Billionaire on Her Doorstep (3 page)

Maggie’s cheek twitched as she leant her chin on her palm and thought there was something to be said about the confidence of a man who took a pink pillowcase to a work site.

Smiley ambled up behind her and nuzzled against her hand. “Hey, buddy, how’s it hangin’?” she asked.

Smiley looked up at her in bemusement.

“Now I know it’s not often that your big city guard dog instincts have had to come into play down here, but how about next time you warn me when we have a stranger at the front door? Deal?”

Smiley slumped to the floor on top of her feet and Maggie knew that was all the answer she was going to get.

The scent of the Jamaican Roast tickled her nose and with an enthusiast’s satisfied sigh she took a long leisurely sip, relishing the feeling of the hot liquid scorching her tongue and throat. Her stomach thanked her. But it needed more.

She glanced again over the railing. It would take some time, days even, to clear the wilderness choking her backyard, even once he had a chainsaw. And though the guy was an accomplished flirt, and she had no intention of flirting back, that didn’t me an she oughtn’t to be civil.

She would bring him lunch. Nothing flash. A plain cheese and tomato sandwich would surely show she wasn’t interested in anything he had to offer besides his skillful hands. Which were only welcome in her garden. On her plants.

“Inside,”she said to Smiley. “I must be more famished than I realize.”

Ten minutes later, Maggie walked down her wooden back steps with the first meal she had made for someone other than herself or Smiley in nigh on six months. Even Freya, Sandra and Ashleigh brought their own food when they came over for their regular play date each Wednesday. And sensibly so. Cheese and tomato on white was about as gastronomically adventurous as Maggie could be.

Tom turned at the sound of creaking steps. There were tracks in his dark hair where his fingers had pushed his too long fringe out of his eyes.

“I figured you might be hungry,” Maggie said.

“Starving,”he said. “Thanks.” He breathed in deep and stood taller, stretching his arms over his head, arms jam-packed with sinewy muscles.

Maggie cleared her throat and turned away to put his sandwich and cup of black coffee on the step above his tool belt. She was all prepared to shoot a farewell wave and jog back up the stairs when she noticed a trail of dirt smeared across his shiny forehead. She seriously considered leaving him with a smudge on his face for the rest of the day. But his spoiled aesthetic was too much of a shame for her artist’s eye to leave be.

“You’ve got a smear,” she mumbled, waving a hand in his general direction. “Right across your forehead. Dirt. Grass. General mess.”

He shrugged, his hands dropping to hang casually at his sides. “It won’t be the last of the day. This is the kind of job that leaves its mark on a man. As is yours, I see.”

He glanced downward and Maggie did the same to find her bare feet covered in splotches of blue paint with a dash of that blasted red thrown in for good measure. She wiggled her toes back up at herself. Toes that had once been pedicured on a weekly basis now had nails so short they looked like the feet of a rambunctious teenager.

“Occupational hazard,” she said, tucking the filthier of her feet behind the other.

“Not such a bad one - getting dirty,” he said. “At least we don’t have to worry about things like hypertension and stress like they do up in the city.” He smiled at her, as though awaiting a response.

Maggie blinked at him. He wanted to chat?

She reminded herself that she had a very much unfinished painting upstairs awaiting her return. But then again it would be rude to just cut and run…

“High blood pressure they can keep,” she said. “But I do miss the stress of living in the city.”

“Why’s that?”he asked.

“Without a strict deadline to keep me focused, I give in to distraction all too easily. I have been known to take navel gazing to the heights of an art form.”

Tom’s dark hazel eyes skittered down her front to land upon the general region of the navel in question.

To distract herself from the ridiculous need to tug at her T-shirt, she blurted, “And I desperately miss the traffic noise at night. The steady whoosh below my apartment window. I still haven’t found a way to fall asleep before two in the morning without it. My friend Freya seems to think I should thank my lucky stars that I’ve replaced car fumes for sea air. But I’m not sure it’s natural for a coffee-drinking, night owl workaholic to transform into a late-sleeping, star-gazing, shell-collecting yoga zealot overnight.”

When she stopped to take a breath Maggie realized she had gone a mile further into her personal zone than she had ever meant to go. But, rather than looking at her as if she was some kind of chump in need of therapy, as Freya did when she said such things, Tom nodded.

“I was like that for the first few weeks after I moved here from Sydney.”

“You’re from Sydney?” When his right eyebrow disappeared beneath his fringe, she pressed her lips together and tilted her nose a little higher in the air.

Tom gave a small bow. “Born and bred. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Though I’ve been here for a while now, so the sand and salt has permeated my skin for good. Give it time.” His eyes crinkled kindly. “You’ll get there too.”

Maggie’s cheeks warmed. Was it that obvious that salt and sand had yet to make it on to her all-time top one hundred list of favorite things? And was it that obvious that she wished more than anything in the world that they had? For it would mean that she really could change the patterns of her life?

“Were you in the same line of work in Sydney?” she asked, deliberately changing the subject.

Tom paused, but only briefly. “In a manner of speaking. I worked in restorations.”

“Of houses?”

“Some,”he said. “At first. Then we expanded and eventually concentrated on the restorations of heritage listed buildings.”

“Lots of those in Sydney,” she said. “Not so many here. So why did you move?” Okay, so now she was asking a heck of a lot of questions. But that “you’ll get there” comment had stuck in her craw. And, like a dog with a bone she couldn’t leave it be.

“We used to spend our summers here when we were kids, and my cousin Alex still lives down the road in Rye,” he said.

“So far as I can tell, people around here would rather knock an old place down than renovate,” she said. “Belvedere might well have gone that way if I hadn’t bought her when I did. So there can’t be much call for restoration guys.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t do that sort of thing any more.”

