously mapped out woman killing as a career path. But after he’d rid himself of her and walked away unscathed, he recognized his talent and saw a future in exploiting it.”
She scooted closer to him and laid her hand on his chest. “I saw her picture in your files. She was lovely.”
“I have no memory of her.”
“How old were you when she went missing?”
“Around ten, I think. But my dad had moved the two of us to Alaska years before that.”
“Tell me about it.”
He took a deep breath, rubbed his legs against hers, readjusted his head on the pillow. “A lot of it I’ve had to piece together because Dad wouldn’t talk about it. Never. But what I gather is that she abandoned us to be with Weston Graham.”
