The Beav’s contempt for fashion clearly carried over into nightwear. She wore a maroon man’s T-shirt and a pair of faded black track pants that hung in accordion pleats around her small ankles. Nothing remotely sexy about either of those garments, except for the mystery of what they covered up. He stepped back to let her in. She smelled like soap instead of a perfume factory.
He headed for the minibar. “Let me get you a drink.”
She yelped. “Ohmygod, you don’t actually use that thing?”
He couldn’t help it. He looked down at his crotch.
She, however, had her eye on the minibar. She dropped her sketch pad, shot in front of him, and snatched up the price list. “Look at this. Two-fifty for a tiny water bottle. Three dollars for a Snickers bar. A Snickers bar!”
“You’re paying for more than the candy,” he pointed out. “You’re paying for the convenience of having the candy exactly when you want it.”
But she’d spotted his peanut can on the bed, and he couldn’t talk her down. “Seven dollars. Seven dollars! How could you?”
“Do you need a paper bag to breathe into?”
“You should just hand over your wallet.”
“Normally I wouldn’t mention this,” he said, “but I’m rich.” And, barring the total collapse of the U.S. economy, he always would be. As a kid, the money had come from substantial child support payments. As an adult, it came from something one hell of a lot better. His own hard work.
“I don’t care how rich you are. Seven dollars for a can of peanuts is extortion.”
The Beav, he realized, had some serious money issues, but that didn’t mean he had to buy into them. “Wine or beer, take your choice. Or I’ll choose for you because, one way or another, a bottle’s going to get opened here.”
She still had her nose buried in the price list. “Could you just give me the six bucks, and I’ll pretend to drink the beer?”
He took her by the shoulders and set her aside so he could get to the minibar. “Don’t look if this is too painful for you.”
She snatched up her sketch pad and retreated to the chair across the room. “There are people starving in the world.”
“Don’t be a sore loser.”
She reluctantly accepted the beer. Fortunately, the room only had one chair, which gave him the perfect excuse to stretch out on the bed. “Pose me any way you want.”
He hoped she’d suggest the naked thing again, but she didn’t.
“However you’re comfortable.” She set the beer on the carpet, crossed her ankle over her knee tough-guy style, and balanced the sketch pad on her ratty black track pants. Despite her aggressive posture, she looked nervous. So far, so good.
He propped himself on one elbow and finished unbuttoning his shirt. He’d posed for enough cheesy End Zone photos to know what the ladies liked, but he still didn’t entirely understand how they could prefer something lame like this to a game shot of him throwing a perfect spiral. That was women for you.
A spike of inky dark hair had worked free from the Beav’s perpetually disorganized ponytail, and it fell across one of her sharp cheekbones as she turned her attention to her sketch pad. He let his shirt fall open far enough to reveal the muscles he’d developed over more than a decade of hard work, but not far enough to reveal his fresh shoulder scars. “I’m not…,” he said, “…actually gay.”
“Oh, honey, you don’t need to pretend with me.”
“The truth is…” Slipping his thumb into the waistband of his jeans, he tugged them lower. “Sometimes, when I go out in public, the demands of fame get to be too much for me, so I resort to extreme measures to hide my identity. Although, in fairness to myself, I never lose my dignity. I wouldn’t, for example, go so far as to climb into an animal costume. Do you have enough light over there?”
Her pencil moved across the sketch pad. “I’ll bet if you found the right man you’d get past your denial. True love is powerful.”
She still wanted to play games. Amused, he temporarily switched tactics. “Is that what you thought you had with ol’ Monty?”
“True love, no. I have a missing chromosome. But a real friendship, yes. Would you mind turning to your other side?”
So he’d be facing the wall? No way. “Sore hip.” He bent his knee. “All those things Monty was saying about trust and abandonment issues…crap?”
“Look, Dr. Phil, I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“Not crap, then.” She wasn’t looking at him. “Me, I’ve fallen in love half a dozen times. All before I was sixteen, but still…”
“Surely there’s been somebody since then.”
“Well, there you’ve got me.” The fact that he’d never fallen in love drove Annabelle crazy. She pointed out that even her husband, Heath, a head case if there ever was one, had been in love once before he met her.
