The Cinderella Deal (5 page)

He was unperturbed. “Hey, I got a football scholarship.”

Daisy shook her head and picked up her own sandwich. It was turkey on sourdough and much healthier than Line’s reuben, which must have had at least four thousand fat grams, which for some reason did not make her turkey look any less boring next to it. “My husband, the Killer Bee,” she said, thinking resentful thoughts about corned beef.

Linc went on, oblivious to her. “Ohio is a big football state.”

“Does that make me the queen bee?”

“As a matter of fact, my scholarship was to Ohio State.”

“Which would make you a drone.”

“It wasn’t a great scholarship.”

“It would explain why you’ve got such boring taste.”

“But it didn’t really matter, because I had a full ride on an academic scholarship.”

Daisy got a faraway look on her face. “We could live in a little cottage called The Hive.”

Linc stopped. “Are you listening to me?”

Daisy batted her eyes at him. “Of course, my darling. You were a football hero and got a full ride to Ohio State. You dated the homecoming queen, you were president of your senior class, you were voted most likely to succeed, and your teachers adored you. And you lost your virginity as a sophomore after the first football game.”

Linc blinked. “How did you know?”

Daisy looked smug. “You’ve got yuppie written all over you, sweetie. The only thing I’d never have guessed was that you were a Killer Bee.” She bit into her sandwich, happy to have nailed him.

Linc put down his reuben and smiled at her. “You were in Art Club. You were in Drama Club. You were in National Honor Society. You wore glasses and weird clothes. You wrote poetry, you got straight A’s in English, and you dated guys who were very serious about

Life. You didn’t lose your virginity until college, and then it was a great disappointment. You’ve spent your entire life hoping that a former football star from Sidney, Ohio, would ask you to marry him and move to Prescott, Ohio, so you could have lots of kids and become a Republican.“

Daisy swallowed and grinned at him. “You were doing pretty good until you got to the former football star from Sidney, Ohio.”

“Well, for the weekend, pretend the rest is true too.”

Daisy tried to understand him. He must have had a repressed childhood, the kind she would have had if she’d had to live with her father for more than summers. He probably had one of those pushy mothers. “Does your mother like me?”

“My mother doesn’t like anybody, including me.”

Daisy put her sandwich down, suddenly not hungry. “That’s awful.”

Linc shrugged. “She’s not an emotional woman. She doesn’t dislike me. I’m fine. She leaves me alone. I’ve seen guys whose mothers call every weekend to see if they’re married yet.”

“That’s my mother.” Daisy picked up her sandwich again.

“And your dad calls you ‘cupcake.’ ” Linc took another bite of his reuben.

Fat chance
. “My father doesn’t call me anything,” Daisy said. “What’s your father like?”

Linc chewed and swallowed. “Dead.”

The lousy memories of her father disappeared under an onslaught of sympathy, and she let her sandwich drop onto her plate. “Oh. Oh, Linc, I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “He died when I was thirteen. He got to see me make a touchdown in my first junior high game, though.”

“Oh, good.” Daisy thought of Linc alone at all his other games. The story built in her mind—the valiant young athlete looking at the empty place in the stands after every touchdown, searching for the father who wasn’t there, who wasn’t ever going to be there—and her eyes welled with tears.

“Stop it.” Linc handed her a napkin. “That was twenty-five years ago. I barely remember what he looked like. Tell me about your father.”

Daisy blotted her tears and pulled herself together. “There’s not much to tell. He left.”

You had to ask, didn’t you
? Linc told himself. “That must have hurt.”

Daisy shrugged and swallowed. “He left when I was one. I’m over it now.”

Linc tried to think of something sympathetic to say. “Oh.”

“I used to spend my summers with him and he’d try to make me neat and well-behaved so I wouldn’t embarrass him. When I turned sixteen, I wouldn’t go anymore. So I haven’t seen my father much since then.”

“Oh.” It sounded messy, and Linc really didn’t want to talk about it. “So did your mom remarry?”

“No.” Daisy fished a pickle from her sandwich with such elaborate unconcern that Linc knew she was upset. “She’s waiting for my father to come back.”

“What?”

“I know.” Daisy nibbled her pickle. “Even when I was a little kid, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. But she still thinks he’ll come back. She just can’t see reality.”

