Billionaire on Her Doorstep (7 page)

“Read the thing or don’t read the thing,” Freya shouted over her shoulder. “I don’t care. You’re always going on about male domination in the creation of modem religion and this book says much the same.”

Freya waved a dog-eared copy of The Da Vinci Code over her shoulder like a waggling finger at the third musketeer, Ashleigh, Maggie’s old art teacher, the patron of the group and the eldest at somewhere over fifty years old. Well over, Maggie guessed, though with her short, insanely curly ash-blonde hair and layers of autumnal-colored clothes, she had always seemed kind of ageless.

Ashleigh smiled serenely at Maggie and carried an Edwardian dining chair in her elegant wake, before her pale eyes swayed to the painting over her shoulder. Her gaze wandered carefully over the piece, then down to the floor where the dozen other members of the lukewarm Blue Smudge Series rested haphazardly against one another.

Ashleigh hooked a long thin hand through Maggie’s elbow. “This new one’s coming along nicely, don’t you think?”

Maggie didn’t think any such thing. “Wine for everyone?” she called out rather than saying so.

“God, yes,” Freya gasped, heading into the kitchen.

“Make mine a double,” Sandra said, shuffling a French cigarette from a box as she stared at Maggie’s painting, with her forehead creased into a kind of determined concentration only the young could achieve without leaving a mark.

“So what’s it all about?” Sandra asked, her hand hovering an inch from the canvas as though it could communicate better to her that way.

“Beats me,” Maggie admitted. “But it has a name now at least. The Big Blue.” When the younger woman tossed a cigarette into her mouth Maggie said, “Take it outside.”

“Right,” Sandra said through a curled lip as she flicked her hot pink bra strap back under the thin strap of her black tank top and disappeared out on to the veranda.

Maggie and Ashleigh shared a look. “Do you remember ever being that young?” Maggie asked.

“I was never that young,” Ashleigh said.

Freya came back from the kitchen with three full wineglasses. “So what are you working on?” she asked.

Maggie pointed over her shoulder and Freya turned, focused and saw it in all its obviousness. “Right. Okay. But it’s a landscape.”

Maggie felt both women’s eyes zero in on her. She could tell them she thought it sucked too, right? These were her friends, her kindred spirits, her peers, and the ones who had taken her in and held her close six months before when her life had fallen apart.

“It is a landscape,” she said optimistically. “I’m trying something new.”

Freya frowned. “Really? I mean, is that wise at this point in your career?”

Ashleigh must have given Freya the look, for the color brightened in her freckled cheeks. “What? Just because you enjoy being a tortured artist doesn’t mean that some of us don’t quite like the fact that we’ve beaten the odds and made a fine living at it.”

Freya lumped Ashleigh with the wineglasses and took Maggie by the hands. “Maggie, it would be like a children’s book author deciding to write erotic thrillers. Risky as all get out.”

Maggie squeezed back. “I don’t think I have much choice, Freya. I think I’m all portraited out.”

Freya gave her a small smile, but Maggie knew that she wouldn’t really understand. To Freya it was a nine-to-five job. But for Maggie, and for Ashleigh too, it had always been a little more magical than that. Art was a way of expressing her feelings - good and bad. And, on the flip side, it was that much harder when the expression dried up.

Paint that!” Sandra gasped from the veranda. Through the window Maggie saw her pointing downwards with her smoldering cigarette. And then the sound of a chainsaw cut through the silence.

“Oh, shoot…” Before Maggie could think of an excuse to stop them, the other two women sorted out their wineglasses and headed outside. She had no choice but to follow.

“This is new,” Ashleigh rumbled under her breath.

Below, Tom stood with his legs shoulder-width apart as he wielded his chainsaw. Jeans hugged lean hips. His dark hair was spiky and a mess. And a sheen of sweat glowed along his tanned muscular arms.

Sandra sighed eloquently beside her and Maggie had to admit, even though she had been steadfastly paying no heed to the fact for days, he did make for quite the glorious picture.

