Heiress for Hire (Cuttersville #2)(19)
Author: Erin McCarthy

"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 f**k 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 o**l s*x, 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.

She was just going to go to sleep, and in the morning those pennies would be gone.

Or not.

When Amanda came out of her bedroom in the morning, thinking only of a hot shower before she had to head to Harriet’s at nine, she stepped on a whole pile of pennies.

They stuck to her foot, scattered left and right, and towered so high that Baby had to execute a fence jump to clear the pile.

"Ummm…" This was an interesting development.

One that was too strange and unbelievable to think about for any length of time. Amanda squatted down and started counting.

At six hundred and twelve, she sat back on her butt and looked at the little stacks she had made of ten pennies each row. "Hot damn. I have six dollars and twelve cents."

She was going to take these pennies and buy herself a whopping king-size cup of coffee this morning, and she planned to do it quickly. Before the pennies disappeared the same way they had originated.

Unfortunately, Amanda bought too large of a cup of coffee. She couldn’t get her hand wrapped around the cup with a solid grip, and while offering a magazine to a customer who was so old she was shriveled like a raisin, Amanda dropped the coffee. Right into the woman’s lap.

Slow reflexes, dulled by a century of living, further exasperated the problem, so that the old woman wound up with a huge wet spot across her crotch and an angry red burn on her wrist.

"Oh, I’m so sorry!" Amanda set down her cup on the reception desk and looked around for paper towels or something. Whoops. This might be worse than the whole perm incident of the day before.

The little old lady, who had been sweetly sitting in the first station to wait for her stylist, morphed like Linda Blair in the Exorcist.

"Clumsy idiot! Get me a blow-dryer. I can’t leave the store like this—it looks like my Depends failed." She craned her neck. "Harriet? Harriet! Where is that fat fool?"