So
it’s hereditary
, Linc thought, but all he said was “She must have loved him very much.”

Daisy looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. It was very romantic the way they met. He saw her behind the counter in a flower shop she worked in, and he swept her off her feet and into his limo, and I guess they were really crazy about each other for a while, and then the crazy part wore off for him, and he got a good look at what he’d married and didn’t like it.” Daisy shrugged. “He’s a very conservative person. Very proper, very serious.” She met his eyes. “Like you.” Linc wasn’t sure what to say, but she went on. “And my mother’s sort of… fluffy. I don’t think she ever caught on that she wasn’t what he wanted. I mean, from her point of view, she was doing all the right things, being a good little wife. He just wanted somebody more sophisticated, somebody who fit with his reality. So he found that somebody and left.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah.” Daisy sighed. “But she still thinks it’s just this error he made, and sooner or later he’ll remember she’s his one true love.” She shrugged.

“Sooner or later? How long has it been?”

“Thirty-three years.”

“Your mother is nuts,” Linc said, and winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean…”

“I don’t think she’s actually nuts,” Daisy said. “I think she’s just detached from reality. It’s a coping skill.”

She met his eyes and read his mind. “I am not detached from reality. I’m perfectly capable of taking short vacations from it, but I always know how to get back.”

“Good. Try not to go on vacation this weekend. What do I call your mother?”

“Pansy.”

Linc looked appalled. “Why?”

“Because that’s her name.”

Linc shook his head in disbelief. “Okay. Your mother is Pansy. What’s she like?”

Daisy thought about her mother. What could you say about Pansy? “She’s little,” Daisy said finally. “Nothing like me. Blond. Cute. Southern. She’d go bananas for this ring.” Daisy narrowed her eyes at him. “She’d go bananas for you too. The big, dark, handsome Yankee come to steal her little magnolia away. Just like Rhett Butler.”

Linc looked quelling. “Frankly, my dear, I never thought of you as a magnolia.”

Daisy didn’t quell. “I never thought of you as a Killer Bee either. The things you find out when you’re engaged to someone. What’s your mother’s name?”

“Gertrude.”

“Gertrude? For real? Gertrude Blaise?”

“Her maiden name was Gertrude Schmidt.”

Daisy nodded. “A German. I knew it.” She sucked in her breath suddenly. “Oh, my God, I can’t possibly marry you.”

Linc put his sandwich down, alarmed. “Why?”

“My name.” Daisy invested the words with as much tragedy as possible.

“Daisy?”

“Daisy Blaise.” She made a retching face. “Disgust-ing.”

He grinned. “Cute. Sounds like a stripper.”

“Maybe that’s how we met.” Daisy perked up. “I was stripping and—”

‘No.“

“Okay, then.” Daisy tried to make her voice reasonable. “How did we meet? We should meet cute.”

“No, we shouldn’t.” Linc pointed a finger at her. “Forget the fiction. We met because we live in the same building. We lie as little as possible.”

“That’s no good. I’ll think of something,” Daisy said, and Linc said, “No, you will not,” and went back to his sandwich.

“Okay.” Daisy pushed her empty plate away, prepared to concentrate. “Brothers or sisters?”

“Two brothers, Wilson and Kennedy. Wil and Ken.”

“Lincoln, Wilson, and Kennedy?”

“Dad believed in role models. What about you?”

“I believe in role models,” Daisy said, getting ready to tell him about Rosa Parks, and then she realized that he meant her family. “Oh. Two stepsisters. Melissa and Victoria. Very chic.”

“Got it.” Linc finished his sandwich and looked at his watch.

Am I boring you
? Daisy thought, but all she said was “Anything else you need to know?”

“What do you do for a living?”

Exactly what it says on my card on the mailbox
, Daisy wanted to say, but she repressed it. Being around Linc meant repressing a lot. She didn’t like it. “I paint and tell stories. Julia said you wrote a book once. What was it called?”

“The Nineteenth-Century Sporting Event as Social History.”

“Catchy title. Who’s going to play you in the movie?”

Linc looked at her with palpable calm. “Maybe I should just tell everyone in Prescott that you’re mute.”

Daisy grinned back. “I’ll be good.”

“Remember that. What do you paint?”

“Primitives.”

“Primitives?”

