to understand them, or try to. What if the dream was tied into what she was doing and she needed to know what was hidden inside it?
Groaning, she bent over the sink and splashed water on her face. It wouldn’t do much to help with the headache, but maybe it would clear the cobwebs from her brain. Once she’d handled that, she could decide if she wanted to do anything about looking like death warmed over.
Although she suspected she wouldn’t.
One of her minor skirmishes in her losing battle against her fiancé. He’d hate taking her out looking like this, but he’d never get here in time to do much more than bitch. And he was too anal to reschedule, too. The wedding was getting close, and after all, they did need to make sure her dress fit.
He could damn well take her out with her face the color of a two-day-old corpse and all that rot. She’d take care of her hair, change her clothes, because otherwise, it would be pushing her luck, but she’d still look horrid. And she was just fine with that.
Hopefully, he’d be so aggravated with her, she could try on the damn dress and then come back here and sleep.
All she had to do was get through the bloody fitting.
* * *
THE damn thing didn’t fit. It was too loose across her breasts, meager as they were, too loose in her waist.
“She’s lost weight,” the designer said, his pretty face unhappy. He shot Patrick a worried look and then looked back at Dru. “Oh, honey, you haven’t been crash dieting, have you? You look absolutely perfect as you are. Then you go and lose weight. I’ll have to take the dress in and it may not—”
“Don’t worry about taking the dress in.” Patrick stared at Dru with intense eyes. “We’ll just have to make sure she puts the weight back on.”
The designer was oblivious. He tugged here, pinched there. “Maybe if I try this . . .”
The look in Patrick’s eyes grew icy as he stared at the designer’s back. Suppressing a shiver, Dru touched the designer’s shoulder. “Seth, please don’t worry. It’s only a few pounds. It was silly of me to try and lose so much weight this close to the wedding. I didn’t think it would make such a difference.”
“You were crash dieting, weren’t you?” Seth straightened, glaring at her with accusatory eyes. The pained panic in those green eyes was just plain pathetic, she thought. One might think she’d ruined his wedding.
Giving him another smile, she said, “Not exactly.” She couldn’t call it crash dieting. She just didn’t eat, because she wasn’t hungry. After all, how hungry could she be, sitting next to the monster she was expecting to marry for breakfast, for dinner . . . sometimes he even expected her to eat lunch with him. Every touch was a reminder of what was to come, and her appetite had faded away to nothing.
She’d have to eat, though. That was all there was to it.
“I’ll do better, I promise. I’m actually quite ravenous,” she assured Seth. She doubted she could eat much of anything around Patrick, but she’d just start eating when he wasn’t around.
She’d do it, too. Whatever was necessary. Resolved, she smiled at the designer, refusing to look at the man who was staring at her with iced fury.
* * *
“WHY have you been dieting?”
It was the first time he’d spoken to her since the fitting more than an hour ago.
But then again, this was the first time they’d been assured of privacy since then. Earlier, his assistant had been around.
Lydia—Dru didn’t care for Lydia, tried to avoid her at all costs. That woman was a piece of work. She suspected Lydia had some pretty deep insights into Patrick’s character, but there was no way Dru was going to try for that connection.
No until she had to.
But now she had to deal with this . . . and the icy cold anger she could still feel coming from him. She took her cues from it, just as she’d always done. “It’s not exactly that I’ve been dieting,” she hedged, giving him a vague smile. “I just have a habit of eating when I’m nervous and I’ve been careful not to do that. I guess I’ve been too careful.”
He studied her.
Even though she saw it coming, Dru didn’t move.
The blow was a light, stinging slap—not hard enough to bruise, not even hard enough to leave a mark. Still, the