The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [25]
Linc looked confused. “Chickie?”
“No, dear Little Gertrude.”
Linc started to laugh, and Daisy had to grin with him. “And Chickie bought this?” he asked her.
Daisy’s grin faded as she remembered. “She was drunk. She drinks way too much, but it’s because she’s so unhappy. She’d stop if she had somebody to talk to.”
Linc’s grin disappeared too. “Did she tell you that? How much did you talk? What did you tell her? What did you do this afternoon?”
Daisy stuck her chin out. “We just looked at Prescott. But I can tell. She’s a good person, she’s just so, so lonely.”
Linc leaned forward. “Don’t get caught up in this story. It’s not true, remember?”
“I know,” Daisy said.
He stood up to get ready for bed, and she closed her eyes because he was so near. “I appreciate everything you did today, don’t think I don’t,” he told her. “I know that you were the deciding factor. You got me this job, and I appreciate it.”
How much? she thought, and considered asking him to show it, but only for a second. Then sanity returned, and she said, “My pleasure,” and rolled away from him before she did anything dumb.
Once they were on the plane the next day, they both relaxed. “You did it.” Daisy leaned her head back and sighed. “I can’t believe it. You did it. I’m so proud,” she said, and he felt warm because he had done well, which had happened before, and because somebody was proud of him for it, which hadn’t happened in a long time. She looked at him with pride and affection and friendship, and he was a little sorry that it was all over. They’d reached The End, and they’d both live happily ever after apart, the only way people as different as they were could live happily ever after. Daisy would go back to dressing like a leaky Magic Marker, and he would go to Prescott.
Prescott.
He was really going. Because of Daisy.
“Let me give you something to thank you.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “You can have anything you want.”
Daisy hesitated long enough that he bent to see her face better, and then she turned to him. She pulled her hand from his grasp and tugged the daisy ring off her finger and handed it to him, smiling up at him at the same time, which took some of the sting off the move, although not enough. His hand closed around the ring automatically.
“Just promise me that I’ll never have to see Crawford again,” Daisy said.
“You’ve got it,” Linc said as the sapphire in the ring cut into his palm. “That I can promise.”
FIVE
LINC SPENT THE rest of the spring finishing up loose ends at the university and getting ready to move. He saw Daisy in the apartment foyer and thought about asking her out for pizza or something else mundane that wouldn’t signal “date,” but it seemed better to just keep nodding and moving past her so that he wouldn’t get caught up in the story again. Daisy was a hard habit to kick, he’d discovered, even after only three days. She was sloppy and round and uncontrolled, and she brought warmth and chaos into his life, and he was having a hard time forgetting her. Especially in the middle of the night when he’d remember the motel room. Sometimes the only thing that got him through those middle-of-the-nights was the memory of how awful she could be. She’d brought him more anxiety in the three days he’d spent with her than all the other women he’d ever known put together. But she’d also brought him Prescott. He sent her flowers to thank her before he left. Then he packed and moved to Ohio.
He bought a small Victorian house Chickie found for him on Tacoma Street about a mile from campus. Linc preferred a more modern look to his housing, but this place had been rented to students for forty years and needed a lot of repair, so it was a bargain, or at least as much of a bargain as any house could be in a college town. The structure was solid and the rooms were airy and the holes in the walls could be fixed with spackle and paint. “I can’t thank you enough,” he told Chickie when she’d shown him through it. “You found me a great deal.”
Chickie