Natural Born Charmer (6 page)

He blinked, more than a little stunned. She couldn’t blame him. He’d undoubtedly used that “It’s not you. It’s me” line a thousand times himself, and it must be disconcerting to have it thrown back in his face.

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“The unvarnished truth is that I’m more comfortable with losers like Monty, not that I intend to make that mistake again. If I went to bed with you—and I’ve thought long and hard about this—”

“We only met eight hours ago.”

“I have no boobs, and I’m not pretty. I’d know you were just using me because I’m all that’s available, which would make me feel like crap, which would be the start of another one of my downhill spirals, and frankly, I’ve spent enough time in mental institutions.”

His smile had an edge of calculation. “Anything else?”

She gathered up her sketch pad, along with the beer. “Bottom line, you’re a man who lives to be adored, and I don’t do adoration.”

“Who says you’re not pretty?”

“Oh, it doesn’t bother me. I have so much character that adding beauty to the mix would be greedy. Honestly, until tonight, it hasn’t been an issue. Well, except for Jason Stanhope, but that was seventh grade.”

“I see.” He continued to look amused.

As casually as possible, she made her way to the connecting door and opened it. “You should feel like you’ve dodged a bullet.”

“What I mainly feel is horny.”

“Which is why hotel rooms offer porn.” She quickly closed the door and drew her first clean breath. The trick to staying half a step in front of Dean Robillard was to keep him off balance, but whether she could manage that as far as Kansas City was as problematic as what she’d do once she got there.

The Beav must have stayed up late because she had the drawing ready the next morning. She waited till they’d stopped for a break at a central Kansas truck stop before she set it in front of him. Dean stared down at the finished product. No wonder she was broke.

The Beav suppressed a yawn. “If I’d had more time, I could have done it in pastels.”

Considering how much damage she’d performed with her pencil, it was probably just as well. She’d drawn his face, all right, but with the features seriously out of whack: eyes too close together, his hair
line set back a good two inches, and a couple of extra pounds, giving him jowls. Most damaging, she’d reduced the size of his nose just enough to make it look squashed on his face. He was seldom at a loss for words, but the image she’d drawn left him speechless.

She took a bite of her chocolate glazed doughnut. “Fascinating, isn’t it, how easily it could all have gone wrong for you?”

That’s when he realized she’d done this deliberately. But she looked more thoughtful than smug. “I hardly ever get to experiment,” she said. “You were the perfect subject.”

“Glad to be of service,” he said dryly.

“Naturally, I did another one.” She pulled a second drawing from the folder she’d carried into the truck stop and flicked it dismissively onto the table, where it landed next to his uneaten muffin. It showed him lounging on the bed, knee cocked, shirt falling open over his chest, exactly how he’d arranged himself for her. “Predictably gorgeous,” she said, “but boring, don’t you think?”

Not just boring, but a little sleazy, too—his pose too calculated, his expression too cocky. She’d seen right through him, and he didn’t like it. He still found it hard to believe she’d walked out on him last night. Was it possible he’d lost his touch? Or maybe he’d never had one. Since women tended to drop into his lap, he didn’t have a whole lot of experience being the sexual aggressor. He needed to fix that.

Once again, he studied the first drawing, and as he took in his altered face, he began thinking about all the ways his life would have been different if he’d been born with the face the Beav had given him. No lucrative endorsement for End Zone, that was for sure. Even when he was a kid, his looks had given him a lot of free passes. He’d understood that theoretically, but her drawing made it concrete.

The Beav’s face clouded. “You hate it, don’t you? I should have known you wouldn’t get it, but I thought…Never mind.” She reached for the paper.

He snatched it back before she could touch it. “It took me unaware, that’s all. I probably won’t hang it over my fireplace, but I
don’t hate it. It’s…thought provoking. As a matter of fact, I like it. I like it a lot.”

She studied him to figure out if he was sincere. The longer he was with her, the more his curiosity grew. “You haven’t told me much about yourself,” he said. “Where did you grow up?”

