The Cinderella Deal - Jennifer Crusie [56]
“You deserved more,” Gertrude insisted, her eyes bright with tears.
He ran his hand through his hair, unsure of what to say next. “I’m just glad you didn’t die.” He stopped when he realized that was true. And he didn’t want her alone and cold either. “Listen, I don’t like this stuff about you being lonely. Why don’t you move down here? We’ll take care of you.”
She cried even harder, and he couldn’t understand why, and he sat frozen until Daisy walked in and took the Bible out of his hands.
“Go away,” she said. “Crying is women’s stuff.” When he didn’t move she looked at him more closely and said, “Breathe, Blaise,” and he sucked in a deep breath. “Now go away.”
He stood up and she took his place on the bed. She pulled out a tissue and gently blotted Gertrude’s tears away. “I know he’s awful,” she teased, “but you shouldn’t cry like this. You need all the liquid you’ve got; the doctor said so.”
Gertrude kept crying silently, the tears sliding down her cheeks faster now, and Linc felt like hell.
“What did you say?” Daisy asked Linc, but she wasn’t accusing him, thank God. “What were you talking about?”
“My dad.” Linc took another deliberate breath. “And I told her I thought she should move down here so we could take care of her.”
He watched Daisy’s eyebrows go up in surprise, and then she said, “Of course. That’s a good idea. Go away now. Make some tea.”
He didn’t understand, but he went downstairs and made tea for all of them and found cookies that Daisy had made that day, and when he went back upstairs half an hour later, he met her coming out of her room.
“She’s sleeping.” She put her hand on his cheek. “You poor baby. Are you all right?”
Linc slumped against the wall. “She’s never said things like that before.”
She let her hand fall from his cheek to his shoulder, and he missed the comfort of her palm on his face. “She’s sick,” Daisy told him. “It makes people feel vulnerable. They say things they keep hidden when they’re feeling strong. Let’s have the tea downstairs.” She took the tray from him and led him back downstairs, and he watched her and remembered his mother’s loneliness, and thought, What am I going to do when she leaves? The thought was so bleak that he even drank tea with her although he hated the stuff.
Linc’s mother got steadily stronger and never referred to that evening again. But they finished Job, and Linc felt as though a knotted place inside had been freed. It shouldn’t matter now, after all these years, that his mother loved him, had loved him then, and was sorry that she hadn’t loved him more, but it did. For the first time he saw her as a real person with regrets instead of just a demanding shadow in his life, and when he let himself care about her, the world around him became an easier place.
The last thing she said to him before she left at the end of the week was “Take care of Daisy. She is so good for you.”
“I will.” He kissed her good-bye gently. “Take care of yourself. If you feel sick again, we’ll come up and get you. Are you sure you don’t want to move down here?”
“I am sure.” She put her hand on his cheek as she must have seen Daisy do half a dozen times that week. Another surprise. “You must take care of yourself too. You are very pale.”
“I’m always pale.” He kissed her cheek. “Be careful on the drive home.”
Daisy heaved a sigh of relief when Gertrude was gone. She liked her, but sleeping with Linc for a week had been too difficult. It wasn’t just that he had a nice, large, hard body, the kind of body a woman could hold on to during great, cataclysmic sex. She’d never actually had great, cataclysmic sex, but she was sure that was what she’d have with Linc. No, it wasn’t just his body, it was more that he was Linc, stubborn, brilliant, kind, rude, fascinating Linc, who scratched Jupiter’s tummy while he watched the game on TV and crooned dumb dog songs to him during the commercials. She’d heard him once singing, “Daisy Blaise had a real dumb dog, and Jupiter was his name/Oh,