Billionaire on Her Doorstep (6 page)

As she’d done a hundred times before when art students had asked her the same thing, she looked him in the eye and waited until all of his attention was focused there. Okay, so maybe that wasn’t her brightest idea. For some reason his hazel eyes did things to her insides that art students’ eyes never had. Her hand began to shake.

Better to get it over with then, she thought. She took a shallow breath and started to spin.

“Hey!” he called out. Naturally he’d been looking the wrong way and-had missed the trick entirely.

She finished her twirl with a flourish, spun the brush into the air and caught it behind her back.

“Holy moly.” He blinked, amazed, and she felt her cheeks warming under his blatant appraisal. “I can see now how many hours of seeking distractions can produce artistry all of their own.”

Tom went to put the brush back on to her table, but before she knew what she was doing, Maggie reached out, about to clamp down on his wrist. But she stopped herself just in time, her hand hovering so close to his skin she could feel the hairs on his arms rising to meet her.

He stilled and looked back at her. His eyes were no longer smiling, now questioning.

“Keep it,” she said, her voice coming out unnaturally low.

She pulled her hand back into its safety zone in the back pocket of her cargo pants. “You need the practice.”

He nodded. “Thanks.”

When he stepped off her drop cloth Maggie felt a huge weight rise off her chest. She realized then that she hadn’t taken a proper breath since the moment he’d walked in the room.

“I’ll be off, then,” he said. “And don’t argue, but tomorrow lunch is my treat.”

“Who’s arguing?” Maggie said.

He saluted her with the paintbrush she had given him, then jogged out the front door and was gone.

And, with a ragged sigh, Maggie knew that neither his empty coffee cup resting on her paint table, nor the paintbrush now missing from her jar would be the reasons she thought of him often before she went to sleep much much later that night.

CHAPTER FOUR

Tom twirled his keys around his finger as he walked up to the front door of his bungalow. He spun around on the spot in a move that would have made John Travolta proud, before sliding the key into the front door.

Once inside he tossed his car keys into a small wooden bowl on his antique Queen Anne hall table and immediately thought of the dilapidated garden bench that served as Maggie’s hall table.

That was one interesting woman. Smart. Sharp. Deep as a well. And funny. The last thing he would have expected Maggie to be was funny. In his book, sharp and funny was a killer cocktail.

He listened to his answering machine messages with half an ear as a few job offers came in. But he would happily pass them off to someone else, as for the next two weeks he was a contentedly kept man.

He flicked a wall switch that lit up the several large lamps in his great room in one go. His dark leather sofas, mahogany side tables, shiny wooden floors and collection of fine art warmed under the golden glow.

It sure was different from Maggie’s great room. He no longer lived in the exclusive North Shore of Sydney, and he now worked as a handyman rather than as the head of a multi-billion dollar restoration company, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t surround himself with the finer things he’d been able to amass while making his fortune. So what was stopping her from filling her big old house with any furniture at all?

He’d have a shower and a beer before making himself a pasta dinner, and he could think on all that for a few hours in front of the footy channel…

“Evening, Tom.” The outline of a man lit by the blue glow of the laptop screen in Tom’s office made him jump fair out of his skin.

“Alex!” he cried out. “Make yourself known a little earlier next time, why don’t you?”

“Sorry, Cuz” Alex said. “You know how it is. Head down, bum on seat, working hard. Internet is down at the office and I needed to place a couple of last-minute orders. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course I don’t mind. Do you want a beer?”

“I’m good.” Without looking away from the laptop, Alex reached out and grabbed the half empty bottle at his side.

“So what’s on the agenda at your place tonight?” Tom asked as he moved into the raised kitchen to get his own cold drink.

“Music lessons. Dora’s taken up the trumpet,” Alex admitted. Tom laughed. He was pretty certain the last-minute orders for the hardware store were not all that urgent.

