Drop Dead Gorgeous by Linda Howard
“I don’t care what it doesn’t make!” I whispered frantically. “It’s her! She’s the stalker! And the power has gone out. What if she’s here, what if she’s in the house—”
“I’m coming back,” he said after the merest hesitation. “And I’m calling in for the nearest patrol car. If you think she’s in the house then you get out of it, any way you can. You got that? You’ve been right too many times, and you’ve had too many close calls. If you have to go out a window again, do it.”
“Okay,” I said, but he’d hung up and there was only dead air.
He was coming back. He’d been gone about fifteen minutes, so it should take him about that to get back here, unless he drove like a bat out of Hell. There might be a patrol car that was closer.
Oddly, his assurance that he trusted my instincts calmed me down. Maybe it was because I didn’t feel so alone, because help was on the way.
I set my cell phone on silent mode, and slipped it in my pocket. At least this time I wasn’t caught wearing flimsy pajamas and no shoes. A long-sleeved T-shirt and a pair of cargo sweatpants offered much more protection. Well, I still didn’t have on shoes, but at least I was wearing socks—and even if I’d had on shoes I would have pulled them off, in the interest of silence.
I was probably letting my nerves get to me, I thought, but the last time I’d reassured myself of something like this, she’d burned down my home. I seemed to have some sixth sense for her that let me know when she was near, and I intended to trust it.
At least I no longer had to wonder why, what I’d done that someone would try to kill me. I knew now. It was Wyatt. Wyatt loved me, and we were getting married. She couldn’t stand that.
Roberta had told me how, when Megan filed for divorce, Wyatt had simply walked away. He hadn’t cared enough to try to make their marriage work, or enough to rethink his decision to become a cop. She hadn’t been important enough to him. How that must have eaten at her through the years, that she hadn’t been enough for the man she loved. I knew something of how she’d felt, not that I was sympathetic toward her or anything stupid like that. Please. The psycho bitch had tried to kill me.
She’d gotten remarried within the year, Roberta had said. The second marriage must not have worked out either, because how could it, when she was in love with Wyatt? But she’d held on, because Wyatt hadn’t married anyone else, and she could cling to the thought that deep down he still loved her and maybe one day they’d get back together—until I came along. Our engagement announcement had been in the newspaper. Had she made a habit of going online and reading the local newspaper, or Googling his name every so often? Maybe someone local knew her, and had told her. How she’d found out didn’t matter, but her reaction to the news very much mattered.
I tried to think of any weapons that were available. Knives, of course, down in the kitchen. I’d felt safe going down for a knife while I was in my condo, with the alarm system to tell me if anyone broke in, but Wyatt didn’t have an alarm system. He had locks, dead-bolt locks, and triple-pane windows that only someone very determined could get through. Unfortunately, she was very determined.
I had nothing up here to protect myself with, except the big, heavy flashlight on Wyatt’s bedside table. I slowly eased out of the bathroom, fully expecting to come face-to-face with an ax-wielding lunatic, but the bedroom was silent and empty. I got the flashlight, gripping it in my right hand. Maybe I’d have the chance to conk her on the head. One good concussion deserved another.
Cautiously I moved into the hallway. It, too, was empty. I stood for a moment listening, but there was no sound within the house. Outside, I heard a car’s tires on the wet pavement as it passed by, the sound mundane and comforting, but not as comforting as it would have been if the car had slowed and turned in. Wyatt hadn’t had time to get here yet, but a patrol car would be welcome, too.
All of the doors in the hallway were closed, except for the door to the master bedroom, behind me. I couldn’t remember if I’d closed the door when I’d come out of the guest room where I’d been trying on shoes. That just isn’t something you normally remember. But no one jerked any of those doors open and leaped into the hallway to charge me with an ax, so I eased forward, toward the stairs.