“I know about him,” Freya said, her voice heavy with accusation. “That’s Tom Campbell. What’s he doing here?”

Maggie leant away from the rail and moved back inside; the last thing she wanted was to be discovered ogling. The others followed after a time. Except one.

“Sandra,” Ashleigh called out, clicking her fingers.

Sandra took a drag on her cigarette, put it out in a potted fern, took one last lingering look at Tom, then clumped back in.

Maggie grabbed a fat cushion from its hidey hole behind her easel and threw it on to the floor, then took a seat. When the others made it to their respective places she elaborated. “He’s just doing some work around the garden.”

Sandra’s pierced right eyebrow shot into a perfect V.

“Can you really see me out there working a chainsaw?” Maggie asked. “I can barely work a stove top, much less a complex piece of machinery. And when I looked him up in the local phone book under “H” for Handyman, I had no idea that was going to turn up. Truly.”

“Likely tale,” Sandra said, leaning back into her beanbag.

“Maggie, I thought we had all agreed that you are meant to be reconnecting with your art and with yourself,” Freya said, “not connecting with some musclebound hunk.”

But I’m not connecting with anything! Maggie wanted to scream. I feel so disconnected. From my life. From my home. From the artistic expression which sustained me for the last ten years.

But they had tried so hard to include her, to encourage her, to promise her that beach life would make it all better; how could she tell them it wasn’t working?

“So you think he’s hunky, hey, Freya?” Sandra asked.

“What I know, Freya said, “is that he spent last summer with that divorced American broad who spent her whole time here telling everyone who would listen that she got Mornington Manor in a divorce and couldn’t wait to sell the “quaint little house on the bluff” so she could move back to California.”

“So he dated someone and it didn’t work out,” Sandra said, saying the words Maggie ought to have come up with, if she hadn’t been so distracted by trying to imagine what the American broad might have looked like.

“We’ve all been there,” Sandra said. “And, as to the American, you just didn’t like her because she called one of your pots “cute”. Half the holiday houses on the Peninsula have come to the current owner in a divorce. Look at Maggie!”

Everyone did as Sandra suggested while Maggie took a rather large sip of her wine and declined to comment.

“This place was always hers, right?”

Maggie nodded.

“And at least she has no intention of selling and moving back to Melbourne when the bastard finally signs the papers,” Freya pointed out.

And again Maggie kept her mouth tight shut.

They were in a particularly feisty mood today and Maggie decided that if she opened up and told them exactly how dire her financial situation had become since she’d cut herself off, they’d be unbearable. Today she just wanted good wine, and good food, and noisy company. She was simply too tired for anything else.

“Well, now we’ve figured this Tom guy is now single,” Sandra said, “who says Maggie doesn’t deserve her own fling?”

“Sandra!” Freya shouted.

“I’d hazard a guess it’s been a while since our Maggie has been flung. If ever,” Sandra continued unabated. “Have you ever been flung, Maggie-Moo?”

One thing Maggie-Moo hadn’t ever been was flung. She’d been a good daughter, a caring girlfriend and a loving wife. And had been let down on all counts. Until the day came when someone could promise her a fling would end any differently, she would remain unflung.

She tucked her legs beneath her and sat up straighter. “I’m here to work, ladies,’she said, “and to take a little time for me, just as Freya said. Not to be flung, or flinged or whatever the correct grammar for such a thing might be. Tom’s here for another week and a half and then he’s off to be someone else’s handyman.”

“In the meantime, he’s your handyman,” Sandra said.

“In the meantime nothing. End of discussion.”

Sandra harrumphed and pouted. Freya gave a self-satisfied smile. And Maggie noticed that Ashleigh had been dead quiet throughout.

“So,” Maggie said, purposely avoiding Ashleigh’s pale piercing eyes. “Someone else’s turn in the hot seat. Progress report. “What are we all working on this week?”