“So how did it go with Lady Bryce today?” Alex asked. “What’s she like? A recluse? Or just snobby, as the Barclays seem to think? Did you need the chainsaw for the job or was that just an insurance policy?”

“None of the above, actually. Maggie is perfectly amiable.” Well, not perfectly, but he’d discovered that she at least knew how to be.

“Hang on a cotton pickin” minute. Tommy Boy,”Alex said, spinning on Tom’s office chair to face him with a grin spread across his round friendly face, all urgent orders forgotten. “Did I hear a note of appreciation in your voice?”

Tommy Boy was about to deny it, but there was no getting around Alex. The poor guy lived in a house surrounded by women. Even his daughter’s pet rabbits were female. Alex looked to Tom for manly succor. And Tom looked to Alex as his only remaining family. How could he let him down?

“I’m afraid you do, Alex. For there is much to appreciate about my good lady employer.”

“Don’t tell me she’s hot,”Alex insisted.

Tom baulked at the implication. Hot was completely the wrong word for Maggie Bryce. If anything she was too cool. Friendly but reticent. Inquisitive but isolated. Like a bird that had had her wings clipped.

“She’s intriguing,”Tom allowed.

“Right,” Alex said, his disappointment at her not being an undercover Playboy bunny all too evident.

“And it can’t have even been our third conversation when I told her about Tess,” Tom admitted before he’d even felt the words forming. He took another long sip of his beer as he waited for Alex’s gaping mouth to snap shut.

“And why was that, do you think?” his cousin eventually asked.

“I have not one single clue.”

“Does she… remind you of Tess?”

Tom shrugged. “Not all that much. She’s graceful, like a ballet dancer. Tess was a pipsqueak and a tomboy who’d never quite lost her baby fat. But Maggie’s a painter and you know Tess was a big art lover. Maybe that’s what made me mention her.”

He looked to Alex, who merely shrugged.

“But she is plucky. She has a wicked tongue on her. Pretty sarcastic at times. Tess would have loved that.”

Everyone could do with a bit of spice in their diet, Tom thought, taking another swig of his beer. But he and Tess had always prized it more than most. Tom still missed their sparring matches. Every single day…

“So, what’s her first name again?”

“Hmm?” Tom said, breathing deep through his nose.

“The painter with the wicked tongue.”

“Maggie,” Tom said.

And then suddenly Alex was facing the computer and typing again.

“What are you doing?”

“Googling her,”Alex said.

Knowing it was wrong, and spying, and intrusive, Tom moved to look over Alex’s shoulder.

“Well,” Alex said, “according to Google, Maggie Bryce is a thirteen-year-old skateboarding champ from Canberra, or a ninety-four-year-old horse strapper in Ireland. I could try adding intriguing and sarcastic as qualifiers but I’m not sure that’d help.”

“May I?” Tom asked as he motioned to his desk, his chair and his laptop.

“Of course.”Alex squeezed his large form from the chair and let Tom sit. He leaned over, breathing down Tom’s neck. “This is too much fun.”

“You need to get out more.”

“And don’t I know it.”

Tom added “Melbourne painter” to the search parameters and he found her. He found pictures of her in her late teens, beaming at the camera while standing next to a vibrant, colorful portrait of her art teacher after winning… the Archibald Prize?

Tom sat against the back of his chair with a thud. There was no doubting it was her. The ear to ear grin was something Tom hadn’t witnessed as yet but the biscuit-blonde hair, the dancer’s grace and those wide grey eyes were unmistakable.

“Sheesh,” Alex whistled in his ear “That Archibald thing’s a big deal, right?”

.”About as big a deal as it can get,” Tom said.

He clicked on another site to find her a few years down the track, looking more like herself - dressed in a T-shirt and jeans with a splotch of paint on her cheek as she taught art to a large group of preschoolers. But again she was grinning, all high cheekbones and comely overbite.

“What are you talking about?”Alex said. “She’s more than just intriguing, my friend. She’s beautiful.”

