Free The Cinderella Deal by Jennifer Crusie

from the history department. I love your dress. Really.” She smiled up at Daisy and managed to make it seem like she was smiling down. “And you must be so proud of Lincoln. His paper was brilliant. What do you think of his theory of the impact of the ring on social barriers?”
    “I’m all for it,” Daisy said, and Caroline’s smile widened.
    “Ah, you’re not a historian,” Caroline said. “Forgive me.”
    “You bet,” Daisy said, but she thought,
I don’t like you.
She liked Caroline even less when she slithered over to Linc and began to smile up at him. Really up at him, because she was little. And blond. Like Julia. And probably like all of Linc’s other women. Not that it mattered. Linc smiled back, tall, dark, and gorgeous, looking down at tiny little Caroline.
    Daisy gritted her teeth. There was no reason to be jealous. This was all just a story, and it wasn’t even her story. No matter how much she loved Prescott and liked the people she met and wanted to save Chickie, it wasn’t true. She and Linc were only pretending to be engaged.
    But he wasn’t pretending very well, the jerk.
    Daisy decided to do the adult thing and ignore them while she concentrated on what Linc was paying her a thousand dollars to do. So she talked with Crawford, keeping out of range of his hands. She talked with Evan, radiating cheer to counteract his gloom. She talked with Lacey, sharing stories about Liz and Annie when she found out that Lacey loved animals too. She talked with Crawford again, because when she turned around he was there. She talked with Booker, sharing his admiration for Linc. She talked with someone from the English department who’d come for the drinks, sharing his annoyance that the mushroom canapes were gone. She talked with Crawford, because when she turned around he was there again. Crawford was growing from an annoyance to a real problem. She looked around for Linc to rescue her, but he was gone, and Daisy felt her temper rise.
    If he’s with that skinny midget Caroline
, she thought,
I’m going to take steps
.
     
    Linc was seriously confused.
    On the one hand, he had Prescott for sure; Crawford had taken him aside when they arrived at the party and together with Booker had made him the formal offer which Linc had accepted so promptly that they had all beamed.
    Then things began to get weird. It couldn’t be the story, he told himself. After all, it was his story. No, it was more like slipping reality. There was Caroline Honeycutt, for example, logical, intelligent, and more than interested in him, exactly his kind of woman. And then there was Daisy, intuitive and unpredictable, scowling at him and charming everybody else, exactly not his kind of woman. So it was disconcerting that his eyes kept going back to Daisy instead of staying on Caroline.
It was
    seeing her in that slip,
he told himself. He’d stick close to Caroline, and he’d remember that he liked thin, lithe women dressed in designer suits and black lingerie, not round, tall women dressed in secondhand clothes and white slips with pink flowers, for God’s sake, and then he wouldn’t fall into the story and think about taking Daisy back to the motel and consummating his new job with his wife-to-be-who-wasn’t.
    Make a note not to tell any more stories
, he told himself, and when Caroline joined him, he threw all his attention onto her and reality.
     
    By midnight Daisy felt that if she flashed her smile one more time, her eyeballs would roll out and her cheeks would split. And it didn’t help that every time she turned around, Linc was with Caroline.
    “Linc.” She walked up beside him, smiling.
    He was talking with Caroline again and he ignored her.
    “Linc?” She tugged on his sleeve, still smiling.
    Caroline looked up at her and smiled patronizingly. “You are just too darling for words.”
    Daisy narrowed her eyes. “Don’t be bitchy, dear, it ages you.”
    Linc took her arm and steered her away from a startled