Hot Wheels and High Heels (18 page)

Darcy grabbed a towel, wound it around the dye job from hell, and went to the living room, expecting to see the aliens her mother had always believed in making crop circles in the front yard. Instead Lyla held a big, beautiful gold box wrapped with a blue ribbon. Darcy recognized that kind of box. It came from Amaryllis.

“It was just delivered with your name on it,” Lyla said. “What do you suppose is in it?”

Her mother set the box down. Darcy opened it, and she couldn’t believe what she saw.

Clothes. Gorgeous clothes. Shirts and pants and skirts. Everything she pulled out elicited a gasp from her mother, and Darcy gasped a few times herself. Who in the world could have sent her—

Jeremy. He’d done it again. Only this time he’d graduated from coffee to couture, finally stepping up to the plate with something that was not only useful, but
fashionable.
Beautiful, glorious clothes from her favorite store, in just the colors she loved. How had he known?

“There’s no card,” Lyla said. “Who do you suppose all this is from?”

“The only man I know right now who can afford to shop at Amaryllis.”

Her mother’s face went blank for a moment, and then her eyebrows shot up. “Of course! Jeremy Bridges! Oh, my God! This is even better than that coffee he gave you! Do you suppose he’s actually getting serious?”

Darcy wanted to believe that. She wanted to believe Jeremy was putting aside his game playing to pursue an actual relationship. She still remembered the sarcastic lilt in his voice when he refused to give her the receipt for the Starbucks card, but maybe this was his way of making up for that.

And maybe not.

“I don’t trust him,” Darcy said.

“Trust him? Of course you trust him. What’s not to trust about any man who gives you beautiful things like this?” She picked up the sleeve of one of the shirts. “The tags have been removed. I wonder how much he spent?”

Darcy wondered, too. Just how far had he gone this time to rattle her cage? If he’d spent a thousand dollars on coffee . . .

“I’ll get the catalog. We can add it up.” She started to rise, then sat back down again. “Never mind. I left it at the office.”

“Then call the store. You know all the staff there. I
have
to know.”

Darcy found the number and called the store. Betty came on the line, an older woman who’d worked there since Darcy could remember.

“Hi, Betty. It’s Darcy McDaniel.”

“Ms. McDaniel! So nice to hear from you. It’s been far too long since you’ve been in.”

Darcy loved that fawning attitude. Betty knew how to kiss ass with the best of them.

“I was hoping you could tell me something. A gentleman was in there recently to buy me a gift, and I was wondering—”

Wait a minute. This would get her nowhere. Jeremy wouldn’t have come in himself. He would have sent a personal shopper, which would have been a woman, and since dozens of women came in there every day, would Betty even have known . . .

“Oh, yes,” Betty said. “A gentleman certainly was in here last night. I assume you got the delivery today?”

So Jeremy had actually come in there himself? The very thought of that put a smile on Darcy’s face.

“Yes,” Darcy said. “I just received it. Uh . . . Betty? Just between you and me . . .”

“Yes?”

“How much did he spend?”

“Hmm . . . I don’t remember exactly. Let me look.”

A minute later she came back on the phone, her voice low and confidential. “Three hundred and eighty-four dollars.”

Darcy felt a shot of disappointment. He’d spent only three hundred and eighty-four dollars on clothes when he’d gone a full thousand on coffee?

“That’s all?” she said.

“Storewide clearance sale,” Betty added.

Thank God. That explained the pitiful price tag. “Did he say anything about me when he was in there?”

“No, not really. Actually, he didn’t talk much at all. He brought one of our catalogs in, opened it, and pointed to what he wanted.”

Darcy blinked. “What?”

“And he kept saying, ‘No pink. She doesn’t like pink.’ He wouldn’t even consider mauve or rose.”

Darcy froze. It couldn’t be.

For a moment she just stood there, gripping the phone, as her mind circled back to her Wal-Mart shopping excursion. Only two men on earth knew she hated pink. One of them had skipped the country.

The other one was John.

On Monday morning, John arrived at work just after eight o’clock, relieved to see Darcy’s car there. At least she’d shown up today, which meant it was possible she wasn’t going to hate him for the rest of her life.