“Why not?”

He paused again and she noticed that he was no longer smiling all that much. But by then it was too late.

“I changed a lot - ” he said ” - my trade, my location, my lifestyle, right after my little sister, Tess, died.”

Maggie’s solar plexus seized up and a small “Oh,” escaped her lips. Suddenly she wished she could take it all back - the conversation, the sandwich, the phone call asking him to come out and clear her brambles.

She waved a hand in front of her face until he became lost within the fast shifting movement of her open fingers. “Tom, I’m sorry, it’s none of my business. I - “

“It’s okay,” he said, shrugging, but even after knowing him for all of five minutes she could see that his inner light had dimmed. “The funny thing is, if she was here now in my stead she would have bent your ear until it hurt. Although she had the same skill with a paintbrush as you have with plants, she adored all things art. Funny, funny girl… At any rate, when she died it was an easy decision to come here, even though the call for restorations wasn’t all that significant.”

Maggie had no idea what to say. Knowing more about the guy than she had ever meant to unearth, she shot him a tight-lipped smile, flattened her heel against the first step and made a move to retreat before things became any more uncomfortable, when he said, “You want my advice for a good night’s sleep?”

Her foot stopped moving. “If you think it’ll help.”

“You just have to give yourself over to the sounds of the ocean - the seagulls, the waves hitting the shore, the distant horns as ships pass one another in the night. And, when you do, you’ll wonder why you haven’t been a beachcomber all your life.”

His smile came creeping back, brightening his dark eyes and adding oodles of character to his too handsome face. Skeptical, about a good many things, Maggie shook her head. “It can’t be that easy.”

“You know people actually buy CDs of ocean waves to help them sleep?” Tom asked.

“Best of luck to them,” she said.

At her determined mulishness Tom laughed. Maggie wasn’t all that surprised that he had a natural, throaty, infectious laugh. For she was coming to see that he was living proof that the Wednesday girls were right. If Tom was any indication, maybe this place, with its peace and quiet and fresh air and sunshine, really did hold the elixir for a long and happy life.

A drop of sweat ran down Tom’s face. His arm came up, blocking her view and wiping the drop away. But when his hand dropped she found herself looking into a pair of smiling hazel eyes, filled with unambiguous invitation.

Maggie swallowed. Hard. But she couldn’t look away.

Then Tom took a sudden step towards her.

It was so unexpected that Maggie flinched, and abruptly, so that the back of her heel whacked against the edge of the step, making a horrid crunching sound that seemed to reverberate in the sudden deep well of silence.

The poor guy withdrew, hands raised in the international sign of surrender. “I was just going for the sandwich, I promise,” he said.

Maggie would have kicked herself if only her heel wasn’t already so sore. Instead she dug her fingernails into her palms as she willed her body to rock back on to flat feet.

“I know. Of course. I’m - Sorry, I was startled because I was away with the fairies. Another occupational hazard.” She stepped aside, leaving the way between the man and his food clear

He moved, more slowly this time, picked up his meal and backed away as though he knew instinctively just how much space she needed in order to breathe. He bit off a quarter of the sandwich in one go. Then, after washing it down with a healthy slug of coffee, he leaned against the canted railing, shook his boyish fringe from his eyes and breathed out what sounded to Maggie like a sigh of contentment.

Envy of his every laid-back action arced around her as she tried to remember how long it had been since she’d done anything in contentment. The pile of half-finished canvases stacked against the wall in her great room reminded her that it had been months and months. Even since long before she had arrived in Portsea.

And then on that stinking hot day a week before, she had received a letter from her agent, Nina, asking when exactly she might have something new to show - read sell.

Maggie had sat curled up on a chair on her back veranda, playing with Smiley’s big soft ears and staring through the top of her backyard growth at the hazy horizon beyond, and it had occurred to her for the first time that day that she might never produce anything worthy of selling again. Her vibrant, abstract portraits with their distinctive lashing swathes of primary colors and movement and mirth might well be a thing of the past, for now all she seemed able to produce were nondescript, unintelligible smudges of blue.

Even the pressure of Nina’s letter, which hinted broadly at a parting of the ways if she didn’t produce and soon, hadn’t provided her with the stimulation she required, for out here it was physically impossible to build up a rich head of steam. Out here she needed something different to pull her out of her professional doldrums. Something special. She needed the possibility of a pure, unspoilt beach at the bottom of her cliff.

And for that she needed Tom Campbell. And his muscles. And his can do attitude. And his bright sunshiny contentment, no matter that it touched a raw nerve. That sounded like a plan.

She breathed in deep through her nose. “If you need any more coffee, help yourself,”she said, backing up a step. “Ditto on the contents of my fridge .”

As Maggie headed up the stairs, she was caught in a delicious wave of hot aftershave, hot coffee and hot sunshine rolling in from the coast.

And somehow that very mix of scents only served to remind her how quickly a person’s best laid plans could unravel before their very eyes.

At the end of a long hot day grappling blackberries, lantana and what seemed like every other heinous weed known to man, Tom dusted himself off, collected his rags, tools and sweater and found his new employer in the corner of the great room, staring at her blue canvas with such concentration that he thought she might well find the answer to life, the universe and everything within its lumps and weaves.

His back muscles hurt. His forearms were scratched to hell. He was hot, filthy and lathered in sweat. Right then he’d gladly put life, the universe and everything on hold for the sake of a shower, a square meal and a cold beer.

As he neared, he saw that the red splatters from earlier had been cleared away. No, not cleared, but diffused into the blue, giving shade and depth where there had previously been none. He also realized that Maggie was humming.