She broke off a section of her doughnut. “Here and there.”

“Come on, Beav. You’ll never run into me after this. Spill your secrets.”

“My name is Blue. And if you want secrets, you have to go first.”

“I’ll give it to you in a nutshell. Too much money. Too much fame. Too good-looking. Life’s a bitch.”

He’d intended to make her smile. Instead, she studied him so intently he grew uncomfortable. “Your turn,” he said quickly.

She took her time polishing off her doughnut. He suspected she was trying to decide how much she wanted to tell him. “My mother is Virginia Bailey,” she said. “You’ve probably never heard of her, but she’s famous in peace circles.”

“Pee circles?”

“
Peace
circles. She’s an activist.”

“You don’t want to know what I was imagining.”

“She’s led demonstrations all over the world, been arrested more times than I can count, and served two stints in a federal maximum security prison for trespassing on nuclear missile sites.”

“Wow.”

“That’s not the half of it. She nearly died during the eighties when she went on a hunger strike to protest U.S. policy in Nicaragua. Later, she ignored U.N. sanctions to take medicine into Iraq.” The Beav rubbed a dab of frosting between her fingers, her expression distant. “When the American soldiers entered Baghdad in 2003, she was already there with an international peace group. In one hand, she held up a protest sign. With the other, she passed out water bottles to the soldiers. For as long as I can remember, she’s deliberately kept her income below thirty-one hundred dollars to avoid paying income tax.”

“Cutting off your nose to spite your face, isn’t it?”

“She can’t bear the idea of her money being spent on bombs. I don’t agree with her about a lot of things, but I do think the federal government should let taxpayers check off boxes stipulating where they want their tax money to go. Wouldn’t you like to make sure all those millions you give Uncle Sam went to schools and hospitals instead of nuclear warheads?”

As a matter of fact, he would. Playgrounds for big kids, preschool programs for little ones, and mandatory LASIK surgery for NFL refs. He set down his coffee mug. “She sounds like a real character.”

“Like a kook, you mean.”

He was too polite to nod.

“She’s not, though. Mom’s the real thing, for better or for worse. She’s been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize.”

“Okay, now I’m impressed.” He leaned back in his chair. “What about your father?”

She dipped part of her paper napkin into her water glass and wiped the doughnut icing from her fingers. “He died a month before I was born. A well he was digging in El Salvador caved in. They weren’t married.”

One more thing he and the Beav had in common.

So far, she’d given him a lot of facts without revealing much that was personal. He stretched his legs. “Who took care of you while your mother was out saving the world?”

“An assortment of well-intentioned people.”

“That can’t be good.”

“It wasn’t terrible. They were mostly hippies—artists, a college professor, some social workers. Nobody beat me or abused me. When I was thirteen, I lived with a Houston drug dealer, but in Mom’s defense, she had no idea Luisa was still in the business, and except for the occasional drive-by shooting, I liked being with her.”

He hoped Blue was kidding.

“I lived in Minnesota for six months with a Lutheran minister,
but Mom’s a devout Catholic, so I spent a lot of time with various activist nuns.”

She’d had a childhood even less stable than his own. Hard to believe.

“Fortunately, Mom’s friends tend to be benevolent. I also learned a lot of skills most people don’t have.”

“Like.”

“Well…I read Latin, a little Greek. I can put up drywall, plant one hell of an organic garden, use power tools, and I’m a kickass cook. I’ll bet you can’t match that.”

He spoke damn good Spanish and liked using power tools himself, but he didn’t want to spoil her fun. “I threw four touchdown passes against Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.”

“And set those Rose Princesses’ hearts a-fluttering.”

The Beav loved taking shots at him, but she did it with such open relish that she never came across as bitchy. Odd. He drained his coffee. “With so much moving around, school must have been a challenge.”

“When you’re constantly the new kid, you develop fairly sophisticated people skills.”

“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.