“I’ll bet.” He was beginning to see where her confrontational attitude came from. “Any college?”
“A small liberal arts school. I had a full scholarship, but I quit at the beginning of my junior year. Still, it’s the longest I spent in one place.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Wanderlust. I was born to roam, babe.”
He doubted that. The Beav wasn’t a natural hard-ass. Raised differently, she would have been married by now, probably teaching kindergarten with a couple kids of her own.
He tossed a twenty on the table, and when he didn’t wait for change, she reacted with predictable outrage. “Two cups of coffee, a doughnut, and one uneaten muffin!”
“Get over it.”
She snatched up his muffin. As they headed across the parking lot, he studied the drawings she’d done of him and realized he’d gotten the best end of their deal. For the price of a couple of meals and a night’s lodging, he’d received some food for thought, and how often did that happen?
As the day advanced, Dean noticed the Beav growing more fidgety. When he stopped for gas, she took off for the restroom and left her grungy black canvas purse behind. He capped off the tank, thought about it for half a second, then went on an exploratory mission. Ignoring her cell phone and a couple of sketch pads, he pulled out her wallet. It contained an Arizona driver’s license—she really was thirty—library cards from Seattle and San Francisco, an ATM card, eighteen dollars in cash, and a photograph of a delicate-looking middle-aged woman standing with some street kids in front of a burned-out building. Although the woman’s hair was pale, she had the Beav’s same small, sharp features. This had to be Virginia Bailey. He dug deeper in her purse and unearthed both a checkbook and a savings account passbook issued by a Dallas bank. Fourteen hundred dollars in the first and a lot more in the second. He frowned. The Beav had a nice nest egg, so why was she acting as though she was broke?
She returned to the car. He put everything back in her purse, closed it, and handed it over. “I was looking for breath mints.”
“In my wallet?”
“Why would you have breath mints in your wallet?”
“You were snooping in my purse!” Her expression indicated that snooping in general didn’t bother her, only when it was directed against her. A pointed reminder to keep his own wallet close to his body. “Prada makes purses,” he said as he pulled away from the gas station and headed back to the interstate. “Gucci makes purses. That thing looks like it came with a set of socket wrenches and a girly calendar.”
She bristled with indignation. “I can’t believe you snooped.”
“I can’t believe you hit me up for a hotel room last night. You’re not exactly destitute.”
He was greeted with silence. She turned to stare out the window. Her small stature, those narrow shoulders, the delicate elbows emerging from beneath the sleeves of her ridiculously oversize black T-shirt—all those signs of fragility should have aroused his protective instincts. They didn’t.
“Someone emptied out my bank accounts three days ago,” she said flatly. “I’m temporarily broke.”
“Let me guess. Monty the snake.”
She tugged absentmindedly on her ear. “Yeah, that’s right. Monty the snake.”
She was lying. She hadn’t said a word about bank accounts when she’d launched her assault against Monty yesterday. But her dismal expression testified that someone had robbed her. The Beav needed more than a ride. She needed money.
He prided himself on being the most generous guy in the world. He treated the women he dated like queens and sent lavish presents when the relationships ended. He’d never two-timed, and he was a damned unselfish lover. But the way Blue kept resisting him tempered his natural inclination to open his wallet. He took in her disheveled hair and sorry excuse for an outfit. She wasn’t even close to being a knockout, and under ordinary circumstances, he’d never have noticed her. But last night, she’d held up a big red stop sign, and the game was on.
“So what are you going to do?” he asked.
“Well…” She nibbled at her bottom lip. “I don’t actually know anyone in Kansas City, but I have an old college roommate who lives in Nashville. Since you’re going right through there…”
“You want a ride to Nashville?” He made it sound like the moon.
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
He didn’t mind at all. “I don’t know. Nashville’s a long way off, and I’d have to pay for all your meals plus another hotel room. Unless…”
“I’m not sleeping with you!”
