Natural Born Charmer (7 page)

“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
security 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…”

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 hired 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.

“Stop talking about yourself like that,”
her friend Charli said whenever they discussed the bad old days. “
You were never, ever a groupie, April. You were their freakin’ muse.”

That’s what they all told themselves. Maybe, for some of them, it had been true. So many fabulous women: Anita Pallenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Angie Bowie, Bebe Buell, Lori Maddox…and April Robillard. Anita and Marianne had been the girlfriends of Keith and Mick; Angie was married for a while to David Bowie; BeBe was involved with Steven Tyler; Lori with Jimmy Page. And for over a year, April had been Jack Patriot’s lover. All the women were smart and beautiful, more than capable of forging their own way in the world. But they’d loved the men too much. The men and the music they made. The women offered counsel and companionship. They stroked egos, smoothed brows, overlooked infidelities, and entertained with sex. Rock on.

“You weren’t a groupie, April. Look at how many you turned down.”

April had been discriminating in her way, refusing the men she didn’t fancy, no matter how high on the charts their albums hit. But she’d dogged those she wanted, willing to shrug off the drugs, the rages, the other women.

“You were their muse…”

Except a muse had power. A muse didn’t lose years of her life to alcohol, pot, Quaaludes, mescaline, and, finally, cocaine. Most of all, a muse wasn’t so afraid of corrupting her little boy that she’d virtually abandoned him.

It was too late to fix what she’d done to her Dean, but at least she could do this. She could make him a home and then once again disappear from his life.

April rested her head on her knees and let the music wash over her.

Do you remember when we were young,
And every dream we had felt like the first one?
Baby, why not smile?

The farm belonged to the valley. Dean and Blue arrived at sunset when low clouds of orange, lemon, and purple draped the surrounding hills like ruffles on a cancan dancer’s skirt. A curving, bumpy drive led from the highway to the house. As Blue caught sight of it, her current disasters slipped from her mind.

The house—big, rambling, and weather-beaten—spoke to her of America’s roots: of planting and harvest, Thanksgiving turkeys and Fourth of July lemonade, of hardworking farm wives snapping beans into chipped white enamel pans, and hardworking men stomping the mud from their boots at the back door. The oldest and largest part of the house was built of stone with a deep front porch and long, double-hung windows. An abbreviated wooden ell, a newer addition, bumped back on the right. The low-pitched roof held a ramble of eaves, chimneys, and gables. This had been no hardscrabble farm but a once prosperous enterprise.

Blue took in the mature trees and overgrown yard, the barn, fields, and pastures. She couldn’t imagine a more unlikely spot for a big-city celebrity like Dean. She watched him head toward the barn with the easy, loping grace of a man at home in his body, and then she returned her attention to the house.

She wished she could have come here under different circumstances so she could enjoy this place, but the farm’s isolation made her situation more difficult. Maybe she could get hired by one of the crews working on the house. Or she’d find something in the nearby town, although it was barely a dot on the map. Still, she only needed a few hundred dollars. Once she had that, she’d set out for Nashville, rent a cheap room, print up new flyers, and start all over again. The
trick was getting Dean to let her stay here rent free while she put her life back together.

She had no illusions about why he’d brought her to the farm. By not tearing off her clothes for him that first night, she’d turned herself into a challenge—a challenge he’d forget about the instant one of the local southern beauties caught his eye. That meant she’d needed to find another way to make herself useful to him.

Just then, the front door opened and one of the most amazing creatures Blue had ever seen stepped out. Amazon tall and slender, she had a bold, square face and long, uneven blades of poker-straight, streaky blond hair. Blue remembered photos she’d seen of the great fashion models of the past, women of the sixties and seventies like Verushka, Jean Shrimpton, and Fleur Savagar. This woman had that same presence. Smoky blue eyes peered out from a dramatic square-jawed face, almost masculine in its strength. As the woman reached the front step, Blue saw a faint set of lines bracketing that wide, sensuous mouth and realized she wasn’t as young as she’d first thought, maybe in her early forties.

Narrow jeans perched on bladed hip bones. The strategically placed rips at the thighs and knees hadn’t been put there by wear, but by a designer’s calculated eye. Metallic threads edged the suede shoulder straps of her crocheted, cantaloupe-colored camisole. Copper leather blossoms bloomed on the toes of her slides. Her look was both boho funky and chic. Was she a model? An actress? Probably one of Dean’s girlfriends. With such dramatic beauty, a few years’ age difference hardly signified. Although Blue didn’t care about fashion, she was suddenly conscious of her own shapeless jeans, baggy T-shirt, and unkempt hair, which drastically needed a decent cut.

The woman took in the Vanquish, and her wide, crimson-slashed mouth curved in a smile. “Lost?”

Blue bought a little time. “Well…I know where I am geographically, but, frankly, my life’s kind of a mess right now.”

The woman laughed, a low, husky sound. There was something familiar about her. “I know all about that.” She came down the steps, and Blue’s sense of familiarity grew. “I’m Susan O’Hara.”

This sexy, exotic creature was Dean’s mysterious housekeeper? No way. “I’m Blue.”

“Damn. I hope it’s temporary.”

Right then, Blue knew.
Holy shit.
That square jaw, those blue-gray eyes, that quick brain…Holy, holy shit.

“Blue Bailey,” she managed. “It was a…uh…bad day in Angola.”

The woman regarded her with interest.

Blue made a vague, meaningless gesture with her hand. “Plus South Africa.”

Boot heels struck the gravel.

As the woman turned, the fading light picked out long strands of blond and fawn in her hair. Her red lips parted, and the delicate fans of strain at the corners of her eyes constricted. The boot heels came to an abrupt stop, and Dean stood silhouetted against the barn, his legs braced, arms tensed at his side. The woman might have been his sister. But she wasn’t. Not his girlfriend, either. The woman with the stricken ocean blue eyes was the mother he’d dismissed so brusquely just that morning when Blue had asked about his family.

He stopped for only a moment, and then his boots ate up the ground. Ignoring the brick path with its uneven edges like broken teeth, he stalked across the overgrown lawn. “Mrs. Fucking O’Hara.”