I know, I know. In every horror movie, at least once the dumb-ass blonde goes down the stairs after hearing a noise, or down into the dark basement. Something. Well, you know what? If you’re upstairs, you’re usually trapped. Not many houses have dual staircases, one on each end of the house. At least if you’re on the ground floor there’s more than one way out. I’d just been caught on the second floor in a fire, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience. I wanted to be on that ground floor.
I took another step. I could see part of the den now, and the doorway to the kitchen. No maniac. One more step. A flash of blue at the bottom of the stairs caught my eye. The blue whatever wasn’t moving, it was just there. And there hadn’t been anything blue down there when I came up these stairs.
It looked familiar, though. Whatever it was, I’d seen it before. But, I swear, it looked like two blue pipes sticking up, with odd designs—
My boots. My blue boots, the ones that hadn’t been delivered before my condo was burned.
She’d gotten them. She had picked up my package. And now she was really here, in this house, it wasn’t my imagination any longer.
No way in Hell was I going down those stairs. I was going to take Wyatt’s advice and bail out the window—
She stepped out of the kitchen, a pistol held in a steady, two-handed grip, aimed right at me. She was wearing soft-soled shoes that wouldn’t make any more noise than my socks. Without letting the aim waver, she tilted her head at the boots. “What were you thinking? That you’d join the rodeo, or something?”
“Hello, Megan,” I said.
Surprise flared in her eyes. She hadn’t expected that. She’d expected to kill me and walk right out, because who would ever suspect her? She didn’t live here, hadn’t been here in years and years, hadn’t contacted anyone she knew here. No one should ever have been able to connect her to this.
“I’ve already told Wyatt,” I said.
A derisive look crossed her face. “Yeah, right. The power’s off. None of these cordless phones will work.”
“No, but the cell phone in my pocket does.” I indicated the bulge. “There’s a shoe box full of pictures up here. I was going through them, and came across this snapshot of you and Wyatt and two other couples. Some guy named Sandy and his latest bimbo.” I added that so she’d know I wasn’t making it up. Getting away with murder was a big part of her plan, I suspected. Knowing that she wouldn’t, no matter what, might make her rethink this whole killing-me thing.
I saw the pain flicker in her expression as she recalled the photograph. “He kept that?”
“I don’t know that he kept it so much as he never got around to throwing it away. As soon as I recognized you, I called him.” I shrugged. “They were already working the rental car angle anyway. He’d have spotted your name.”
“I doubt he even knows my last name,” she said bitterly.
“Well, look, that isn’t my fault,” I pointed out.
“I don’t care what is or isn’t your fault. This isn’t about you. It’s about him. It’s about him finding out what it’s like to love someone so much you hurt, and not be able to have them. It’s about living with pain for the rest of your life, a pain you can’t walk away from.”
“Huh. Sounds like you should put yourself out of your misery.” I just hate whiny people, don’t you? Bad things happen to everyone. A busted relationship isn’t the same as someone dying, so get over it.
“Shut up!” She moved closer to the foot of the stairs, that two-handed grip still as steady as ever. “You don’t know what it’s like. When we got married I knew he didn’t love me as much as I loved him, but at least I had a chance, I thought. But I never got to build on it. A pro athlete is gone a lot. I had to share him with the t
I shrugged. “Two? That’s just a guess. I don’t know how long you were married. He doesn’t talk about you.” No, I didn’t like her, didn’t feel sorry for her, didn’t give a damn about her other than I wanted to keep her talking long enough for Wyatt to get back.
“How would you feel, sharing him with the whole world,” she began hotly.
“See, that’s the difference between us,” I said, leaning on the newel post. “I think the whole concept of sharing is overrated. It’s unnatural. I don’t like to share. I don’t share. I will not share.” Unspoken were the words, You worm. Do you think I’d have put up with being ignored for a single minute?
She looked a little rattled, as if she’d expected me to be hysterical by now, crying and begging. Rattled wasn’t good. Rattled did stupid things, like pull the trigger. To get her mind off my unnatural behavior, I asked, “How did you get in here, anyway?”
