Free Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

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 anight 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