Heiress for Hire (38 page)

More yippy poodles was a small price to pay for having the pleasure of Amanda's company. Danny would say yes to just about anything within reason now that she'd agreed to marry him. Become his wife. The thought made him grin all over again. "Sure. And maybe one could be a Labrador while you're at it?"

"I'll think about it," she promised, with a sexy little smile.

"You can go back to Chicago and see your parents whenever you want, you know. We'll make it work." He would do whatever it took to make it work. There was still some worry rattling around in him, that she would miss all the conveniences she was used to, but he had to suppress those insecurities. He'd seen Amanda when she'd first come to Cuttersville. She had been running away from an unhappy life, discontent and hurt, and she had opened up, thrived here on the farm.

She kissed his chin. "Of course we will. I might make a couple trips back a year to see my parents and to do some shopping, but I won't really miss anything. Except for gingerbread lattes, and that's a small price to pay. And then someone's got to take care of those chickens, you know, so it might as well be me."

"You're going to feed the chickens every day?" The thought made him laugh.

"Sure. Not if it's raining or anything like that, but I was thinking someone needs to look out for their interests. I'm going to initiate a chicken coop revitalization project. No hen left behind. That sort of thing. Fair shelter for all farm animals."

After swallowing almost all of the obnoxious laughter that rose up in his chest, he shook his head and grinned at her. Danny hadn't been unhappy, but he had been lonely. Now he had everything he could ever ask for. He clasped his hands around her waist and lifted her a foot off the ground. "Damn, I love you. You're smart, sensitive, and sexy. How'd I get so lucky?"

"Want to get even luckier?" Her breasts pressed against his chest as she traced a line across his lip with her tongue.

Uh, yeah. His body reacted accordingly and he got a massive hard-on. "Everyone's right there in the house… but what'd you have in mind?"

"You've never shown me the barn."

While he was tempted, it was no place for Amanda. "No, Princess, it's dirty and full of cobwebs in there. Just stay for dinner tonight, and after Piper's in bed, we can sneak off to my room." The thought sent his blood racing thick and hot to his groin.

She slid back down to the ground but kept her ankle wrapped around his calf. "We're going to do a lot of sneaking for the next ten years or so, aren't we?"

"Lots of sneaking. Tons of sneaking." Sneaking morning, noon, and night if he had his way. "You know, practice makes perfect."

Kissing the side of his mouth, Amanda sighed. "Well, I'm committed to being perfect."

"You already are." He held her tight, then let her go so they could head into the house. "And you're damn good with a can of hairspray."

"It's a gift," she told him. "And Garnier Fructis hairspray is only like four bucks a bottle yet gives great hold. Good stuff."

Danny fit her hand in his and tugged her toward the back door, grateful for her bravery, relieved neither she nor Piper had been hurt. "I'm proud of you for facing down that asshole."

"So am I, to tell you the truth."

Impulsively, he leaned over and jerked her up into his arms, tossing her a little to get a good grip.

She let out a shriek as her arms flung around his neck. "Not this again." Her lips parted. "You'll turn me on, you know, with all this knight-in-shining-armor crap."

"Good." And he kicked open the door and carried her over the threshold into his kitchen.

"Brady drew this?" Amanda was going to have to have a talk with that kid. He'd sketched her… fat.

"Yeah. I told him how to draw it." Piper bounced on the bed, holding her legs straight out. One of Amanda's suitcases jumped on the bedspread with each bounce.

Giving up the packing, Amanda studied the piece of paper in her hand. It was her with a really freaking round face. And bad hair pulled back in some kind of bun thing. It was a good sketch from an artistic perspective. But from the model's point of view, it sucked. Is this how Piper saw her?

"Why is my mascara running? I always use waterproof."

Piper stopped bouncing and looked at her. "You're not in the picture. It's the Crying Lady. In the mirror. And she's crying."

"Ah, okay." That was a relief.

Amanda dropped the drawing and went back to packing Baby's sweaters in the suitcase. Danny was going to wonder what they were doing up here. He'd hauled about sixteen boxes of her clothes and shoes out to his truck already, and she wasn't even finished packing. Clothes were breeding in her dresser drawers. And when you took seventeen pairs of panties and moved them to a box, suddenly they inflated like water toys.

At this rate, they would have her stuff moved in time for Christmas, not the first of October, which was their goal. Danny wanted everything moved before they got married on Saturday. Which was—woo hoo—only three days away.

Fortunately for her, he had more patience in his left ear than she had in her whole body. He didn't complain, just grunted as he went down the narrow steps with two or three boxes at a time stacked in his arms.

So she didn't have time to worry about the chick in the mirror when she had to finish this packing, so her husband-to-be would see that she really was making an effort. She couldn't get distracted. Not even if the Crying Lady looked remarkably like a pasta-consuming version of herself.

"Hey, Piper, can you help me pack all these shorts and stuff? I can't believe how long this is taking."

