The Cinderella Deal (4 page)

Linc nodded. “I know. I’m desperate. I need a fiancee for twenty-four hours.” That sounded a little odd, so he clarified it. “Only a fiancee.
A platonic
fiancee.”

“I understand that you’re not propositioning me.” Daisy folded her hands on the table like a polite child. “You can stop making that clear.”

Linc relaxed a little. “Good.” He took a swig of his beer, amazed at how much more difficult this whole thing was than he’d imagined. It wasn’t just the embarrassment of admitting what he’d done. It was also Daisy Flattery. There was something about dealing with this woman that reminded him of the way he’d felt messing around with the chemistry set he’d had when he was a kid. Volatile. Unpredictable.

Her voice broke his train of thought. “Why do you need a fiancee?”

He took a deep breath and told her, haltingly at first but then becoming more confident as he explained, and she didn’t throw him out or go off into fits of laughter.

“You’re in a mess,” she agreed when he was finished. “But I don’t see how you think I could help you. I’m hardly the wifely type.”

“No, but you could be for twenty-four hours. I’ll pay for a new dress. All you have to do is pretend to be the wifely type for the space of a speech and a cocktail party. I’ll have you out of there by Friday at midnight and back home by Saturday afternoon.”

Her laughter spurted, something between a giggle and a snort. “So you pick me up out of the gutter, and I get a new dress, and I pretend to be something I’m not, and then at midnight I run away and turn back into a pumpkin.” Her grin widened. “It’s a Cinderella story.”

“I guess so.” Whimsy was not Linc’s strong suit.

“And you get the job of your dreams and the time to finish your book.” She tilted her head. “I like this story. Everybody wins.”

“Even Guthrie,” Linc said. “He’ll get your back rent.”

“And I get to keep Annie.” Daisy smiled at him, warm with gratitude. “That was nice of you to tell Guthrie you didn’t mind, since you didn’t know whether I’d do this or not, and you hate cats.”

He looked at her, puzzled. “I don’t hate cats.”

Daisy’s smile cooled. “I saw you kick Liz once.”

Linc frowned at her. “Liz?”

Daisy nodded to the black cat curled up among the debris on the floor. It hadn’t moved at all since he’d been there. Maybe it was dead. He fought back an urge to poke it with his foot to see if it was breathing, and that brought back his earlier encounter. “Oh, yeah. I didn’t kick it, I just nudged it out of the way with my foot. It walked on my car.”

Her smile disappeared completely. “The
nerve
of her.”

Oh, great. Now she was off on a tangent, mad at him for something he hadn’t even done. “Forget the cat. Will you do it?”

She thought about it, setting her jaw, and Linc had a sinking insight into how stubborn she could probably be. Then she said “Yes,” nodding sharply. “For a thousand dollars.”

Linc jerked back. “A thousand?”

“That’s what I need.” Daisy smiled at him, the smile that had probably sunk a thousand ships in her lifetime. “I’m not really going to be Cinderella unless you rescue me completely, you know.”

When she smiled at him like that, it was hard to think. Imagine what that smile could do in Prescott. M
ake a note to have her smile a lot in Prescott
, he told himself, and gave in. “All right. A thousand dollars.”

She stuck her hand across the table, and he took it. Her grip was firm and warm. “It’s a deal, then,” she said. “A Cinderella deal.”

“Great,” he said through clenched teeth. Just what he needed, a child bride who still believed in fairy tales. “Are you free tomorrow afternoon about one so we can rehearse this story?”

Daisy nodded. “For a thousand dollars, I can be very free.”

“Good.” He stood up and patted her on the head. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

Daisy was still glaring at the door when he’d closed it behind him.

A cat kicker. An elbow grabber. A head patter.

“This may be a Cinderella deal,” Daisy told the cats, “but trust me, he’s no prince.”

When Linc picked Daisy up at one, he’d been having qualms all morning, and the sight of her outfit didn’t help relieve them. She was swathed in a short-waisted bright yellow eyelet dress that hung down to her ankles and hid completely whatever shape she had, and her hair was mashed under that damn blue velvet hat. Where did she get those huge clothes? She wasn’t that little; she had to be five eight at least. She’d look smaller if she stood next to him though.
Make a note to tell Daisy not to stand next to Booker,
he told himself. She’d look like a Valkyrie next to a gnome.

