Heiress for Hire (10 page)

He spoke to the stove. "Mom, can we just not worry about that at this point? It's sort of irrelevant."

About the only thing that might be relevant was the knowledge that he had aggressive sperm, and that when women tell you they're on the pill, an extra measure of security should still be taken. Of course, that would only be necessary if he were having sex, which he wasn't.

He'd only had sex twice since his divorce, and both times he'd walked away thinking that getting naked and joining bodies with a woman he didn't love was a rather awkward experience.

Not that he wanted to share any of that with his mother.

"Of course it's relevant."

Uh-oh. His mother's finger had come out and was shaking at him. "You need to take responsibility for your actions. You need to be careful. I don't want any son of mine shooting sperm left and right like he's using the seed spreader in the fields."

Oh, God, there was an image. "Mom, I'm a grown man now and know all about responsibility. I was just a kid then."

She sniffed. "You weren't that much of a kid". You were having sex, weren't ya?"

He figured there was about no way to win this argument. "Can you keep it down, please? Piper will be back any second now."

His mother had already scared Piper; he didn't want her mentally scarred, too. At least not anymore than she already was.

With a sigh, he tipped the pan to slide the eggs to a plate. They plopped in a heap on the hard, very breakable white plate, and he wondered if Piper was too young for a plate that heavy. There was a whole lot he didn't know about kids.

His mother took the frying pan away from him and dropped it in the sink, blasting it with cold water from the faucet. She pursed her lips. She frowned. She took a deep breath. Put her hand on her hip. "I'll send your father over to help you out for the next few days. Then you're going to have to get some kind of child care, or leave her with me."

He nodded. "Thanks. And I think in a few days Piper will warm up to you. She's just dealing with a lot all at once."

She reached for him, cupped his cheek and gave it a pat, even though she had to reach up to do it. "Danny, you're a good boy. Always have been. I'm proud of the way you're handling this."

That meant a lot to him. He was feeling a bit overwhelmed and a lot unsure of himself. He needed his parents on his side. He was about to say thank you, tell her he loved her, when she spoke again.

"But whatever you do, please be careful from here on out." She clicked open her purse and pulled out a big box of condoms. A thirty-six pack, with spermicide.

While he stood frozen in horror, she put them in his hand. "I'm begging you not to get the blonde pregnant."

Feeling dirty even holding condoms in his hand in his mother's presence, Danny tossed them in the closest kitchen drawer and rubbed his jaw. "What blonde?" He couldn't even imagine who his mother thought he was sleeping with. And for the record, he was old enough to know to buy condoms should the situation ever arise.

"Boston's friend. Amanda. Please be careful around her."

Amanda? His mother thought he was having sex with Amanda? What the hell had he done to make her think that?

He did want to have sex with Amanda. Real bad. In an unex-plainable, lust-driven way. But his mother couldn't know that, and Amanda certainly didn't know that. He hoped. And he wasn't going to act on it.

Unless she wanted him to.

No, damn it, he wasn't going to act on it. He had Piper to think about and a whole heap of troubles. Amanda was more than a heap of trouble. She was the Titanic of troubles.

"Mom, trust me. I am not going to get Amanda pregnant." The very thought made him break into a cold sweat. Good God, he couldn't even imagine blending genes with Amanda. It would be like breeding a poodle and a Labrador, a mixed breed nature had never intended. They'd wind up with a Labradoodle.

"Umm-hmm." His mother pursed her lips and raised an eyebrow. "I bet that's exactly what you told Shelby and Nina Schwartz. Right before you knocked them up."

Amanda was in a mood.

It had been an entire week since her father had cut her off, and things weren't going quite according to plan.

She punched her pillow and rolled to the left one more time. She was turning and jerking in bed so much she had probably lost five pounds. Which normally would be a cause for celebration. Frankly, right now she needed to maintain her fat stores.

Fifty bucks hadn't bought her a whole hell of a lot of groceries, and she was starving. In agony. Her stomach growled around the clock, and she spent all her time focused on when she could reasonably eat again without depleting her meager supplies. She ate a lot of cereal. She chewed a lot of celery. And her only source of protein was licking peanut butter off a spoon at three o'clock every day.

Samson wouldn't hire her, tight-fisted bastards that they were. They claimed there were no positions available, but she suspected her father had given instructions not to help her.

Finally, yesterday she had managed to wrangle a job at Hair by Harriet as a receptionist, and it had gone reasonably well if you didn't count that little incident over Mrs. Bitterman's perm.

Amanda had tried to keep her mouth shut, honestly she had, but perms were so nineteen-eighty-seven that she had suggested Mrs. B might want some color instead and a kicky little haircut. The next thing she knew, the old lady was leaving in a huff and Harriet wasn't Happy Harriet.

But she hadn't fired her, so Amanda took that as a vote of confidence. Even if she made it through another day, and another, answering the phone and booking appointments, Harriet said she wouldn't get paid for another two weeks. That just wasn't physically possible since she had to eat something.

Deprivation didn't suit her.