“I’ve been watching this house. I’ve watched the two of you back out of the garage a dozen times. Neither of you ever waits to make certain the door is completely down. In fact, you’re around the house and out of sight before the door is halfway down. When he left, I just rolled a ball into the garage. The automatic sensor stopped the door and raised it back up. I walked in. How hard was that?”
So she’d been in the house since Wyatt had left. She could have caught me unawares, killed me, and already left, but she’d wanted to play her little game with the boots. She’d wanted me terrified.
I said, “Not very, I guess,” and shrugged. If I lived through this, a security system was going in immediately—the kind that beeps whenever a door is opened. “I guess you threw the master breaker switch, too.”
She nodded. “The box is in the garage. Why not?”
“And you were playing musical chairs with the rental cars, right? And wearing wigs? Except for that horrible dye job you had at the hospital.”
“I didn’t plan as well as I could have. I hadn’t even thought about security cameras in the mall parking lot. Thanks for telling me. I thought about the wigs after it took a stylist hours to get that shit out of my hair.”
“You could have saved yourself the trouble. The tapes were worn out. Wyatt couldn’t get any useful details from them.”
Now she looked annoyed, because I’m sure she went to a lot of trouble, swapping cars. And she was right: stripping artificial color out of your hair is a long, messy job. I’d have been pissed about that, too.
“You missed with the car in the parking lot, but I can’t see that as a very effective way to kill someone.”
She shrugged. “Spur of the moment decision. I’d been following you around and all of a sudden there you were, strutting across the parking lot as if you owned it. You were a…target of opportunity.”
“Strutting? Excuse me. I don’t strut.” Indignant, I straightened from the newel post.
“Prancing, then. I hated you on sight. I’d have smothered you in the hospital if you’d been alone.”
“Boy, you aren’t good at this killing shit at all, are you?”
“It’s my first time. I’m learning as I go. I should have been more straightforward. Walk up to you, put a bullet in you, walk away.”
Except she still hadn’t learned that lesson.
Fifteen minutes hadn’t gone by yet; I was certain of that. I hadn’t heard any cars drive up. Would Wyatt drive up? Or would he park down the road and sneak up on the house?
No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than he half stepped out of the kitchen door behind her, keeping part of his body behind cover. His automatic was in his right hand and aimed at her head. “Megan—”
Startled, she whirled. She might have been a good shot, in fact we found out later that she really was, she regularly shot at a target range, but she’d never practiced a real-life situation. She was already pulling the trigger as she whirled, the shots going wild.
Wyatt’s didn’t.
And neither did her last one.
My heart literally stopped, for a couple of agonizing seconds. I don’t remember moving, but I was down those stairs, leaping over her as she lay there moaning. If she hadn’t already been lying down, I’d have plowed over her getting to him.
Until the day I die I’ll see the expression on his face, see the way the bullet jerked him back, see the red spray of blood from his chest, arcing almost in slow motion. He staggered back, then went down on one knee. He struggled to get up, to get on his feet again, then sort of sprawled sideways. And still he kept trying to get up.
I was screaming his name. I know that. I screamed his name over and over. I slipped in his blood, there was already a pool of blood on the floor, and went down beside him.
He was breathing in shallow, jerky movements. “Shit,” he muttered thickly. “This hurts like hell.”
“Wyatt, you jackass!” I shrieked, sliding my arm under his head to cradle it. “‘Take a bullet for me’ is just an expression. An expression! You aren’t supposed to really do it!”
“Now you tell me,” he said, and closed his eyes.
I’m ashamed of what I did. Almost. I guess I should be ashamed.
I ran over to that bitch and kicked her.
Chapter
Thirty
Twenty-one days out
I looked out the window of Roberta’s wonderful Victorian, watching Wyatt standing in front of the arbor below, in her marvelous flower garden. “He should be sitting down,” I said anxiously. “He’s been standing too long.”