He held the passenger door open for her, and she looked at his car as if it were roadkill.

“What?” he asked her. “What’s wrong now?”

“This car is evil,” she told him in a thrilling voice. “This car needs an exorist.”

He looked at her dumbfounded. “This car is a Porsche. 1 rebuilt it myself. This is a
great
car.”

“It’s black and long and low and it looks like hell on wheels.” Daisy shook her head. “I can’t believe a college professor would drive something like this.”

This wasn’t a new thought; everybody who saw the car started from the same place, which was that it wasn’t his type of car and how the hell could he afford it. The truth was, Linc had found the car while he’d been working in a scrap yard during grad school and, in a moment of absolute insanity brought on by his disbelief that anyone could have thrown away something that beautiful, bought the frame by promising to work off the debt. And that, of course, had been only the beginning. It had taken five years and more money than he wanted to think about to get the car running again. And now that it was his proudest possession, this woman was sneering at it.

“After Friday, you’ll never have to ride in it again,” he told her. “Get in.”

“Yes, but I’ll have to look at it. It’s like living upstairs from Beelzebub.”

“Thank you,” he said, and when she got in the car, he slammed the door. Some women had no appreciation for the finer things in life, and Lord knew it was no surprise she was one of them.

“Where are we going?” she asked when they were on the road. He fished in his jacket pocket and handed her a note that said “Ring. Dress. Lunch.”

“We need a ring,” he told her, used to repeating everything to his classes even though they had a syllabus in front of them. “And a dress. And then we’ll have lunch so we can talk about this.” He looked over at all her yellow and blue fabric and winced. “We’ll get a white dress.”

Daisy scowled. “I like color.”

Linc looked back to the road. “For this weekend, you’re wearing white.” He shot a glance at her for her reaction and caught her
scowling
harder. “And quit doing that. You could curdle milk with that face.”

She sighed and smoothed out her frown. “I’m beginning to regret this.”

For some reason, that made Linc clutch a little. “Think of the thousand dollars,” he told her, remembering how grateful she’d been the night before.

She nodded. “And Annie.”

The cat again. “Listen. I would have let you keep the cat anyway.”

“Really?”

“Sure. You look like you could use a friend.”

Daisy lifted her chin. “I have a friend. Several.”

“Sorry. You just never seem to have much company.” He looked over at her and saw her scowling again. “Cut that out.”

Daisy obediently smoothed out her face. “Derek didn’t like company. And after a while my company didn’t like Derek, so they didn’t come back.”

“Derek.” Linc remembered. “Thin blond guy. Played the stereo too loud.”

Daisy nodded. “He’s a musician. He’s got hearing problems from standing too close to the speakers onstage. That’s how I met him. Somebody turned the amps up at a concert one night and he fell off the stage at my feet and cut his head, and I had a Band-Aid, and he said he’d never met anybody who’d brought a Band-Aid to a rock concert before.”

Linc looked over at her, amazed. This had to be a story. “You’re making this up.”

Daisy scowled at him again. “I am not. He moved in a week later.”

Linc moved his eyes back to the road, feeling exasperated. After one week she let some complete stranger move in. This woman had no common sense. Not that it was any of his business.

Come to think of it, though, what they were doing was pretty much Derek’s business. Linc was never going to live with a woman, but if he ever did, he certainly wasn’t going to let her pretend to be
somebody
else’s fiancee. “Will Derek be upset about this thing you’re doing for me?”

“He’s gone.”

Linc glanced at her, but she was obviously not going to explain. “Well, thanks for turning down the stereo. I really appreciate it.”

“Derek took it with him when he went.” Daisy looked out the car window, oblivious of his reaction.

It was none of his business, but he had to ask. “Was it his stereo?”

“No.”

Linc shook his head. Derek must be a fool. A great apartment and a woman with Band-Aids who didn’t care if he was deaf because he’d been too dumb to move away from a speaker. And then he’d stolen her stereo. How had he found it in that mess of an apartment? Her life was as big a mess as her apartment.

He pulled up in front of a small jewelry store. “Try not to lose your grip in there,” he told her. “I’m a college professor, not a millionaire.”

She nodded obediently and followed him into the dim coolness of the store.