He gave her a lazy smile. “Is sex all you think about? I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but, frankly, it makes you seem a little desperate.”
It was sucker’s bait, and she refused to bite. Instead, she slammed on a pair of cheap aviator sunglasses that made her look like Bo Peep about to take command of an F-18. “Just drive and look gorgeous,” she said. “No need to tax your brain by talking.”
She had more nerve than any woman he’d ever met.
“The thing is, Blue, I’m not only a pretty face, I’m also a businessman, which means I expect a return on my investment.” He should feel as smarmy as he sounded, but he was enjoying himself too much.
“You’re getting an original Blue Bailey portrait,” she said. “You’re also getting a security guard for your car and a bodyguard to hold off your fans. Honestly, I should charge you. I think I will. Two hundred dollars between here and Nashville.”
Before he could tell her what he thought of that idea, Safe Net interrupted.
“Hi, Boo, it’s Steph.”
Blue leaned toward the speaker. “Boo, you devil. What did you do with my panties?”
A long silence followed. He glowered at her. “I can’t talk now, Steph. I’m listening to an audiobook, and somebody’s about to get stabbed to death.”
The Beav pulled the aviators down on her nose as he disconnected and peered at him over the top. “Sorry. I was bored.”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. She was at his mercy, but she refused to give an inch. Intriguing.
He turned up the radio and helped out the Gin Blossoms with a damn good drum fill on the steering wheel. Blue, however, stayed lost in her own world. She didn’t even comment when he flipped the station after Jack Patriot came on again with “Why Not Smile?”
Blue barely heard the radio playing in the background. She was so far out of her element with Dean Robillard that he might have been from a different universe. The trick was not letting him realize she knew it. She wondered if he’d bought into her lie about Monty and the bank accounts. He didn’t give much away, so it was hard to tell, but she couldn’t bear having him know her own mother was the villain.
Virginia was Blue’s only relative, so it had been natural for her to be the cosigner on all Blue’s accounts. Her mother was the last person to steal from anyone. Virginia happily bought her clothes at Salvation Army thrift stores and slept on friends’ couches when she was in the States. Only a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions could have made her take Blue’s money.
Blue had discovered the theft on Friday, three days ago, when she’d tried to use her ATM card. Virginia had left a message on her cell.
“I only have a few minutes, sweetheart. I got into your bank accounts today. I’ll write as soon as I can to explain everything.” Her mother rarely lost control, but Virginia’s soft, sweet voice had broken. “Forgive me, my love. I’m in Colombia. A group of girls I’ve been working with was kidnapped yesterday by one of those armed bands of marauders. They’ll be…raped, forced to become killers themselves. I—I can’t let that happen. I can buy their freedom with your money. I know you’ll see this as an unforgivable breach of trust, my darling, but you’re strong and others aren’t. Please forgive me and—and remember how much I love you.”
Blue stared blindly at the flat Kansas landscape. She hadn’t felt so helpless since she was a kid. The nest egg that had given her the only secur
ity she’d ever known had become ransom money. How did she start over with only eighteen dollars? That wouldn’t even pay for new advertising flyers. She’d feel marginally better if she could call Virginia and scream at her, but her mother didn’t own a phone. If she needed one, she simply borrowed.
“You’re strong and others aren’t.” Blue had grown up hearing those words. “You don’t have to live in fear. You can make your own way. You don’t need to worry about soldiers breaking into your house and dragging you off to prison.”
Blue also didn’t have to worry about soldiers doing much worse.
She tried never to think about what her mother had once endured in a Central American prison. Her sweet, kind mother had been a victim of the unspeakable, yet she’d refused to hold on to hatred. Every night she prayed for the souls of the men who had raped her.
Blue gazed across the passenger seat toward Dean Robillard, a man who took being irresistible for granted. She needed him right now, and maybe the fact that she hadn’t fallen at his feet gave her a weapon, although admittedly a fragile one. All she had to do was keep him interested, and herself fully clothed, until they got to Nashville.