He went inside the building. She wasn’t at her desk, but he saw a light on in the storeroom and figured she was in there getting supplies or fishing through old records. He went to the coffeepot for a shot of caffeine, then headed to his office. He still didn’t know how she was going to react to everything, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

Don’t say a word if she doesn’t. Just go about your business as usual.

That was hard to do, though, when he was still reeling from his traumatic experience on Friday night. The Galleria was every woman’s dream and every man’s nightmare, one of those malls where everybody dresses up to go shopping and they charge you to breathe the air. Fortunately, there had been a big sale at that ridiculous store Darcy loved, so he’d been able to buy more with less. He’d grabbed that catalog from her desk that he’d seen her browsing through at lunch. Even though at this point in her life it was nothing but a wish book, still she’d circled several items she liked, so those were the ones he’d bought. The whole time his mind had been screaming that it was a waste of money, but he just hadn’t been able to stop himself.

He discovered a woman’s clothing store was like a grocery store, because pink really wasn’t pink. It was
shrimp.
Purple was
eggplant.
Green was
kiwi.
And yellow could either be
banana
or
lemon,
depending on how loud a yellow it was. The saleswoman kept offering him all these choices, and in the end he’d simply told her if it was circled in the catalog, it was a size six, and it wasn’t
shrimp,
to stick it in a shopping bag.

Then he handed the salesclerk his credit card and pretended he really wasn’t spending such an outrageous amount of money. He was a man who was careful about the disposition of every dime he made, but he’d had to cough up nearly four hundred dollars before his conscience had even begun to leave him alone. By the time he left the store, he’d actually broken a sweat. He never spent that much money all in one place unless it was a gun shop, an electronics counter, or a car dealership.

He only hoped she’d see the clothes as the peace offering they were and not flip out and tell him again that she refused to take anything he gave her. He had no idea what he’d do if she did
that
again.

He turned on the light in his office, and the first thing he saw was an envelope in the middle of his desk. Curious, he set down his mug and opened it. It contained cash. A lot of cash. He counted it and got a shock.

Three hundred and eighty-four dollars?

Just then, the door to the storeroom opened and Darcy came out. She was carrying a few office supplies, which she deposited on her desk. Her hair seemed different today. Darker, maybe? Maybe not. Finally he just decided it looked different because she had it in a ponytail instead of down around her shoulders. And her clothes . . .

Wait a minute. This wasn’t what he’d bought for her. Instead, she wore a pair of white pants that fit a little awkwardly and a knit shirt exactly like ones he’d seen recently that were priced two for ten dollars.

Slowly the truth came to him. She wasn’t wearing Donna Whozits or Calvin Whatever.

She was wearing Sam Walton.

She went to the coffeepot to pour herself a cup. He left his office and grabbed a stack of repossession orders from the top of a file cabinet. He mumbled a “good morning,” and she mumbled one back. He pretended to thumb through the stack while she wiped stray drops of water off the table where the coffeepot sat, but soon he couldn’t stand the silence any longer.

“You returned the clothes,” he said.

She paused. “Yes.”

“You didn’t have the receipt.”

“They know me there.”

John nodded. “The shirt you’re wearing now is nice.”

“Thank you. I do love wearing popular styles. As it turns out, one of my mother’s friends has one just like it.”

“And the pants. I see you bypassed the pink ones.”

“When it’s my dime, I can buy whatever I want to.”

Which made him wonder where she’d gotten the money, since she’d returned to him all the money he’d spent. Then he looked down at her left hand.

Her wedding ring was gone.

When he met her eyes again, it was clear she’d seen him staring. She turned away, straightening the coffee and filters and stir sticks for the third time. “It didn’t go with my wardrobe anymore. Nothing’s worse than wearing overstated jewelry with . . .” She stopped and looked down at herself. “Understated clothes.”

What she didn’t mention was that she’d pawned that overstated jewelry to get the money to buy the understated clothes it didn’t go with.

“I thought you hated Wal-Mart,” he said.

“I do. I thought you hated high-priced clothing stores.”

“I do.”

“So why did you go there?” Darcy asked.

