Drop Dead Gorgeous (4 page)

I wasn't paying attention to my surroundings, I admit. I had important things on my mind. As I left the store I did notice that there weren't many cars left in the parking lot, but I'd parked close to the store, the light was good, no suspicious stranger was lurking around my car, other people were leaving at the same time, etcetera.

I juggled my packages so I could dig my car key from my pocket, and hit the unlock button on the remote as I stepped off the curb. A van was parked in the handicap slot, which of course was the first slot on the row, and I'd parked in the second slot. My beautiful little car flashed its lights at me in welcome.

I heard the smooth sound of a car accelerating and stopped a few feet from the curb; with a quick glance I judged I easily had enough time to cross ahead of the oncoming car, and resumed my asphalt trek.

Everything seemed normal. I didn't pay much attention to the car as it neared; my left hand had started aching from the weight of all the plastic bags I was carrying, and I adjusted my grip. Still, something—some whisper of instinct that said the sound of the car was getting too close—made me look up as the car seemed to surge right at me, as if the driver had floored the gas pedal.

The car looked gigantic, coming right at me. The headlights were glaring right in my eyes, blinding me; I had only a vague impression of the dark form behind the wheel, and that was due solely to the lights in the parking lot. There was plenty of room for the car to swerve around me, but it didn't.

I took a running step to get out of the way, and in the split second that followed I swear it seemed the driver adjusted direction, too, and
aimed
for me.

Panic exploded in my brain. All I could think— and this wasn't a fully-formed, coherent thought, just an "
Ohmigod
!" kind of realization—was that if the car hit me I would be crushed between it and the van.

Good-bye, wedding. Hell, good-bye
me
.

I jumped. Actually, I dived. And it was a world-class effort, let me tell you. There's nothing like thinking you're about to be turned into mush to put some spring in the legs. Even when I was cheerleading in college I couldn't get that kind of distance.

The car roared by so closely I felt the heat of its exhaust; I was still airborne at the time, that's how close I came to being hit. I heard squealing tires, then I crashed to the asphalt behind the van and the lights sort of went out.

Chapter Three

I didn't lose consciousness, or at least not completely. The world was nothing but a dark, tumbling blur. I remember the sharp, burning sensation as I sort of skidded and rolled across the asphalt. I remember thinking "
My shoes
!" as I tried desperately to hold on to my packages. I remember my ears
ringing,
and the sudden hot taste of blood in my mouth. And I remember what felt like a shock wave of pain slamming through me.

Then the movement stopped and I lay on the asphalt, which was still warm even though night had closed in, not quite certain where I was or what had happened. I could hear sounds, but I couldn't tell what they were or where they were coming from. All I wanted to do was lie there and try to contain my body's outrage at being injured. I was hurt. My head was pounding in a sickening throb, throb, throb, in time with my heartbeat. I felt hot, then cold, and wanted to throw up. I could feel the sharp aches, the burns, the throbs and jabs; I just couldn't isolate all the sensations and make sense of them, couldn't determine location or severity, or do anything about them.

At least I wasn't dead. That was a plus.

Then a very clear thought burned through my brain: "
That bitch tried to run me down
!"

My second thought was, "Oh, shit, not again!"

I even said the words aloud, and the sound of my own voice startled me, sort of jarred me back into my body, which, by the way, wasn't a happy place to be. I almost wanted to go back into that disconnected state, except I was afraid the driver would turn around and come back for another pass at me, and if I were just lying there zoned out I'd be
roadkill
.
Literally.

Spurred by a panicked shot of adrenaline, I sat up and hastily looked around. That wasn't my smartest move ever. Well, maybe it was, because I had to make certain I wasn't about to become a greasy mess on the pavement, but my body immediately rebelled: my head gave a huge throb, my stomach heaved, my eyes rolled up in my head, and I collapsed back to the asphalt.

This time I just let myself lie there, because the eyeballs-rolling-up thing was weird. Surely someone would come rushing to my aid any minute now.

Frankly, I was getting very tired of people trying to kill me. Read my previous book if you don't know what I'm talking about. I've been shot (by my ex-husband's current wife); my brake line cut (by my ex-husband), resulting in a multi-car accident; and now this. I was tired of pain. I was tired of the hell this played with my schedule. I was
damn
tired of not looking my best.