Neither did lack of sleep, and if that chick in the mirror didn't stop crying all night every night, she was going to find a baseball bat and send it right through the glass.

Loony Lady was at it again tonight.

"That's it." Amanda sat up, her monogrammed tank top and shorty shorts both riding up. The shirt had a large hot pink A on the left side, and the shorts spelled out AMANDA across her ass, which struck her as extraordinarily stupid. Anyone seeing her from behind while she was in her pajamas damn well better remember her name.

Baby yipped to be let down off the bed, so Amanda scooped her up. "We're telling this ghost-bitch from hell to do her crying during daylight hours. That as humans, we still require sleep."

Tossing her hair over her shoulder, she stomped across the wood floor, catching a blast from the floor fan on her way past. Baby sneezed on her arm.

"Lovely." She wiped her now-damp skin on her shorts and headed toward the back bedroom, where the wailing and moaning had been occurring on an extremely regular basis since that first night she'd heard it.

As usual, there was nothing in the mirror but a cloudy film in front of her own image. But that noise was coming from somewhere, and Amanda figured Miss Maudlin could use a little pep talk.

"Listen, babe, I understand that your husband deceived you, murdered, stole, and yada, yada, yada. But I should think after a hundred years you'd be over it. He's not coming back, and if he did, you shouldn't even consider taking him back. Have some self-respect. Have some dignity."

Amanda realized she was talking a little loud with excessive hand gestures, but of course she was reminded of that dickhead Logan, who had been quite the liar himself. It still rankled that she had let down her guard, that she had retreated into the naivete of her teen years and blithely trusted him and his feelings.

He had adored her, she had thought, and she had been quite smug and happy in that knowledge. She had even allowed herself to think that maybe, just maybe, there could be a husband and happiness in her future. That she could find some sort of purpose in loving him.

Then she had heard him on the phone, obviously talking to a woman who wasn't a relative or a coworker. The "I can't wait to see you so I can fuck you again" had been something of a dead giveaway.

But worse than that, truly, was that he had then critiqued her, Amanda. And she hadn't scored well according to him. On the sex-ual SATs she couldn't even get into community college with that pitiful showing. Logan had said she gave lousy oral sex, was too flat-chested, had an annoying habit of raking her nails down his back, and was only tolerable because of the money he expected to siphon off during their relationship.

It had been brutal. Humiliating. And it left her questioning her abilities to read people and doubting if she could ever fully trust someone again.

One thing she knew without a doubt.

Never again would her attention, focus, future be determined by a man, her father or otherwise.

She was Amanda Margaret Delmar—hear her roar, damn it.

The thought of Logan and his deception made her physically ill. Or that could be her empty stomach rebelling. But either way, she forced herself to lower her voice, relax her shoulders.

"Listen to me. Do you think your husband is crying, wherever he is? He probably spent all that money, living it up, and didn't give you two thoughts. Just like my ex-boyfriend isn't giving me two thoughts. And my father hasn't even bothered to call and see if I'm alive or dead."

Stroking Baby's trembling body, she thought the crying softened a little, but she couldn't really tell. "Now I've got to go to sleep, and I'm asking you to please keep it down. I have no money. None. I'm penniless. I need this job to buy food before I start to look like a Survivor cast-off."

The pitiful wailing cut off, like the stop button on the CD player had been pressed.

"Thank you." Amanda turned with a yawn and started to count shoes in her head to relax herself. Sheep were so toddler. She got to a sunshine yellow pair by Bebe when something passed in front of her in a blur and dropped onto the floor in the hallway.

"What the hell now? If that was a spider, Baby, I expect you to eat it. I can't handle spiders at midnight when I'm starving and broke." She had her limits, and she had just about reached them.

But it wasn't a spider. It was a penny. A shiny, coppery penny, looking never used and stamped with the date nineteen ninety-seven on it.

"Okay. Where did this come from?" Twirling it in her fingers, she looked around. It could have fallen off the doorframe to the extra bedroom she wasn't using, but it wasn't dusty. Nor could she imagine why someone would put a penny on a doorframe, but it seemed like the only explanation, and there was no understanding some people's actions.

Another penny blurred past her as it fell to the floor. Hello. Where had that one come from? "Getting freaked out here."

Baby was tense, her body taut and poised to attack.

Amanda took a glance up, and watched in utter amazement as another penny fell out of the ceiling, dropped all the way to the floor, then rolled to a stop by the bathroom door. She rubbed her eyes, squinted a bit. Maybe she was hallucinating, going into insulin shock from not drinking coffee or eating sugary desserts for the last week.

Because she could swear that penny had dropped right out of the plaster ceiling.

The next one hit her in the eye.

It was very real, and it had very much fallen out of nothing.

"Okay, time for bed." Amanda took one last glance at the three pennies resting on the floor, and dropped the one in her hand to the floor. She padded toward her bedroom.

She hoped her father was happy. She had gone insane.

Next she'd be wearing her thong on the outside of her dress and talking to pigeons.