Drop Dead Gorgeous (35 page)

Be sure to watch for Jennifer Skully's next romance,
coming to HQN in October 2006.
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J
ACK
D
AVIS FOUGHT DOWN
the air bag and scrambled from the cab of his truck. The woman he'd rammed into was already out of her sporty red mini-SUV and on her hands and knees looking beneath the vehicle.

“What are you doing?” Jack swallowed the epithet he'd been about to use. His mama taught him politeness regardless of the circumstances.

Traffic flowed slowly through the lanes on either side of them. For once, he could appreciate the slowness of a Silicon Valley rush hour. Jack turned to the gold Cadillac that had rear-ended him when he'd slammed on his brakes. The Caddy's driver hadn't moved yet, though his air bag had deflated.

Jack ran back. An old guy, with numerous fragile bones. Squatting by the closed window, he shouted through. “You okay?”

No answer, but at least the old man's eyes were open, and he'd turned his head. Jack whipped his cell phone off his belt and punched in 911.

With the call made, he opened the door slowly, and held the man back against the seat when he tried to move. “Just stay put until the ambulance gets here. They need to check you out. Feel like anything's broken?”

The old man shook his head, but would he really know? His eyes couldn't seem to focus on Jack's face. Jack stood.

That's when he saw her. The woman, the other driver. Her butt in the air, short skirt barely covering her essentials, she looked as if she was trying to crawl under his truck. “What are you doing now?”

Stalking back, he grabbed her arm and pulled her out.

Still on her knees, she stared up at him with the bluest, most freaked-out eyes he'd ever seen.

“Didn't you see it?”

“See what?” he asked as calmly as possible. She'd started to worry him.

“The body. It fell off the overpass right in front of me. I ran over it.”

She was young, midtwenties or so. Blond hair, blue eyes, and, from his vantage point as she knelt beside his truck, nice…nice everything.

Despite being batty.

“I didn't see a body flying off that overpass, ma'am.” Jack struggled to retain that ingrained politeness.

She bit her lip, then looked through his legs at the Cadillac. “Maybe it's under there.”

Jumping up, she tipped sideways on her high heels, recovered and rushed around him to peer beneath the old man's gold car.

She leaned into the open door of the Caddy. “Did you see that man fall off the overpass?”

The old man shook his head. He still hadn't spoken, and Jack was anxious about him. “You could have killed someone slamming on your brakes like that.”

She sucked in a breath, her breasts expanding in her tight black sweater. “Oh my God, I didn't…are you all right?”

“Fine. Thanks for asking.” He didn't point out she should have shown the concern before she crawled under his truck.

She put a hand on the old guy's shoulder. “What about you?”

He smiled up at her blissfully. And nodded.

“I'm so sorry. But the body just fell right in front of me.”

Jack closed his eyes and shook his head. “There is no body.”

She stared at him with guileless blue eyes. “But I saw it.”

He didn't know why he was trying to convince her, but he walked to the front of her car, leaned down to look under it, did the same with his own truck—ah, Jesus, the crushed bumpers and tailgate made him wince—and finally the Cadillac. Then he spread his hand. “Nothing here.”

Sirens sounded in the distance. Behind them, traffic was stacking up.

“Nothing back there, either,” he said when she looked at the stream of cars with blinkers on, trying to merge around them.

She stared back at the overpass. She'd skidded several feet beyond it. “But I saw it. It was a vision. A premonition.”

Oh man. She was schizo, a type with which he'd had far too much experience. “Don't tell the cops about any
visions
you had.”

She tipped her head to the side. “But how am I going to explain about slamming on my brakes?”

“Tell them you saw a dog in the median lane, probably got trapped out there, then made a run for it.”

“But that would be a lie. Dogs don't fall out of the sky.”

Neither did bodies. He'd always considered himself a patient man, but he had his limits. “Have you been drinking?”

Her pretty blue eyes widened with horror. “It isn't even nine o'clock in the morning.”

“If you tell the cops you had a vision, they're going to test you for every illegal substance known to man. You have that much time?”

She passed a look from the now-crushed rear of her little red SUV to the crumpled front of the gold Cadillac to the old man still sitting dazed in the front seat. “All right. A dog.” She tipped her head again. “Did you see it? Just in case they ask.”

“I didn't see anything but your rear end.” Especially when she was kneeling down by the side of her car. Now that was a vision.