Heiress for Hire (Cuttersville #2)(17)
Author: Erin McCarthy

He glanced at Piper. She stood frozen in front of the table, her balding Barbie dangling by one leg. "It’s my mom, Piper. Bet she heard about you and had to see for herself the little girl I told my father I was so excited about."

His mother came into the room like a semi-truck on an empty highway. Piper flinched, and Danny shut off the heat on the stove and moved to her side to reassure her. His mother wasn’t exactly subtle or dainty or soft-spoken. Wilhemina Tucker was descended from strong German peasant stock, and she had made a damn good farmer’s wife for the last thirty years.

Tough, tenacious, tender-hearted. That was his mother.

And now he watched her brusque, stubborn face just crumple. Tears filled her eyes, and Danny hoped like hell he wouldn’t embarrass himself in front of her by getting choked up too.

"Mom, this is Piper Danielle Schwartz, my daughter. Piper, this is Wilhemina Georgette Tucker, my mother."

"You can call me Grandma, sugar." And his mother bent down and enveloped Piper in a hug that could crack her ribs.

Piper didn’t hug back. She just kind of stood there, stiff, biting her lip.

Fortunately, his mother didn’t seem to notice. She stepped back and cupped Piper’s cheeks with her hands. "I’m so glad to meet you."

Piper’s face was enveloped with his mother’s tan, farm-worn hands, her little lips compressed into an hourglass shape. His daughter looked nothing short of terrified.

His mother let go of her but started gushing. "We’re going to have so much fun, you and me. I always wanted a daughter."

"Gee, thanks, Mom." Danny rubbed his chin and went back to the eggs, cracking a second along with the first already in the bowl.

She waved her hand at him in dismissal. "Oh, you know what I mean. I wanted a daughter after you." Bending down, she looked at Piper’s doll. "Well, she’s a sad-looking thing. How about Grandma buys you a new one?"

Danny glanced back and saw Piper shake her head.

"No? Surely you would like a pretty new one with a nice dress and some long hair. And maybe a new hat for you while we’re at it." His mother tried to take off Piper’s hat, and Danny winced. Now he knew that was absolutely the worst thing to try.

He knew his mother was excited, but he thought she was taking the wrong tact. Piper was sensitive, and the only sensitive thing about Willie Tucker was her teeth when she drank ice water.

Piper was gripping her hat and looking terrified.

"Mom, I think she wants to keep her special things with her." Eventually his mother might figure out something was missing under Piper’s hat, but he had promised his daughter he wouldn’t tell anyone, and he meant to kept every promise made.

"Oh. Kind of like that grubby little blanket you had when you were little? You know I just kept cutting bits off the end of that until it was nothing but a square of cotton, and you finally lost it."

"And I’m still traumatized from that." He whisked the eggs and gave his mom a warning look. She was not handling this all that well. He wanted to shove an oven mitt in her mouth to shut her up.

"You going out in the field today?" his mother asked him, giving him a bewildered look that suggested she had no idea why he was wiggling his eyebrows.

"I need to. Got to check the soil in the south field, see if it needs watering."

"I can stay with Piper then. Give us time to get to know each other."

He nodded, thinking that was as good of a solution as he could find for now. He couldn’t take Piper with him, and his mother would take care of her as well as he would.

Danny was dumping the eggs in the frying pan when Piper said, "No!"

Startled, he turned and found that she was right next to him, sliding between him and the stove like a rabbit wiggling under a fence.

"Watch the stove." He stuck his hand behind her head and pulled her toward his chest, thinking he should have used the back burner on the range to start cooking. The coils were so close to her head, it was a good thing she didn’t have hair. It probably would have caught on fire.

Piper looked up at him with big, brown eyes. Doe eyes. Eyes that sucked him in, chewed him up, and spit him out until he felt like oatmeal. Mushy, gushy, sappy, sugary oatmeal.

"Can I stay with you?" she asked in a plaintive whisper.

Danny glanced over his shoulder at his mother, even as he dropped the spatula, turned off the burner, and wrapped his arm around Piper’s shoulder blades. She felt so tiny against him, a paradox of soft and hard, smooth skin and bony angles.

His mom was looking bewildered. And a little overwhelming. Danny tried to see her through a child’s eyes, and decided Willie Tucker could be intimidating. His mother was tall and broad, with big, shellacked hair the color of marigolds. She was wearing plas-tic pink earrings, a white shirt with pink stripes, and pink ankle-length pants. Her shoes were pink. Her lipstick was pink. The purse slung over her arm was shaped like a picnic basket, with a checked cloth liner in—imagine that—pink.

Not to mention that his mother had insulted Piper’s hacked-hair Barbie.

With so much upheaval in her life, Piper was probably just scared again that she would get dumped, left behind, ignored. He had to give her stability, and he couldn’t expect her to stay with someone she had just met and wasn’t comfortable with yet.

"Of course you can stay with me. Why don’t you run along and get dressed while I finish these eggs. Put your old shoes on because we’re going to the fields." He gave her a squeeze then stepped back. "Your jean shorts and T-shirts are in the bag on the chair right there. I’ll cut the tags off after you’re dressed."

Piper gave a last glance at his mother, then ran across the room, grabbed the bag, and headed down the hall.

"You didn’t wash the clothes first?" his mother said, with a horror he just couldn’t share.

"I just bought them last night. There hasn’t been time. And if you’d have seen her other stuff, you’d realize this is the lesser of two evils." Danny turned the burner back on and scrambled the eggs.

"Well, why did you let her run off? I want to see her. She’s my grandbaby. And by the way, didn’t your father ever talk to you about condoms?"

Danny’s head snapped up at her annoyed tone, and he opened his mouth, not sure what was going to come out of it, but certain he wanted to prevent anything else from coming out of hers.

"For God’s sake, Danny."

Too late.

"You got two girls pregnant in the same year. I thought we raised you better than that."

Despite being twenty-six years old, Danny felt a prickling of shame and a bucketful of embarrassment. This was still his mother, no matter that he was grown. And he had gotten two girls pregnant less than a year apart.