Free Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page A

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 foughtfor 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