Read The Cinderella Deal for Free Online Page B

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