Page 29 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

Rising from his crouch, he dusted off his hands. “I take it this means you’ve giving in on the surveillance system.”

“Fat lot of good it’ll donow!”

“If anything else happens, you’ll be able to tell who did it. With your track record, I think you can pretty much count on another incident.”

Wasn’t that a happy thought? I glared at my beautiful little black convertible. I’d had it just a couple of months, and now someone had deliberately damaged it.

“All right,” I said sulkily. “I’ll have a surveillance system installed.”

“I’ll take care of it. I know what works best.”

At least he hadn’t said “If you’d listened to me before…” I probably would have screamed right in his face.

He said, “If you’d listened to me before—”

“Aaaaaaa!”I screamed, so frustrated I thought I’d explode. Now I could add “rubbing it in” to his list.

Startled, he jerked back a little. “What’s that about?”

“It’s about…it’s abouteverything!” I shouted. “It’s about nitwits, and jerks, and psycho bitches! It’s about not having anything here I can kick without hurting myself! It’s about having this stupid concussion so I can’t even stomp around! I need to stomp. I need to throw something. I need a voodoo doll that I can stick pins in and set its hair on fire and pull off its little legs and arms—”

He looked mildly interested in my temper tantrum. “You do voodoo, do you?”

Just as a matter of information, you can’t keep up a rant and snort through your nose at the same time. I didn’t want to laugh because I was mad about my car, but what the hell, sometimes a laugh is going to come out no matter what.

I had to pay him back, though. I said, “I’ll need to borrow your Avalanche while my car is in the shop.”

He stilled, thinking back over the track record he’d mentioned just a moment before. “Oh, shit,” he said, sighing in resignation.

Chapter

Twelve

Iwrote the new items on Wyatt’s list of transgressions as soon as we got home, but I might as well have been using invisible ink for all the attention he paid to it. He didn’t even glance at it, lying there on the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen, instead settling in a chair with the morning newspaper, which obviously he hadn’t had time to read that morning, and asking me if I wanted the paper when he finished. Well, hell, it was my newspaper, wasn’t it? Why would I pay for the thing if I didn’t want to read it? And why was he reading the paper instead of paying attention to his list? Things were not right in my world.

But I was exhausted, and I was sick of that blasted headache. “I’ll read it tomorrow,” I said. “I’m going to take some more ibuprofen, shower, and go to bed.” I was feeling grumpy, too, but most of it wasn’t his fault, so I didn’t want to take it out on him.

“I’ll be up in a minute,” he said.

I sulked in the shower, thinking about my car. There should be a security system you could put on cars that would electrify them, so when some punk scraped a key down the paint it would fry his ass. I amused myself visualizing bulging eyes, Einstein hair, and maybe even wet pants, so people could point and laugh. That would teach the little bastard.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not much on turning the other cheek.

After showering I doctored my various scrapes and bruises—none of which needed bandages, so I just put stuff on them to help the healing process. I ran a little experiment on myself, by putting La Mer on one scrape, antibiotic ointment on another, and aloe gel on yet another, just to see which one healed best. I applied vitamin spray to my bruises. Maybe it helped, maybe it didn’t. It was something to do.

I had just turned out the light and crawled into bed—naked, to save Wyatt the trouble of pulling off my clothes—when he came upstairs. I went to sleep while he was showering, roused enough to kiss him good night when he got into bed beside me, and didn’t know anything else until the alarm went off the next morning.

Lynn always opened the gym on Tuesdays, so I didn’t have to be there until one-thirty, though I usually was there before then. Today, however, I had a lot to do before getting to work. First I called the insurance company about my car, then I talked to Luke Arledge, then I made an appointment to get my hair cut—at eleven that very morning, if you can believe it—and finally I went shopping for the fabric for my wedding gown. On the way to the fabric store, I stopped at a place that refinished antiques to ask some questions, and as a bonus found a gorgeous Queen Anne desk that would look great in the office I was creating at Wyatt’s house. All of this was by ten o’clock, so I was hustling.

I felt much, much better; the headache was nothing more than a twinge, and that was when I forgot myself and sort of skipped a little, just because it was a gorgeous sunny day. The weather was much warmer, the cool snap over for the time being, and everyone I talked to was in a good mood.

I had just enough time at the fabric store to look through their silks and satins and know they didn’t have what I wanted. I was in a hurry, because of my appointment at the hair salon, so when I saw a woman who looked familiar I deliberately looked away, just in case I really did know her and would be obliged, if we made eye contact, to make small talk for at least a few minutes. Sometimes being a Southerner is a burden; you can’t just nod and go about your business, you have to ask about family, and usually end the conversation with an invitation to come visit, which would really throw a monkey wrench in my schedule if, God forbid, someone actually took me up on it.

Shay, my hairdresser, was putting the finishing touches on a customer when I arrived, so I took a few minutes to look through some hairstyle books. Because it was one of those days when good things seemed to fall in my lap—it was about time I’d had one of those days!—right away I found a hairstyle I liked.

“This one,” I said to Shay, pointing to the picture, when it was my turn in her chair.

“Verycute,” she said, studying the lines of the cut. “But before I start cutting, be sure you want to go that short. You’ll be losing five, six inches of hair.”

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