“Oh, sure! If it came to a showdown between what Penny wanted and what you wanted, obviously Danny King’s going to side with you,” Lindsay said sarcastically. “Come on, Baz. Let’s get real here. Penny wasn’t exactly Ms. Nobody submitting her first novel. If it was a case of losing Penny or losing you, I can’t imagine Danny having to agonize for more than ten seconds.”

Lindsay didn’t think it was possible for anyone to have a higher color than the editor had already, but she was proved wrong as Baz darkened almost to purple. “It wouldn’t ever have come to that. Penny reacted the way she did because she was hurt and angry and that was the easiest way to get back at me. But she wasn’t a fool. She was planning on coming out when this book was published. If she’d gone with the draft you’re talking about, then someone would have sussed that we’d fallen out and, eventually, why. The last thing she would have wanted was that kind of tabloid notoriety. If you knew her half as well as you claim to, you’d know what I’m saying is the truth,” she added defiantly.

Rather than give Lindsay pause for thought, Baz’s words served only to add fuel to the flames of her conviction. “Maybe so. But it doesn’t alter the fact that enough people would have seen that draft to humiliate you in the business, and jeopardize your relationship with your lover. And you can’t tell me Penny Varnavides would ever have worked with you again after the way you wrecked her relationship with Meredith!”

“What the hell is going on in here?” a male voice interjected.

Lindsay turned to see Danny King in the doorway looking baffled. Baz wiped her sweating upper lip with the back of her hand and said bitterly, “Glasgow’s answer to Emma Victor here is accusing me of murdering Penny.”

Danny King threw back his handsome head in a guffaw of laughter. “You mean you haven’t told her about your alibi?” he gasped.

Chapter 17

Chapter 17

Thunderstruck, Lindsay’s head swung from Danny to Baz and back to Danny again like a nodding dog on a car parcel shelf. “Alibi?” she said faintly, clinging to the hope that life would imitate crime fiction, where alibis, like rules, were made to be broken.

“Obviously not,” Danny chuckled. “Go on, Baz, put her out of her misery.”