The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [10]
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 fiancée. “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 sales-clerk.
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 Linc’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