Beautiful. That was the word he’d been looking for. Nothing as crass and undignified as hot. Or as forbidding as cool. Maggie Bryce was beautiful.

Tom shuffled in his seat and made himself concentrate. He clicked on yet another website, which showed pictures of her at a gallery opening in Armadale. The gallery had shown several of her paintings, all of them selling for amounts so astronomical Alex coughed so hard he had to take a moment to get another beer.

In those pictures the money that afforded her a home in Portsea showed. Her hair was ice blonde and cut into a slick do that tucked perfectly along her cheekbones and flicked beneath her chin. She wore ubiquitous Melbourne black that made her look tall and slim, but still more curvaceous than she was now.

But in these pictures she wasn’t smiling any more. Her eyes were sadder somehow. Older. The shining light that had turned her eyes to molten silver in that school room picture had dimmed.

He scrolled down the page. But she was only in the background of a couple more pictures with a good-looking guy with salt-and-pepper hair, bent over, listening to him and touching him on the arm. The level of attention she was giving to the guy was enough to have him slam his laptop closed.

“Hey!” Alex cried out.

“That’s enough,”Tom insisted. “You’ve seen what she looks like, you know she’s a hot-shot painter, now you know all I know about her.”

Alex laughed and moved away, taking his beer with him. “Now I know why she has you all hot and bothered. Miss Hoity -Toity treats you as Tom the handyman, doesn’t she?”

Tom ran a hand over his rough chin. “I am Tom the handyman,” he insisted. “I have been for years.”

“Have you told her what you used to do for a living?”

“Not in detail. But she’s upstairs painting and I’m downstairs wielding sharp, dangerous cutting implements. There’s not much time for small talk.”

Tom had never hidden the fact that he had money. Those close to him knew, and thought it a great lark that he’d downgraded his skill set to changing light bulbs rather than ordering them by the hundreds for the intricate restoration of old buildings. It made it easier having the locals know too as they didn’t mind sending work to other people or calling off jobs late, which was fine with him. But he’d never run around with a megaphone telling every newcomer either.

So where did that leave Maggie?

Alex slumped down into a plush wing-chair by the desk. “I would put money on the fact that when around pretty little Lady Bryce, the big-shot, CEO, he-man inside of you just itches to come out of his cave and beat his chest.”

“She’s not little,” Tom said. “She’s taller than you.”

That shut Alex up, just as he’d hoped.

“And you’re nowhere near the mark,” Tom said, stalking over to the remote to turn on his wide-screen TV. “She’s a job, that’s all. Just as restoring old homes was just a job. Nothing more than a means to an end.”

He took a moment to gulp down a swig of beer.

Alex reached out and gave him a slap on the back. He knew better than anyone that the reason Tom had made Campbell Designs such a phenomenal success had been to make enough money to get Tess the best medical treatment money could buy.

“And when I’ve reached the end of this job,” Tom continued, “Maggie will be another face driving past in the street and I’ll be just another name in the Peninsula phone book.”

But if Alex knew that the end had become the ownership of a big smudge of blue on canvas, he would laugh until beer came out of his nose.

Late the next morning, a bustle of noise at Maggie’s front door heralded the arrival of Freya, Sandra and Ashleigh, the Wednesday girls. Annoyed at the racket, Smiley plodded through the house and out the back door.

Sandra, the youngest of the gang, lumbered in first, her dark wavy hair in pigtails, her pretty blue eyes rimmed in lashings of rebellious black kohl and her heavy combat boots clumping loudly on the wooden floor.

“Mornin’, Mags, sorry we’re late. Blame Freya,” she called out, dumping her black leather beanbag in the middle of the floor.

Freya, a single mum with twin girls in the first grade, whirled in next, short red hair scruffy, pale cheeks pink, clay stains on her freckled arms, carrying a huge tartan picnic blanket and a cooler filled with gourmet foods.