The Beav’s hand swept across the paper. “Why settle down when the world is your playground, right?”
“I’m getting a cramp,” he said. “Mind if I stretch?” He didn’t wait for an answer but let his legs fall over the edge of the bed. He took his time standing up, then stretched a little, which sucked in his abs and sent his jeans low enough to reveal the top of his gray stretch End Zone boxer briefs.
The Beav kept her eyes glued to her sketch pad.
Maybe he’d made a tactical error bringing up Monty, but he couldn’t get over somebody with the Beav’s strength of character being attracted to such a dick. He set his hands on his hips, deliberately pushing his shirt out of the way so he could display his pecs. He was starting to feel like a stripper, but she’d finally looked up. His jeans slipped another inch lower, and her sketch pad slid to the floor. She leaned over to pick it up and banged her chin on the chair arm. Clearly, she needed a little time to adjust to the idea of letting him explore her beaver parts.
“I’m going to take a quick shower,” he said. “Wash off the road dust.”
She pulled her sketch pad back into her lap with one hand and waved him away with the other.
The bathroom door shut. Blue moaned and dropped her feet to the carpet. She should have pretended she had a migraine…or leprosy—anything to get out of coming to his room tonight. Why couldn’t a nice retired couple have stopped to help her today? Or one of those sweet, artistic guys she was so comfortable with?
The water went on in the shower. She imagined it trickling over that billboard body. He used it like a weapon, and, since no one else was around, he had her in his sights. But men like him were meant to be lusted over from a safe distance.
She took a deep swallow from her beer bottle. She reminded herself that Blue Bailey didn’t run. Not ever. She looked delicate, like the faintest gust of wind would blow her over, but she was strong where it counted most. Internally. That’s how she’d survived her itinerant childhood.
What does the happiness of one little girl, no matter how beloved, mean against the lives of thousands of little girls threatened by bombs, soldiers, and land mines? It had been a miserable day, and old memories unfolded inside of her.
“Blue, Tom and I want to talk to you.”
Blue still remembered the sagging plaid couch in Olivia and Tom’s cramped San Francisco apartment and the way Olivia had patted the cushion next to her. Blue had been small for eight, but not small enough to still sit in Olivia’s lap, so she’d nestled next to her instead. Tom sat on her other side and rubbed Blue’s knee. Blue loved them more than anybody in the world, including the mother she hadn’t seen in nearly a year. Blue had lived with Olivia and Tom since she was seven, and she was going to live with them forever. They’d promised.
Olivia wore her light brown hair in a braid down her back. She smelled like curry powder and patchouli, and she always gave Blue clay to play with when she threw her pots. Tom had a big soft Afro and wrote articles for the underground newspaper. He took Blue to Golden Gate Park and let her ride on his shoulders when they went out on the street. If she had a nightmare, she’d climb in their bed and fall asleep with her cheek against Tom’s warm shoulder and her fingers twined in Olivia’s long hair.
“Do you remember, Punkin’,” Olivia said, “how we told you about the baby growing in my uterus?”
Blue remembered. They’d shown her pictures in books.
“The baby’s going to be born soon,” Olivia went on. “That means lots of things will be different now.”
Blue didn’t want them to be different. She wanted them to stay exactly the same. “Is the baby going to sleep in my room?” Blue finally had her very own room, and she didn’t want to share it.
Tom and Olivia exchanged glances before Olivia said, “No, Punkin’. Something better. You remember Norris, the lady who visited us last month, the weaver who started Artists for Peace? She told you all about her house in Albuquerque and her little boy, Kyle? We showed you where New Mexico was on the map. Do you remember how much you liked Norris?”
Blue nodded in blissful ignorance.
“Well, guess what?” Olivia said. “Your mom and Tom and I arranged for you to go live with Norris now.”
Blue didn’t understand. She gazed into their wide, fake smiles. Tom rubbed his chest through his flannel shirt and blinked his eyes like he might cry. “Olivia and I are going to miss you very much, but you’ll have a yard to play in.”
That’s when she got it. She started to gag. “No! I don’t want a yard. I want to stay here! You promised. You said I could live here forever!”