“Temporary insanity. Why did you cash it all in for a return trip to Wal-Mart?”

She gave him a chastising look. “John. How else am I supposed to teach you the value of a dollar?”

She turned and walked back to her desk, and John felt something shift inside him, and suddenly he was filled with a new kind of awareness he hadn’t expected.
She’s more than you thought she was. A whole lot more.

“Oh,” she said. “I almost forgot.”

She pulled something from a small sack on her desk and tossed it to him. He caught it on the fly.

A package of weed eater line?

Darcy met his gaze for a moment, cracked a tiny smile, then sat down at her desk to get to work.

John knew the moment she found another rich man, she’d be back to her old habits again, dressing in outrageously priced clothes. But just for now . . .

She would have looked like a million bucks in those clothes from Amaryllis, but somehow, in the clothes from Wal-Mart, she looked like a million and one.

When Darcy had worn expensive clothes and her hair had been just the right color, all John had ever done was grump at her. Now that she was wearing cheap clothes and had hair only Morticia Adams could love, he seemed pleased. She wasn’t sure she understood that completely, but she could tell that her second trip to Wal-Mart had changed the way John looked at her, and she was surprised at how good that made her feel.

Tony showed up about eight-thirty, coasting by with his usual grin and cheery “Good morning.” He went to his desk, took out his phone, and had a hush-hush conversation with a person who was clearly of the opposite sex. Tony was one of those men a woman couldn’t help liking, and Darcy could only imagine how many broken hearts he’d left in his wake.

Amy arrived next and complimented Darcy on her new clothes, because that was what nice women did whether they liked what you were wearing or not. Then her gaze drifted up to Darcy’s hair, and a look of distress came over her face.

“Oh, sweetie,” she whispered. “What happened?”

Darcy closed her eyes. “Is it that obvious? I thought since John and Tony didn’t say anything, maybe it didn’t look so bad.”

“Men are oblivious. Did the color kick in a little too much?”

“A little? I look like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.”

“Did you try to do something about it?”

“I can’t afford to have somebody fix it.”

Amy smiled. “Don’t worry. I know how to fix it.”

Darcy brightened. “You do? How?”

“Last year I dyed my hair auburn. Or, at least, I thought it was going to be auburn. I ended up looking like Raggedy Ann. So I got on the Internet and found some stuff that’ll lift out permanent color. I still have some left.”

“So it really works?”

“Like a charm.”

“Can you bring it in tomorrow?”

“Sweetie, this is a crisis. Come home with me at lunch. We’ll fix it today.”

When noontime came, Darcy and Amy dropped by Taco Hut to pick up some burritos, then went to Amy’s apartment. It was a small one-bedroom, but it was in a nice complex near the mall with a fountain out front, a clubhouse, and a nice swimming pool. A few months ago, Darcy would have thought it was painfully modest. Given where she was living now, it felt like heaven on earth.

True to Amy’s word, the stuff to fix Darcy’s hair worked. After only five minutes, it lifted out most of the color she’d put on, but the gray was still mostly masked. It was still darker than her natural color, but at least she no longer looked like a creature of the night.

“Your hair must pick up color really easily,” Amy told her. “Next time get a lighter shade and don’t leave it on so long.”

Darcy nodded. Lesson learned. Now that she knew of something that would fix any goofs she happened to make, she wasn’t so afraid of doing her hair herself.

With the hair-color crisis averted, they reheated the burritos and sat down to eat. Darcy wouldn’t ever have thought it, but she really enjoyed being with Amy. She was smart and cute and down-to-earth, one of those sunshiny women for whom the glass was always half full. When Darcy thought about how few people in her life fit that description, she realized how much she’d been missing. Carolyn was meek and neurotic, and the rest of the women she knew were either sarcastic or conceited, sometimes both at the same time.

“Work has been interesting today,” Amy said.

“Really? Why?”

“Something’s different between you and John.”

At that out-of-the-blue statement, Darcy’s heart skipped. “What makes you say that?”

“You weren’t sniping at each other this morning.”

“We weren’t? Oh. Well, I’ll have to make a concerted effort to be more sarcastic this afternoon. It is part of my job description.”