"Sure." Piper reached over and started transferring shorts from the drawer to a big box.

"Thanks, cutie. I had no idea I had so much stuff." Nor was she certain exactly how all of it was going to fit into Danny's house. Their house now, as soon as they finished moving in her stuff. But then again, her apartment in Chicago hadn't been that big. Maybe the third bedroom at Danny's would have to be given over to her stuff temporarily until she got it all sorted.

Piper worked industriously, and Amanda paused for a second to watch her. She was thriving. In just the ten weeks since Piper had moved in with Danny, she had gained weight, color in her cheeks, and confidence. Anita only came around once a week or so these days, usually when Piper was worried or scared.

She needed a lot of reassurance, and about every other day she asked what would happen to her if Amanda and Danny got divorced. But she was doing well in school, and she was happy. Even her hair was growing in. She looked like Demi Moore in the movie Ghost, but hell, it was hair, even if it looked a bit military right now.

"Got the kid doing all the work for you, huh?" Danny paused in the doorway, wiping his forehead with his shirt sleeve.

He was so freaking cute, Amanda just wanted to suck him up with a straw. She could not wait until they were married and she could wake up with him every morning. Right now they were having stealth sex, and while it was titillating at times, most days she just wanted to stay the whole night with him.

"She's better at it than me. She gets her work ethic from you and her good looks from me." But she stuck her jewelry box in the suitcase to prove she was trying.

Danny kissed the back of her head as he walked by. "We need to move it along, Princess. We're supposed to be picking your parents up from the airport in three hours."

Her father had been so thrilled with her choice of a husband, strangely enough, that he had insisted on paying for their wedding as the father of the bride, and had even spent a weekend fishing with Danny. She figured if he couldn't bond with her, being friends with Danny was the next best thing. Her father was her father, and he would never change, and him liking Danny was a hell of a lot better than him not liking him. And who could have ever conceived that she would be close with Willie Tucker, yet she was.

While Amanda had decided against a big wedding that would take forever to plan and waste gobs of money, they had settled on getting married in Aruba with family and a few close friends pres-ent. Her parents were flying from Chicago, meeting Danny's family, and then they would all hop a plane to the Caribbean together.

If she ever got all her crap together, that is.

"Alright, alright, alright. Just unload that drawer there while I get the blankets out of the closet." Amanda bent down, her Seven jeans straining from the position.

Danny made a strangled sound. She grinned into the dark closet. That would teach him to hurry her along. She had assigned him one of her lingerie drawers. Right now he was probably pawing through sheer black panties.

"We can't leave without the mirror," Piper said.

"What mirror?" Amanda flung blankets out behind her and reached deep into the closet, making sure she wasn't missing anything. Why the heck had she brought a cashmere throw with her to Cuttersville in July? She tossed it toward the bed.

"The Crying Lady mirror. She wants us to take it down off the wall."

Danny had two pairs of her panties in his hands when she reemerged from the closet. He clung to them as he stared at Piper. "Why?"

"I don't know. She's just really upset. I think we should do what she says."

Sure, so they could be sucked into some kind of paranormal vortex when they lifted that mirror off the wall.

Better let Danny do it. He was strong enough to resist any suck-age that might occur.

Apparently he had different ideas. "I don't know, baby girl, that mirror belongs to the house. We don't want to damage it."

"Show him the picture."

Piper plucked the drawing off the suitcase and held it out to her father. "This is what she looks like. That's the lady I keep seeing in the mirror."

"That's Amanda. A sort of… rounder version."

Another reason to love him. He could tell the difference between her and Fatty Face. Not that she needed any more reasons to love him. He was doing pretty damn good already.

"No, it's not." Piper's voice caught. She sounded really upset and her lip was trembling, her fists screwed up.

Danny caved. "Alright, shh, it's okay. We'll go take a look." He dropped Amanda's underwear in the box.

They went down the hall together, stepping over the pile of pennies. "I hope she stops dropping the pennies after I leave. That would be such a waste."

Danny didn't say anything, obviously thinking that he was just indulging the two nutty females in his life. She didn't know how he explained the pennies, but he seemed to be of a mind that if you ignored something, than eventually it would go away.

Maybe he was right. But in the meantime, Piper was stressing out.

"Just lift it," she told her father, running her fingers over the glass.

He did, and it came off easily enough. When he set it on the floor, Amanda gasped. There was a cubby in the wall behind the mirror. And it was filled with papers and a few sacks.

"What's all this?" Danny took the papers and started rifling through them. "Old letters."

"They say he didn't do it," Piper said, biting her bottom lip. "She wants everyone to know he didn't do it."

Suddenly Amanda knew who she meant. The Crying Lady's dishonest husband. The one everyone had thought had been a murderer and a thief. "Let me see, Danny."

"You can't read them. They're in German."

But she understood. The woman cried because no one had believed that she and her husband truly loved each other. That he wasn't a criminal.