“Here,” said Mom, pulling me around and handing my earrings to me. “Put these in.”
I turned back to the window as I slipped the posts through the holes in my earlobes and secured them. “He looks pale.”
“He’s marrying you,” Siana murmured. “Of course he’s pale.”
Roberta and Jenni both started laughing. I gave Siana an indignant look and she burst out laughing, too. For the past three weeks, all I’d heard was jokes about how I’d kick someone when she was down, how bloodthirsty I was, things like that. Even Wyatt had gotten in on it, saying that he’d never felt safer in his life than he did with me guarding him. Dad had told me once, in apparent seriousness, that the NFL had heard about my talents and called wanting to know if I’d try out as a place kicker. Only Mom hadn’t made any jokes, but I thought that was probably because she’d have kicked anyone who shot Dad and she knew it.
Wyatt had spent three days in the hospital. I think they should have kept him longer, but insurance companies dictate how long a patient can be hospitalized, and at the end of three days, he went home. The surgeon who had patched him up had told me Wyatt was healing faster than people usually did, but you know, when someone has a hole punched in his chest you just sort of expect him to be hospitalized for, say, at least four days. Three was ridiculous. Three was almost criminal.
He could barely creep around under his own steam when I took him home. He had to do breathing exercises, huffing and puffing into this pipe thing that measured his lung capacity. He was in a lot of pain, and I knew it because he didn’t even argue about taking his pain medication.
A week after he’d been shot, he started refusing the pain medication except at night, so he could sleep. After ten days, he refused it even then. The fourteenth day, he started doing physical conditioning. Exactly three weeks to the day after he was shot, we were getting married.
We didn’t make the wedding deadline. We missed it by two days, but it was his fault for getting shot so he had to forfeit.
Megan had been in the hospital longer than Wyatt. Who cared? She hadn’t been able to make bail yet, so she’d gone from the hospital to jail, and there she sat. As far as I was concerned, she could rot there. I didn’t care about her unhappiness o
But today, none of that mattered. It was a gorgeous October day, the temperature was perfect, hovering right around seventy, and we were getting married. Our wedding cake, awaiting us in Roberta’s dining room, was a work of art. The food…well, the food wasn’t what we’d planned, because the caterer did fall through, but all the men seemed relieved. Evidently the testosterone crowd liked chicken fingers better than it did delicately seasoned spinach wraps. The flowers were breathtaking; Roberta had outdone herself with them.
And my gown…ah, my gown. It was just what I’d envisioned. The heavy silk flowed around me like water, but didn’t cling. The creamy white held just a touch of champagne richness in the color, so you couldn’t decide if the color was off-white or the palest gold. Without it being vulgar in any way, I thought it was just about the sexiest gown I’d ever seen. I just didn’t know if Wyatt was in any shape to properly appreciate it. We hadn’t made love since he’d been shot, to his great annoyance, because I didn’t want to put too much strain on his healing body and maybe cause a setback. He was more than annoyed. He was downright pissed off about it.
I hoped this gown shot him straight into lust-induced insanity. And I hoped he didn’t collapse under the strain.
My beautiful shoes hurt only a little bit. So long as I kept my broken toe immobilized, I could walk mostly pain-free. I was determined not to limp, though. The bandage was clear, and the shoe straps happened to fall almost exactly on the edges so unless you got down on your knees and stared at my foot you wouldn’t even see the bandage.
The guest list was a tad bigger than I’d intended. Just about every off-duty cop—and his or her spouse or significant other—was in the garden below. So were Sally and Jazz, holding hands, and their kids and spouses, except for Luke who had refused to bring a girlfriend to a wedding just on general principle. Wyatt’s sister, Lisa, her husband, and their two children were there. Great Bods was closed for the day, because all of my employees were there. Siana and Jenni had both elected not to bring dates because they said they’d be too busy to fool with them. There wasn’t a bride’s side and a groom’s side, there was just a great gathering of friends who could sit wherever they wanted.