The pavement was rough under my cheek. From the various shrieks of pain coming from nerve endings all over my body, I thought I must have left large amounts of skin on the asphalt. Thank goodness I was wearing long pants, but really, only leather will protect your skin, so I suspected the pants hadn't been a lot of help. Road rash is an ugly thing. I began to worry; how would I look for the wedding? Was four weeks enough time to heal, or would I have to invest in some heavy body makeup, which is icky and would smear on my dress? Maybe the sleeveless, sexy column of silk I'd envisioned would have to go, and instead I'd wear something with more coverage, like a
burka
, or a tent—not that there's much difference between the two.

Well, for
pete's
sake, where
was
someone? Were all those people going to stay in the
frickin
' mall until midnight? How long would I have to lie there before someone saw me and came to help? I'd almost been smashed to a pulp! I needed a little concern here, a little
something
.

I was getting very indignant. Hello… a body lying in the parking
lot,
and no one notices? Yes, it was night, but the parking lot was lit by those huge vapor lights, and I wasn't lying between two cars or anything. I was… I opened my eyes and tried to get my bearings.

My vision was blurred; all I could see were black shadows and patches of light, and those swam and ran together. Automatically I tried to rub my eyes, only to find that my arms, neither of them, wanted to obey. They would move, but reluctantly, and not very well—certainly not well enough to have fingers flailing away at my eyes; I might blind myself, and wouldn't that be adding insult to injury?

Okay, so I couldn't see exactly where I was. Still, I had to be lying in the end of the row closest to the mall, where
someone
should notice me.
Eventually.

Dimly I heard a car start, somewhere. So long as it wasn't a car that would back over me, that was okay, but I figured in that case the driver would have had to step over my body to get to said car, so that scenario wasn't likely. On the other hand, there have been times when I was so rushed that if I had stepped over a body I might have thought,
I'll get to that later
.

Something else to worry about: being backed over by someone like me.

Was there any sort of record on how long someone could lie in the middle of a parking lot and no one notice? And—yuck—what if ants and things crawled on me? I was bleeding. Probably all sorts of little critters were crawling at top speed toward me, eager to feast.

This thought was so disgusting that if my head hadn't been aching so badly I probably would have bolted upright. No, I don't like bugs. I'm not afraid of them, but I think they're nasty and icky, and I don't want them anywhere near me.

Come to think of it, the parking lot itself was nasty and icky. Tacky, classless people spit on the pavement, and sometimes they spit more than just spit. All sorts of crap landed on pavements, including, well, crap.

Oh, God, I had to get up before I died from an overdose of the
nasties
. No one was coming to my aid, at least not on my timetable, which pretty much meant
NOW
. I'd have to do this myself. I'd have to find my purse, dig out my cell phone—I hoped the damn thing still worked, that the battery hadn't been knocked out or something, because finding a battery and replacing it was beyond me at the moment—and call 911. I also had to sit up, to get most of my body off the nasty pavement, or my mental state would soon match my physical one.

On the count of three, I thought, I would sit up.
One.
Two.
Three
.
Nothing happened. My mind knew what I wanted to do, but my body said uh-uh. It had already tried that sitting-up stuff.

That pissed me off, almost as much as did the lying-there-unnoticed. Okay, I'm lying about that. Lying-there-unnoticed came close to the top of the list. If I had to rate the things that pissed me off right then, someone trying to kill me—
again
!—would have to rate a ten. No one paying any attention to me was a nine. A disobedient body was a distant third, coming in at maybe a five.

Still, I'd been a cheerleader for years, all the way from junior high through college. I'd told my body to do painful things lots of times, and for the most part it had obeyed. It just didn't make sense that it wouldn't obey me now when the stakes were a lot higher than turning a cartwheel or something. My life could hang in the balance here!
Not only that, it felt as if something was crawling on my face.
No doubt about it, I had to get up. I had to get help.

Maybe I was trying to do too much. Sitting up all in one motion, without the spur of panic to push me, was more than I could manage. Maybe I should try moving my arm again.

That worked out pretty well. My right arm hurt, but it did just what my brain told it to do, which was laboriously (I didn't tell it that part, that was just the way it worked) bring my hand up so I could swipe at whatever was crawling across my face.

I expected to feel a bug. I was braced to feel a giant bug. What I felt, instead, was wet and sticky.

Okay, I was bleeding. I was vaguely surprised, though I shouldn't have been. It wasn't that I was surprised I was bleeding, but that I was bleeding from my head or face, or both. I knew I'd hit my head, hence the headache and nausea that likely meant a concussion, but the situation was getting
worser
and
worser
, as someone once said. If I'd cut my face, would that mean stitches? The way this was going, I would look like the Bride of Frankenstein by the time Wyatt and I got married.