Drop Dead Gorgeous Read online

  He looked so grim and cold and furious, all at the same time, that I reached for his hand again as I was unloaded from the back of the vehicle. “I really am okay,” I said. Except for the concussion, I really was. Banged up, but okay. I wanted to sound brave, which would convince him I was fine and was putting on a false front to garner sympathy, but my head hurt too much for me to muster the energy, so instead I sounded sincere, so of course he didn’t believe me.

  The man/woman jockeying-for-position supremacy thing was too complicated for me to deal with right then. You’d think he’d be relieved, but no, I could tell by the way his jaw clenched that instead he was worried as hell. Men are so perverse.

  I mustered my strength. “This is all your fault,” I said, with as much indignation as I could manage.

  He was walking alongside the gurney holding my hand, and he gave me a narrow-eyed look. “My fault?”

  “I was shopping tonight because of your stupid deadline. If you’d listened to me I could have shopped during the daytime, like civilized people, but no, you have to give me an ultimatum, which forced me to be in the parking lot with a road-rage-crazed psycho bitch in a Buick.”

  His eyes got even more narrow. To my relief, the grim look had relaxed somewhat. He figured if I could work up a head of steam, I really was all right. “If you had managed to plan something as simple as a wedding,” he said with maddening disregard for the millions of details that go into a wedding, “I wouldn’t have had to step in.”

  “Simple?” I sputtered. “Simple? You think a wedding is simple? A shuttle launch is simple. Quantum physics is simple. Planning a wedding is like planning a war—”

  “An apt comparison,” he muttered under his breath, but I heard him anyway.

  I jerked my hand out of his. Sometimes I wanted to just smack him.

  Dwight, pushing the gurney, laughed. Dwayne was much nicer than Dwight. I said, “I don’t want you pushing my gurney. I want Dwayne. Where’s Dwayne?”

  “He’s taking care of the paperwork, bringing in your things, stuff like that,” Dwight said easily, and he didn’t stop pushing my gurney.

  The night was just not going my way, but I perked up as much as possible at the news that Dwayne was bringing in my things. It’s a measure of how much my head hurt that I hadn’t given a single thought to my purchases, especially my new shoes, until now. “He has my shoes?”

  “You’re wearing your shoes,” Wyatt said, flashing a quick, questioning look at Dwight over my head, silently asking if I could have a brain injury.

  “I’m not going loopy, I mean my new shoes. The ones I bought tonight.” As I explained, Dwight rolled me into a cubicle. Dwayne followed within thirty seconds, his hands full of clipboard, papers, my purse, and several plastic bags. I spied the bag from the store where I’d bought my shoes, and sighed in relief. They hadn’t gone missing. Then an efficient team of nurses took over; Wyatt was evicted, Dwayne and Dwight gave their report on my condition, which was pretty much as I’d already figured out. Then they, too, were gone, the curtain was pulled, and my clothes were swiftly cut off me. I really hate the way emergency room personnel treat clothing, even though I understand the need for it. Even someone who is conscious might not be able to accurately gauge her own medical condition, and speed and efficiency are the name of the game.

  Regardless of that, I really, really hate when my bra is cut with one callous snip of those big scissor blades. I love my underwear sets. This particular bra was a gorgeous mocha color, with little flowers in the satin fabric, and tiny pearls sewn in the middle. Now it was ruined. I sighed when I saw it, because it was ruined anyway, from blood.

  Come to think of it, pretty much every stitch I had on was ruined, either from rips or blood, or both. Scalp wounds really bleed a lot. I sighed as I looked myself over, then surveyed the clothing that had been tossed aside, which I could do without moving my head much because the head of the gurney was raised and I was propped up. No, nothing was salvageable, except maybe my shoes. My black cargo pants were torn in several places, big, jagged tears that couldn’t be repaired, never mind that the legs had been neatly cut lengthwise to allow the nurses to swiftly remove them. My bare legs were both dirty and bloody, confirming that my irrational fear of germs in the parking lot hadn’t been all that irrational. Actually, most of me was dirty and bloody. I wasn’t a pretty sight at all, which was depressing, because Wyatt had seen me like this.

  “I’m a mess,” I said mournfully.

  “It isn’t too bad,” one of the nurses said. “It looks worse than it is. Though I suppose it feels bad enough to you, doesn’t it?” Her voice was brisk, but comforting. Or rather, she meant it to be comforting, but what she said made me feel worse because looks were exactly what I was worrying about. Yes, I’m vain, but I’m also under a deadline for a wedding and I didn’t want to look like a war refugee in my wedding pictures. My kids would be looking at them, you know; I didn’t want them wondering what their father had ever seen in me.

  I’m also not of a “victim” mentality, and I’m tired of being shot, battered, and bruised. I didn’t want Wyatt to think he had to take care of me. I want to take care of myself, thank you very much—unless I’m in the mood for pampering, in which case I want to be in good shape so I can enjoy it.

  I had just been sort of halfway stuffed into a hospital gown when a tired ER doc shuffled in. He checked me over, listened to the nurses, checked my pupils to see how they were responding, and sent me off for a head CT and what seemed like all-over X-rays. A few boring and painful hours later, I was admitted to the hospital for an overnight stay because the docs also agreed with my diagnosis of a concussion. All of my scrapes were cleaned and some of them bandaged, most of the blood was swabbed away—except out of my hair, which annoyed me because it felt so icky. Worst of all was that they shaved a patch at my hairline and put in a few stitches to close the gash in my scalp. I would have to get creative with my hairstyles for the next few months. At last I was deposited in a nice cool, clean bed and the lights were turned low, which was a relief. Have I mentioned how much my head was hurting?

  What wasn’t a relief was the way Wyatt and my entire family were ringed around the bed, silently staring at me.

  “This isn’t my fault,” I said defensively. It was weird, having them all sort of aligned against me, as if I’d done this on purpose or something. Even Siana had a solemn expression, and I can usually count on her to be in my court no matter what. I did understand, though, because if Wyatt had gotten hurt as often in the past few months as I had, I would be demanding he change jobs and we move to Outer Mongolia to get him out of the danger zone.

  Mom stirred. She had been as tight-lipped as Wyatt, but now she went into mom-mode and went to the miniature sink, where she wet a washcloth. Coming back to my bedside, she began gently washing away the dried blood that the nurses had skipped. I haven’t had my ears washed by my mother since I was little, but some things never change. I was just glad she used water instead of spit. You know all the jokes about mom-spit removing everything from grease to ink? It’s true. Mom-spit should be patented and sold as an all-purpose spot remover. Come to think of it, maybe it has been. I’ve never read the ingredients of a spot-remover. Maybe it just says mom-spit.

  Finally Wyatt said, “We’re getting the security tapes for the parking lot, so we may be able to get a tag number for the car.”

  I’d been hanging around him long enough now to understand some of the finer points of the law. “But she didn’t hit me. When she floored the gas pedal, I dived out of the way. So it isn’t a hit-and-run. It’s a terrify-and-run.”

  “She?” He picked up on that immediately, of course. “You saw her? Did you know her?”

  “I could tell it was a woman, but as to whether or not I know her…” I would have shrugged, but I was trying to keep movement to a minimum. “The headlights were shining in my eyes. The driver was a woman, and the car was a late-model Buick, that’s all I know for certain. Parking