Daisy thought about explaining it to him, telling him about the women she painted in the smallest, simplest shapes possible, surrounding them with the tiny details of their lives so that the simplicity became complexity, the way that the simplicity of their lives became complex when you looked at their hopes and fears and dreams and stories. Then she looked at Linc sitting across from her, logical and reasonable, and decided to forget it. This was obviously a man not interested in visual arts or in women’s lives. “It’s hard to explain, but I do them very well.”

Linc nodded, clearly uninterested. “What else? How do you really earn a living?”

“I told you. Painting. Storytelling. I sell jewelry to an upscale craft store. I used to have some savings from when I was a teacher, but that’s all gone now.”

Linc looked nonplused. “How old are you?”

“I’ll be thirty-five in September.”

“You’re thirty-five and you have no career and no steady income.” Linc shook his head. “Who feeds you? The ravens?”

“I do all right.” Reality was not the story Daisy wanted to talk about. “This is your fantasy,” she told him. “I’m just along for the ride until midnight, when I turn into a pumpkin. Why don’t you just tell me your story, and I’ll memorize it, and we’ll be done.”

“Great,” Linc said, and began to talk. It was so much worse than Daisy had imagined, full of plans for a woman in a designer apron and smiling, apple-cheeked children dressed in Baby Gap and a stuffy career in a stuffy town. The man had no imagination at all, and she was stuck in his story. Thank God it was only for twenty-four hours. If anyone had heard her, her storytelling career would have been over forever.

Linc finished the story, feeling much better about the whole situation. Daisy was obviously a bright woman, and his story sounded pretty good as he told it. For the first time, he thought the whole thing might actually work.

“That is without a doubt the worst story I’ve ever heard,” Daisy said.

Linc bit back a reply. He needed her. He was going to have to put up with her for only one night. “Well, pretend you love it while we’re in Prescott.”

“No problem.” Daisy tilted her head a little, dropped her chin, and opened her eyes wide. “I’m just thrilled to be here in Prescott, the cutest little town in Ohio and the perfect place to raise my two point four children, who’ll all be going to Harvard on full academic scholarships. I can’t tell you how excited I am.”

She leaned forward a little and looked up at him under her lashes. He looked straight down the graceful line of her throat and into the gaping neckline of her ridiculous yellow dress and saw full, creamy curves. He jerked his startled eyes up to meet hers. She had a body. He’d missed that in all the clothes and the scowling, but she wasn’t scowling now. She was smiling at him dreamily, the killer smile that had laid Guthrie low, her lips parted and soft. A wave of lust rolled over him.
She’s nuts and she’s messy and she irritates the hell out of you,
he told himself, but all he could see were those curves and that wide, lush smile.

“I can’t wait,” she repeated, and Linc said, “Stop that,” and she laughed.

Linc stood up just to get away from her. “Come on, Magnolia. I have to get back to school.”

When they were outside, Daisy rolled her eyes at the car again, but she behaved herself until they were halfway home, which gave him some time to recover. Then she put her hand on his arm and pointed. “Can we stop up there for a minute? Just a minute?”

He looked ahead to where she was pointing, at a craft boutique. It didn’t seem like much to ask, and it would get her out of the car for a few minutes while he got his mind back where it belonged. “Sure.” He checked the rearview mirror and pulled over. “Don’t take too long. I have to teach in forty-five minutes.”

Daisy nodded, took a deep breath, got out of the car, and walked into the store.

Linc watched her through the big plate glass window and relaxed. When her mouth wasn’t open and irritating him, and her dress wasn’t gaping and inflaming him, Daisy Flattery was cute. He watched her trek up to the counter, her ridiculous long skirt making her look like a kid playing dress-up. She asked for something, and the guy behind the counter leaned on the register, bored, and shook his head. Daisy said something else, and he shook his head again. Linc glanced at his watch and looked back at the guy. He was sneering. What was it with her? First Derek, now this guy.
This woman has an absolute affinity for jerks,
he thought, and got out of the car.

“Look, Howard.” Daisy faced the store owner and tried to be tough. And mature. Mature was important. “You sold the last of my jewelry two weeks ago.”

“I told you.” Howard pressed his lips together with exaggerated patience. “Checks at the end of the month.”

“But you didn’t give me a check at the end of last month,” Daisy pointed out. “And some of my pieces were sold by then.”