Drop Dead Gorgeous (4 page)

“But Lila's a sweetie.”

“Didn't you tell me she was a pathological liar?”

“No. She doesn't tell lies. She just makes up stories.”

“Like the one about writing her memoirs.”

“She
is
writing them.”

“She said she had a million-dollar book deal.”

“Wishful thinking.”

“Except that she had a champagne party to celebrate.”

“Lila resonates to the reality she wants to create.”

Madison's friends knew a soft touch when they saw it, though trying to get her to see that was impossible. Still, Laurence tried. “That's why she charged the caterer to your Visa account?”

“She didn't have her glasses, and she picked up the wrong card.” Madison believed in unconditional acceptance.

“From
your
purse?”

Madison shrugged. “She paid it all back. Then she moved out. You'd really like her if you just gave her a chance.”

He couldn't think of a worse match. “I don't need you making dates for me. Handling my work calendar is enough.”

“I'm just trying to help you with your Family Plan.”

Here she was, dressed to kill, her jacket unzipped to reveal enough cleavage to scramble his laptop's motherboard, all for another man. Topping that, she had the temerity to try setting him up with one of her irresponsible friends. He was looking at her and thinking about her too much. All because of that damn phone call yesterday. It shouldn't affect him this way—none of her other dates had to this extent—yet still, it did. “The answer is no, Madison.”

“But—”

He held up his hand.

“You'd re—”

“Zzzp.” He cut her off with the sound. He'd take
her
over any of her kooky friends. In his present state of mind, most definitely.

“But you—”

“Zzp.” He made the noise between gritted teeth.

Madison shut her mouth.

Was he so pathetic in her eyes? She rhapsodized about a voice over the phone, wore an outfit to knock a man's eyes out and tried to pawn Laurence off on her far-from-reliable ex-roommate.

Damn. It had nothing to do with jealousy. It was an affront to good manners, to his manhood even. He almost sighed. All right, he had to admit there was a part of him, a very small part, mind you, that loathed the idea that she lusted after a man she'd never met when Laurence himself had been standing in front of her for seven years. Though he'd always found her appealing—who in his right mind wouldn't?—this wasn't jealousy per se, just that she'd never seen him as a man who possessed attractive qualities beyond fun-loving and mysterious. He'd listened to her prattle, handed her a tissue when a relationship ended, done what a boss should do for a distressed employee. But this phone date was more than any self-respecting man could abide.

“I'll find ZZ Top,” she said again.

It was what she should have done before opening her mouth about Lila. She closed the door with the softest of clicks. Very good idea. Before he humiliated himself by showing her he was a man and he wasn't too old.

He turned in his chair to stare out the window, all the while drumming his fingers on the armrests. What was happening here? He'd put a match to Harriet's flame instead of dousing it. He'd become overly obsessed with Madison's assets. He was jealous of a voice on the phone. That damn phone call.

Or maybe it was hearing Madison declare twice in less than twenty-four hours that she only had a few days left to live.

Laurence stilled, a cold spot spreading from his chest to his extremities. She was not going to die. The idea was ludicrous, but his heart beat erratically and sweat popped out on his brow. She was on a quest to live life to its fullest, but God only knew what trouble that could bring her. She might want to fall in love, but what she really needed was shielding, from Richard and from roommates who accidentally stole her credit cards.

Madison needed saving from herself, at least until she turned twenty-eight and realized she wasn't going to die.

 

Z
ACH WOULD APOLOGIZE
, just like T. Larry had told him to. He owed Harriet that. Not for the dress incident—he'd meant every one of those four words—but for the other thing he'd done to her, the thing they hadn't talked about since that night all those months ago.

Zachary Zenker slipped into the coffee room, got himself a soda and slipped back out. No one saw him, not Madison where she stood at the coffee machine making T. Larry a fresh pot and not Mr. Carp who'd nabbed T. Larry's pot right out of Madison's fingers. Sometimes Zach felt like little more than a ghost in their midst. He longed to be noticed, longed to be a part of them, longed to speak his mind the way everyone else did.

As it was, he never got a word in edgewise.

He'd tried to talk to Madison about his problem yesterday, but she'd been on the phone. With nothing more than his daily peanut butter cup for his efforts, he'd left like a dog with his tail between his legs, or worse, a wraith no one even knew was there.

He hunkered down in his cubicle before the digital glare of his portable PC and comforted himself with his spreadsheets, his numbers and his accounts. They didn't offer the usual solace. He kept remembering that T. Larry had never even looked up from the contract on his desk as he issued that apology instruction.

Someday, somehow, he'd do
something
to make them notice him.

 

“Y
OUR TIRES ARE SLASHED
.” Mid-afternoon, Harriet stood in Madison's cubicle opening.

“My tires?”

“On your car. In the garage.” There was just enough venom in Harriet's voice to make Madison wish she didn't always have to look for the best in
every
person.

“I forgot I drove today.” She'd driven her sporty little compact this morning because she was having dinner with Richard the Lionhearted. Sometime in the middle of the night, she'd dubbed him with the name. Her Richard. Suddenly she didn't feel the bite of Harriet's tone as much.

“Aren't you going to check it out?”

“Yeah. Thanks for telling me.” Madison tried to smile brightly in appreciation.

“Well, don't sound so cheerful about it. Someone did a really nasty job.” Harriet seemed to relish the idea.