Daisy bumped into Linc when he stopped in front of the case that held the diamonds. She peered around him. The stones sat there like ice on black velvet, and she shook her head and moved on. “Too cold. I like pearls.”

“Thank you,” Linc said, and she knew he thought she was saving him money. The truth was, she just liked pearls.

The pearls were much better, warm and glowing and real. Linc pointed to one ring immediately, an old-fashioned carved band with a circle of small pearls surrounding a tiny sapphire center. “This one, the daisy.”

he told the clerk. Then he turned to Daisy and said, “It’s a natural. Old-fashioned. Crawford will love it.”

Daisy restrained herself from pointing out that he should give it to Crawford, then, since it wasn’t her style at all. Her style was the one next to it, a heavy chased-silver band holding twisted free-form pearls. Still, he’d told her to develop some tact, and she was working on it. Lord knew he was paying enough for it. “Yes, that one is nice.” She smiled at him. “But I like this one.” She pointed to the silver band. “I like freshwater pearls.”

‘“Forget it. The daisy ring,” Linc told the salesclerk.

The clerk frowned at Linc, and Daisy saw it. The light was dim in the store, and while he took her ring size, the clerk treated her as if she were an abused child. People had mistaken her age in dim light before, maybe she could get away with it here too. It was worth a try, if only to show this control freak she was nobody to mess with. She slipped her hand through Line’s arm. “All right, we’ll take that ring now, honey.” She beamed up at him innocently. “But when I’m eighteen, can I have the other one? Please, please?” She batted her eyelashes at him.

The clerk frowned even harder, and Linc looked dumbfounded.

Daisy transferred her beam to the clerk. “He’s so good to me. I can’t think why Mama and Daddy don’t like him.”

The clerk shook his head in disgust and went to ring the sale.

Daisy met Line’s eyes as innocently as she could.

He wasn’t amused. “Listen, cupcake, you’re cute, but there’s no way you can pass for eighteen. Stop causing problems.”

Daisy smiled at him sunnily. “You haven’t seen anything yet. That guy thinks I’m underage. You pervert.”

Linc scowled harder. “Part of the deal is that you cooperate.”

“In Prescott,” Daisy pointed out. “We’re not in Prescott yet.”

Back at the car, Linc held the door for her and checked his watch, frowning. Evidently they were off his timetable. Daisy gritted her teeth; she hated schedules because all they produced was efficiency and guilt, two of her least favorite things. And Linc didn’t help things any when he got in the car and said, “Can we get a dress without you losing your grip on reality?”

Daisy met his eyes. “You never know.”

“That’s what I hate about this,” Linc said, and put the car in gear.

Shopping for a dress took exactly fifteen minutes. Daisy pulled Linc into a thrift shop and took a white-on-white embroidered rayon dress off a sale rack at the back of the store. She walked toward him, watching as he surveyed the place, realized everything in it was used, and said “No,” but she was ready for him. She’d been hanging out with him for only a very short time, but already she knew him like a book.

“Trust me,” she said. “I tried this on once and put it back because it makes me look like a dweeb-brained virgin. It’ll go great with the ring.” She surveyed him with contempt. “It’ll fulfill all your fantasies, Daddy.”

The thrift store clerk looked at Linc with disgusted interest.

“Stop that,” Linc told her, and bought the dress, as she knew he would, just to get them out of the store.

From there they went to a basement deli near the college for sandwiches. Daisy sat across from Linc and watched him eat, exasperated with him because of all he stood for, including white clothes and daisy rings. “So, tell me what I need to know to be your fiancee. What were you like as a kid? Where did you grow up?”

“A little place in Ohio. Sidney.” Linc bit into his reuben sandwich with a great deal of enjoyment, and Daisy suddenly remembered Julia talking about how enthusiastic he was in bed.
Stop it,
she told herself. Remember the car. “Sidney who?”

Linc shook his head and swallowed. “No, that’s the name of the town. We were the Sidney Yellow Jackets. I still have my football jacket if you want to wear it. Crawford would think that was great.”

Daisy frowned. “Yellow Jackets? Like bees?”

He nodded. “Our colors were black and yellow.”

Daisy stared at him, incredulous while he attacked his sandwich again. “The Killer Bees from Sidney, Ohio?”