At an early evening rest stop just west of St. Louis, Dean watched Blue standing by a picnic table with her cell. She’d told him she was calling her old roommate in Nashville to make arrangements for a place to meet tomorrow, but she’d just kicked a charcoal grill and slammed her phone back into her purse. His spirits rose. The game wasn’t over after all.
A few hours earlier he’d made the mistake of taking a call from Ronde Frazier, an old teammate who’d retired to St. Louis. Ronde had insisted they get together that night, along with a couple other players in the area. Since Ronde had protected Dean’s ass for five seasons, he couldn’t beg off, even though it screwed up his plans for a night with Blue. But it didn’t look as though things were working out the way she wanted. He took in her disgruntled expression and watched her limp back toward him. “Problem?” he said.
“No. No problem.” She reached for the door handle then dropped her arm. “Well, maybe, a small one. Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Like you’ve been doing such a good job of handling things so far?”
“You could be just a little supportive.” She jerked open the door and glared at him over the roof of the car. “Her phone’s been disconnected. Apparently, she moved without letting me know.”
Life had just handed him a frosty mug of cold beer. Surprising how satisfying it was to have a woman like Blue Bailey at his mercy. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said with all kinds of sincerity. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’ll come up with something.”
As he pulled back out on the interstate, he decided it was too bad Mrs. O’Hara didn’t believe in answering her phone or he could have told her that he was on his way to the farm…and bringing along his first overnight guest.
“I’ve been considering your current difficulties, Blue.” He shot past a red convertible. “Here’s what I’m going to suggest…”
Chapter Four
April Robillard closed out her e-mail. What would Dean say if he knew the real identity of his housekeeper? She couldn’t bear thinking about it.
“You want the stove hooked up. Right, Susan?”
No, dude, let’s pop a geranium in it and make a planter. “Yes, hook it up as soon as you can.”
She stepped over the shredded remnants of the dancing copper kettle wallpaper the painters had stripped from the kitchen walls. Cody, who was younger than her son, wasn’t the only workman who invented excuses to talk to her. She might be fifty-two years old, but the boys didn’t know that, and they kept swarming. It was as if they could still smell sex on her. Poor babies. She no longer gave away her goodies so easily.
She grabbed her iPod so she could drown out the noise with some vintage rock, but before she stuck in the earpieces, Sam, the head carpenter, poked his head through the kitchen door. “Susan, check out the upstairs bathrooms. I want to make sure you’re okay with the exhaust fans.”
She’d checked out the exhaust fans earlier that morning with him, but she followed him into the hallway, maneuvering around a compressor and a pile of drop cloths to get there. The house had been built in the early nineteen hundreds and rehabbed during the seventies, when the plumbing and electrical had been updated and air-conditioning installed. Unfortunately, that modernization had also included avocado green bath and kitchen decor, cheap paneling, and gold vinyl floors grown dingy and cracked from use. For the past two months, she’d dedicated herself to erasing those mistakes and restoring the place to what it should be, a traditional farmhouse, luxuriously updated.
The early afternoon sunshine streaming through the new sidelights caught floating dust particles, but the worst of the construction mess was over. Her sandals with their jeweled T-straps clicked on the hallway’s hardwood floor. The bangles on her wrists jingled. Even amid all the dirt and disorder, she dressed to please herself.
A dining room that had once been a parlor opened off to her right, and a newly enlarged living area, part of a later addition, off to her left. The frame and stone house had been built in the Federal style, but the various additions had turned it into a hodgepodge, and she’d knocked out walls to make the space more livable.
“If you take long showers, you want a good exhaust fan to keep the steam from building up,” Sam said.
Dean liked his showers long and hot. She remembered that much from his teenage years, but for all she knew, he could have become one of those men who took short showers and dressed in five minutes. Painful to know so little about your only child, although she should be used to it by now.