An unpleasant tingle nipped her neck. “Where have you been?”

Harriet glared as if Madison had accused her of something. “At a client's. I'd have told you when I left if you'd been at your desk.”

Cheeks flushed, eyes a glittering blue that didn't quite match the orange-red of her dyed hair, and her dress a bright pink, Harriet glowed with color. And animosity.

If you can't find anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
That being one of her mother's favorite axioms Madison had taken to heart, she said nothing. Harriet wouldn't have grabbed an olive branch anyway. Madison had tried often enough to know what to expect. Harriet simply didn't want her advice or her help and, in recent months, had seemed downright hostile.

“Aren't you going to call triple A or the cops?” Harriet pushed and shoved.

“Yes. Thanks for letting me know.” That was pleasant enough. Madison tried for a little bit more. “I wouldn't have found it until I left for home.” After her date with Richard. It would have made for an unpleasant ending to a pleasurable evening.

Harriet made a noise of disgust, shrugged her shoulders and walked away, the nylons on her inner thighs rasping with her angry stride.

Madison breathed a sigh of relief. Harriet was her greatest disappointment, the one person in all the world Madison couldn't seem to like no matter how hard she tried. Nor had she been successful in getting others to like Harriet. When Madison suggested Harriet lighten up, Harriet had adjusted her attire rather than her demeanor, abandoning her black, gray and navy-blue suits for more colorful dresses and skirts. With disastrous results. The girl had become the office laughingstock, and her attitude took a dive. Madison had tried to extol her virtues to others at every opportunity, but she'd found little to draw from. If only Bill hadn't overhead that “Chicken Little” comment she'd made to Harriet and turned the nickname into yet another curse. Madison had racked her brain for a solution to the Harriet problem but nothing worked.

Right now, however, she had her tires to worry about.

She couldn't call her brothers. They'd freak like loving but overprotective mother hens. They'd been that way since her stroke. Not that she blamed them. She figured that worrying about
her
allowed them
not
to worry about the possibility of having a stroke themselves. She was sure that wouldn't happen, but the thought must have occured to them. So she let them worry about her to their hearts' content. Except for now, when she couldn't let them interfere with her date with Richard.

She whirled the Rolodex, stopping at the
C
s. Dialing, she leaned her elbow on the desk to stop the tremble in her hand. The shakiness in that hand and the fact that one corner of her mouth wasn't quite as high as the other were the only noticeable effects of her stroke. The doctors attributed her miraculous recovery to her youth. Madison just said a prayer of thanks to God and counted every minute of her life as more wonderful than the one before.

Then the ring was answered and Madison asked for her favorite tow truck guy.

 

“W
HAT DO YOU MEAN
you're not calling the police?”

“Calm down, T. Rex.”

Laurence didn't feel like a dinosaur. He felt like the fire-breathing dragon Madison sometimes called him. She would have gone to the garage alone if he hadn't heard about her tires through the office grapevine and insisted upon escorting her. “Have you no sense, woman?”

Madison merely smiled and craned her neck to once more look for the tow truck she thought would bring her four new tires. How had the culprit managed to find adequate time and privacy to do that much damage? In the five minutes they'd been down here, no fewer than eight cars had passed on their way in or out. This was one of the more popular garages in the city, mostly due to its reasonable rates and excellent location, but there were no security cameras and inadequate, even faulty lighting. Laurence had previously encouraged all his employees to use the lot.

He squatted for a better look. On the level below, tires squealed like a banshee wail. Gas fumes and the scent of burning oil suffocated him. The sight of Madison's tires wrapped around his vocal cords and stole the air from his lungs.

The perpetrator had plunged the weapon into the sidewall, à la
Psycho
's Norman Bates. Not one thrust to expel the air, but again and again, reducing the rubber to mincemeat. The act had taken time, power and a vengeful rage.

What if Madison had surprised the perpetrator in the act? Laurence's blood raced in his veins and throbbed through his temples.

“If you don't call the police, I will.”

Madison finally deigned to answer him. “It was just a couple of kids making mischief.”

“That—” he rose, moved to within a foot of her, then pointed to the tires “—is the work of a maniac.”

“It doesn't mean it was directed specifically at me.”

“Then why did they single out your car?” He waved an arm indicating the rest of the packed underground garage. “Of all the cars here.” He folded his arms and waited.

She looked up at the missing bulbs above her car. “The lights were out?”

“They could have broken them when they got here.”

By her hesitant glance, he knew she couldn't remember the condition of the lights when she'd arrived that morning. He still expected her to argue.

Then Madison did the most amazing thing. Without even a blithe contradiction to his statement, she gave him a direct answer. “I don't want to cause trouble for someone I might know.”

She almost robbed him of his next question. Almost. “You think you know who did this?”

“Harriet isn't too pleased with any of us. She was the one to discover what happened to my car.”

A first. In seven years, he'd never heard Madison say anything bad about anyone, not even a hint. “
Our
Harriet?”

She shook her head, her earrings swinging with vehemence. “Of course I don't think she did it. Nobody
I
know could be responsible for this.” Laurence didn't have the same faith she did, but he let her go on uninterrupted. “But you know how Mike and Anthony and Bill make mountains out of molehills where Harriet's concerned, and if the police ask what
they
think…” She spread her hands in a draw-your-own-conclusion gesture.