Natural Born Charmer by Susan Elizabeth Phillips Page B

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 Idon’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