Several hours later April managed to slip away from all the noise. As she stepped out the side door, she drew in the scent of the late May afternoon. The distant whiff of manure from a neighboring farm drifted her way, along with the fragrance of the honeysuckle growing in a happy ramble around the farmhouse’s stone foundation. It fought for space with overgrown day lilies, floppy peony bushes, and a leggy tangle of hearty shrub rose planted by farm wives too busy growing the pole beans and corn that would carry their families through the winter to fuss with demanding ornamentals.
She stopped for a moment to survey the weed-choked garden laid out decades earlier in the no-nonsense square common to rural households. Just beyond it a newly poured concrete slab extended from the back of the house, where the carpenters would soon begin erecting the screen porch. In the far corner, she’d etched her initials A.R. in tiny letters, so she could leave something permanent behind. One of the painters working upstairs gazed down at her from the window. She pushed a blade of long blond hair away from her face and hurried past the old iron pump before someone tried to stop her with more unnecessary questions.
The former Callaway farm sat in a gentle valley surrounded by rolling hills. It had once been a prosperous horse farm, but now the only animals roaming its seventy-five acres were deer, squirrel, raccoon, and coyote. The property—pasture, paddock, and woods—also held a barn, a dilapidated tenant cottage, and a secluded, spring-fed pond. An old grape arbor, overgrown like everything else, sat at the end of a broken flagstone path. The weathered wooden bench nearby suggested Wilma Callaway, the farm’s last occupant, might have come out here when her work was done. Wilma had died last year at ninety-one. Dean had bought the farm from a distant relative.
April kept tabs on her son through an elaborate network of connections. That’s how she’d learned that he intended to hire someone to supervise rehabbing the house. Right away, she’d known what she had to do. After all these years, she would finally make a home for her son. Leaving her work behind in L.A. had been complicated, but getting the job here had been surprisingly easy. She’d manufactured some references, bought a skirt and sweater at Talbots, found a clip-on headband to pull her long, choppy hair back from her face, and invented a story that explained her presence in East Tennessee. Dean’s real estate agent had hire
d her ten minutes into the interview.
April had a love-hate relationship with the conservative woman she’d created to keep her identity anonymous. She imagined Susan O’Hara as a widow who was now on her own. Poor, but valiant, Susan had no marketable skills beyond the ones she’d gained raising a family, which included handling household accounts, teaching Sunday school, and helping her beloved, deceased husband rehab houses.
Susan’s conservative taste in clothes, however, had to go. On April’s first day in Garrison, she’d declared the widow a new woman and reverted to her own wardrobe. April loved mixing vintage with cutting-edge fashion, matching designer pieces with thrift shop finds. Last week she’d gone into town wearing a Gaultier bustier with Banana Republic chinos. Today, she’d dressed down in a reconstructed dark brown Janis Joplin T-shirt, ginger-colored cropped pants, and her bijou jeweled sandals.
She took the path that led into the woods. White violets were beginning to bloom, along with Queen Anne’s lace. Before long, she could see the sun-dappled surface of the pond through a ring of mountain laurel and flame azalea. She found her favorite place on the bank and kicked off her sandals. On the other side of the pond, just out of sight, was the ramshackle tenant’s cottage where she’d taken up residence.
She pulled her knees to her chest. Sooner or later, Dean was going to uncover her deception, and that would be the end of it. He wouldn’t scream at her. Screaming wasn’t his way. But his unspoken contempt was more cutting than angry shouts or vicious words. If only she could finish his house before he saw through her charade. Maybe once he moved in he’d feel at least a little of what she wanted to leave behind—her love and regret.
Unfortunately, Dean wasn’t a big believer in redemption. She’d cleaned up her act over ten years ago, but his scars ran too deep to forgive. Scars she’d put there. April Robillard, the queen of the groupies…The girl who knew all about having fun, but nothing about being a mother.
Natural Born Charmer Page 6