Tom turned off the chainsaw. The late spring sun beat down on his back. His muscles ached. He was sweating so much he wished that the way to Maggie’s potential beach was already clear so he could run down the steps and straight into the surf below.

But, despite the thick clustering branches still between him and the big blue sea, all in all he felt mighty good. Mighty pleased with himself. And mighty hungry.

It was after midday. He was surprised Maggie hadn’t come down at some stage that morning. With coffee. Or with an excuse for a chat.

“What was going on in that tangled mind of hers this fine day? He looked up at the large windows in Maggie’s great room, but the sun only created an opaque reflection of ocean and scrub.

He wiped his hand on an old rag and straightened his T-shirt as much as he could, then jogged up the stairs, two at a time.

Maybe today he could ask her more about her career. That would be a neat segue into offering to make dinner at his place, where he could show off his collection, including the Sidney Nolan in his bedroom. Hey, that could be his opening line: Come up to my place and check out my Nolan.

Grinning, Tom called out, “Hey, Maggie, I’ve got leftover fettuccine in the fridge. Prepare your taste buds - “

But he stopped short when he found himself face to face with Maggie’s back while three other women, all sitting in various stages of repose on an odd assortment of seats, all drinking red wine, all looked back at him with varying levels of interest.

“Afternoon, ladies,” he said.

At the sound of his voice, Maggie scrambled to her feet. “Tom! Hi. Umm. Heck, what’s the time? Is it after midday already?”

“So my stomach tells me.”

An unlikely femme fatale in combat boots and pigtails pulled herself out of a deep beanbag and sauntered his way. She held out a hand and followed through with a nubile body until she was all but bodily against him.

“Sandra Klein,” she said. And all he could think was; girls like her get younger every year.

Tom Campbell,’he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Sorry. I should have introduced you,” Maggie blustered, her grey eyes bright, her cheeks flushed. Too much red wine? Or had he walked in on something she’d rather he hadn’t?

Tom, this is Sandra. She’s a cartoonist.”

“Anything I might have seen in the funny papers?” he asked.

“Hardly,” Sandra huffed, affronted with him, which he had kind of hoped would happen, and slumping back down into her beanbag. Was it leather?

“She has her own comic. It’s huge in the feminist fiction market,” Maggie explained, her tone hushed, warning him that she of the suggestive eyes might claw his eyes out with her black painted fingernails if he wasn’t careful. “Each of these talented women is a member of the fertile Sorrento artists’ community. Not one of them paints beach huts.”

That was code just for him, to warn him they were serious women. Tom’s cheek twitched.

“Though we four like to think ourselves a band apart,” said an older woman with riotous blonde curls, clothes better suited to a woman double her weight and eyes that seemed to see into his soul.

“You’re Ashleigh Caruthers,” Tom blurted out, as if she wouldn’t know who she was. And the face in Maggie’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait, he managed to hoId back. “An old colleague of mine in Sydney is a big fan of your sculptures. He has a couple of your Tragedy series. They’re wonderful.”

“Aren’t they just?” Ashleigh returned. She lifted herself from her dainty chair just long enough to shake his hand before drifting back down.

“And this is Freya,” Maggie said, pointing to the woman with short red hair and pursed lips. The big red pot in the back doorway is one of hers. And you’ve likely seen her pottery in homeware stores in town.”

Tom smiled politely, not even trying to pretend that he had ever shopped in any homeware stores in town, much less noticed the pottery.

After silence reigned for a good five seconds, Freya rolled her eyes and pushed herself off her neatly folded picnic blanket, picked it up by one corner and threw it out on to the floor until it made a neat large square. “I’ll get lunch.”

“Right,” Maggie said. “Tom, you will join us, I hope.”

Tom glanced to the kitchen, where the scent of sun-dried tomatoes and eggplant wafted on the air. But, as much as her words were telling him to stay, her eyes were begging him to leave. Besides which, he wasn’t entirely sure he would survive a lunch in the company of this merry coven.