Drop Dead Gorgeous Read online

  I took a shuddering breath, or tried to; my chest felt constricted, as if my heart had got in the way of my lungs and wouldn’t let them work. “I’m not giving back your ring,” I said in that same thin, flat tone. “The wedding is still on—” Unless you want it canceled. “I just need some time to think. Please.”

  For a long, agonizing minute, I didn’t think he’d do it. But then he wheeled and left, grabbing his suit jacket on the way out. He didn’t even slam the door.

  I didn’t collapse to the floor. I didn’t run upstairs to throw myself on the bed. I just stood there in the kitchen for a long, long time, gripping the edge of the countertop so hard my fingernails were white.

  Chapter

  Fourteen

  Eventually, moving slowly, I checked the doors to make certain they were locked. They were. Though I hadn’t been aware of the extra beeps, Wyatt had also set the alarm system on his way out. As angry as he was with me, he was still careful with my physical safety. The realization hurt; this would be easier if he showed some lack of concern, but he didn’t.

  I turned out all the lights on the first floor, then laboriously climbed the stairs. Every move was an effort, as if there was a disconnect between my mind and body. I went to bed but didn’t turn out the lights, just sat in bed staring at nothing as I tried to order my thoughts.

  My favorite coping method is to concentrate on something else until I feel ready to deal with the important stuff. That didn’t work this time, because my whole world felt filled with the things Wyatt had said. I was battered by them, suffocated by them, crushed under their weight, and there were simply too many of them for me to handle. I couldn’t isolate any one thought, nail down any one issue—not yet, anyway.

  The phone rang. Wyatt! was my first thought, but I didn’t grab for the receiver and answer the call. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk to him just yet. In fact, I was certain I didn’t. I didn’t want him to muddy the water with an apology that would just gloss over the bigger problem I sensed, and that was assuming he thought he owed me an apology anyway, which was a big assumption.

  I picked up the cordless phone on the third ring, just to see if it was him calling or someone else, and the Caller ID showed that weird number from Denver again. I set the phone down without answering it. The ringing cut off after the fourth ring anyway, as the answering machine downstairs picked up. I listened, but didn’t hear a message being left.

  Almost immediately the phone rang again. Denver again. Again, I let the machine get it. Again, no message.

  When the third call followed closely on the heels of the second call, I got pissed. Obviously no survey-taker would be calling after eleven p.m., because that’s a guaranteed way to not get your questions answered. I didn’t personally know anyone living in Denver, but, hey, if someone I knew was calling, why not leave a message?

  Wyatt had said the number and Denver location could be because someone was using one of those prepaid phone cards, in which case I guess someone I knew could be calling, trying to wake me up. I’d even seen a short item on the local news about phone cards, that the rates were so cheap some people were using them for all their long-distance calls. I might not know anyone in Denver, but I did know people who lived in other places, so the next time the phone rang, I answered it.

  Click.

  A minute later, it rang again. The Denver number showed on the phone.

  These were obviously crank calls. Some piece of punk slime had learned these phone cards weren’t traceable and was having fun. How was I supposed to concentrate on Wyatt with this almost constant ringing?

  Easy. I got up and turned off the ringer on both my bedroom phone and the phones downstairs. This way the punk slime would still be burning money and minutes, and I wouldn’t know a thing about it.

  The calls were so irritating that they had succeeded in breaking through my numb misery. I could think now, at least well enough to know this problem was too big for me to make any sort of decision tonight. I needed to think things through, one issue at a time.

  Because writing things down helps me get things ordered in my mind, I got a notebook and pen and settled in bed with the notebook braced against my upraised knees. Wyatt had made a lot of accusations, both direct and indirect, and I wanted to think about them all.

  I wrote down the numbers one through ten, and beside each number I wrote a bullet point, as I remembered them.

  1. Nutty

  2. Did I expect him to jump through hoops, and get pissy when he didn’t?

  3. Paranoid

  4. Imaginary

  5. High maintenance

  6. Dumb-ass tricks

  7. Did I call him for every little thing that popped into my head and expect him to check it out?

  Try as I might, I couldn’t think of anything for numbers eight, nine, and ten, so I crossed them out. Those seven were enough.

  One item I knew was wrong. I hadn’t been imagining anything. Someone driving a white Chevrolet had definitely been tailgating me today, had definitely tried to follow me, and had definitely been parked across the street from Great Bods. The ball cap, the sunglasses, the facial structure—I’d seen enough to know the person who had been parked waiting for me was the same person who had tried to follow me. Yesterday, a woman driving a white Chevrolet had definitely followed me to Great Bods. Whether or not the two drivers were one and the same was up in the air, but how else to explain how today’s driver had known where I work?

  Where my imagination bogged down was that I couldn’t think of any reason why someone would be following me. I didn’t carry large sums of money around. I hadn’t robbed a bank and buried the money somewhere. I wasn’t the contact for some spy, and, really, why would a spy be in western North Carolina anyway? Neither did I have a former lover or friend or relative who was a spy or a bank robber, and had escaped from prison, and the federal marshals had me staked out thinking that this former lover, friend, whatever, would try to contact me and…okay, this was stretching the limits even for Hollywood.

  This was where my thinking parted company with Wyatt’s, I realized. To him, there was no reason for anyone to follow me, ergo, I wasn’t being followed. Where we differed was that I knew the driver behind me in the turn lane was also the driver who had been parked across the street, and had arrived ahead of me. I didn’t have any proof, but proof and knowledge aren’t the same thing.

  It stood to reason that if I wasn’t imagining things, then I also wasn’t paranoid. I’d had my own doubts, because I couldn’t see why anyone would be following me. But once I realized that I definitely had been followed then the reason didn’t matter, at least as far as paranoia went—unless I was also delusional, in which case none of this mattered because it wasn’t happening.

  Two items down, five to go.

  The “nutty” comment bothered me. I’m neither nuts nor nutty. Sometimes I’ll use a convoluted means to get what I want, but that’s either to lull someone into thinking I’m a mental lightweight so he’ll under-estimate me, or because I enjoy the means as much as I do the ends. Wyatt had never under-estimated me. He saw the airhead act for what it was: a strategy. I like to win as much as he does.

  So what was he calling nutty? I had no way of answering that. He’d have to supply his own answer.

  The other four items were way too complicated and serious for me to attempt right then. I was too tired, too stressed, too emotional. Wyatt and I were on the verge of breaking up, and I didn’t know what I could do about it.

  I was just drifting off to sleep when I realized he hadn’t said a word about my haircut. Coming on top of everything else, that did it: I cried.

  I slept, but not well and not much. My subconscious hadn’t provided any miraculous answers to my problems, either.

  Common sense told me, however, that I couldn’t act as if time had been suspended. The wedding was still going to take place, until Wyatt and I decided differently. That meant I had work to do. My enthusiasm level wasn’t as high as it h