Olivia rushed her to the bathroom and steadied her head while she threw up. Tom slumped on the edge of the old, chipped bathtub. “We wanted you to stay, but…that was before we knew about the baby. Things have gotten complicated with money and everything. At Norris’s house, there’ll be another kid to play with. Won’t that be fun?”
“I’ll have a kid to play with here!” Blue had sobbed. “I’ll have the baby. Don’t make me go. Please! I’ll be good. I’ll be so good I won’t bother you ever.”
They’d all started to cry then, but in the end, Olivia and Tom had driven her to Albuquerque in their rusty blue van and sneaked away without saying good-bye.
Norris was fat and showed Blue how to weave. Nine-year-old Kyle taught her card games and played Star Wars with her. One month slipped into another. Gradually, Blue stopped thinking so much about Tom and Olivia and started to love Norris and Kyle. Kyle was her secret brother, Norris her secret mother, and she was going to stay with them forever.
Then Virginia Bailey, her real mother, came back from Central America and took her away. They went to Texas, where they stayed with a group of activist nuns and spent every spare minute together. She and her mother read books, did art projects, practiced Spanish, and had long talks about everything. A whole day would pass without Blue thinking about Norris and Kyle. Blue fell back in love with her gentle mother and was inconsolable when Virginia left.
Norris had gotten married again, so Blue couldn’t go back to Albuquerque. The nuns kept her until the school year ended, and Blue transferred her love to Sister Carolyn. Sister Carolyn drove Blue to Oregon, where Virginia had arranged for her to stay with an organic farmer named Blossom. Blue clung so desperately to Sister Carolyn when she tried to drive off that Blossom had to pull her away.
The cycle started all over again, except this time Blue held a little of herself back from Blossom, and when she had to leave, she discovered it wasn’t as painful as before. From then on, she was more careful. With each subsequent move, she distanced herself more from the people she stayed with until, finally, the leaving barely hurt at all.
Blue gazed toward the hotel room bed. Dean Robillard was horny, and he expected her to accommodate him, but he didn’t know how deep her aversion ran to casual hookups. In college, she’d watched her girlfriends, high on Sex and the City, sleep with whomever they wanted whenever they’d pleased. But instead of feeling empowered, most of them had ended up depressed. Blue had suffered from enough short-term relationships during her childhood, and she wasn’t adding to the list. If she didn’t count Monty, which she didn’t, she’d only had two lovers, both artistic, self-absorbed men happy to leave her in charge. It worked better that way.
The bathroom doorknob turned. She had to be careful how she dealt with Dean for fear he’d leave tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, tact wasn’t her forte.
He came out of the bathroom, a towel looped low around his hips. He looked like a Roman god taking a breather in the middle of an orgy while he waited for the next temple virgin to be sent his way. But as the light hit him, her fingers constricted around her sketchbook. This was no flawless, marble-carved Roman divinity. He had a warrior’s body—highly functional, powerfully built, and ready for battle.
He saw her taking in the trio of thin scars on his shoulder. “Pissedoff husband.”
She didn’t believe that for a minute. “The perils of sin.”
“Speaking of sin…” His lazy smile oozed seduction. “I’ve been thinking…Late night…two lonely strangers…a comfortable bed…I can’t come up with a better way to entertain ourselves than to make use of it.”
He’d abandoned subtlety to make a dash for the goal line. His gorgeous face and athletic fame gave him a sense of entitlement when it came to women. She understood that. But not this woman. He moved closer. She smelled soap and sex. She considered bringing up the gay thing again, but, at this point, why bother? She could plead a headache and flee the room…or she could do what she always did and face up to the challenge. She uncurled from the chair. “Here’s the way it’s going to be, Boo. You don’t mind if I call you ‘Boo,’ do you?”
“As a matter of fact—”
“You’re gorgeous, sexy, and ripped. You’ve got more charm than any man should have. You have great taste in music, and you’re rich—huge bonus points there. You’re also very smart. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. But the thing is, you don’t turn me on.”
His eyebrows slammed together. “I…don’t turn you on?”
She tried to look apologetic. “It’s not you. It’s me.”
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 hairline 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.
“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…”