Billionaire on Her Doorstep (9 page)

Tom nodded. “I won’t. It was a thrill to meet Ashleigh Caruthers. I had no idea she lived out here.”

“Ashleigh’s the reason I bought out here in the first place.”

“She helped you find this place?” he asked, motioning with his bottle to the dark house behind them.

“Nope. This great white elephant is all my own foolishness. When I decided to buy a holiday home in Portsea a couple of years ago, it was a knee-jerk reaction to a situation I was going through at home, so it was a definite spur of the moment thing. It was the first house the estate agent offered and I took it sight unseen.”

“Are you always that spontaneous?”

She shrugged. “I have my moments. Funnily enough, buying this place and then moving here were two of the more conspicuous ones.”

“Hmm. I’d hoped you might have an impetuous streak.”

Hoped? Maggie repeated inside her head. Surely he meant to say ‘imagined’.

“Now, tell me more about Sandra,” he said. He raised one eyebrow suggestively and Maggie frowned and shuffled lower in her seat.

“Sandra is far too young for you,” she said, concentrating on her beer.

“When Tom stopped laughing he continued to grin down at her. “She’s seems plenty old enough to make such decisions on her own. So how old do you think that makes me?”

Maggie tilted her head and took the opportunity to openly look at his face. She’d been invited to, after all. Square jaw. Mouth permanently on the verge of a smile. Straight nose that had never seen the back end of a fight. Scruffy dark hair, with a boyish fringe that made him seem younger than he likely was.

And bold hazel eyes luminous with mirth. Mirth and a fierce intelligence. Intelligence that spoke of experience, and vitality, and even self-deprecation that made Maggie wonder if this seemingly easygoing guy had known times when not everything had gone his way.

Simply put, the guy had character radiating from his pores. Man of the earth character. Nothing manicured or elegant about him. She wondered briefly if he had ever even owned a suit and tie.

“If I say I think you’re nearer forty,” she said, “you’ll likely throw that beer in my face. And if I say you’re closer to my twenty-nine I’m certain you’ll kiss my feet. Somewhere in between is as close as I am willing to guess.”

“Somewhere in between is pretty close.” His eyes glittered. “But no fear, Maggie, I would never let go of a good beer in such a fashion.”

He tipped said beer her way in salute before taking another swig, and leaving her with the unspoken impression that he might yet still find it in him to kiss her feet. If she’d thought her seat uncomfortable before, she’d had no idea.

“Did I choose a good beer?” Maggie asked, deliberately changing the subject. She slithered lower in her chair and let her legs stick out straight in front of her, crossed at the ankles.

Tom pushed away from the back railing and came to sit in a chair beside hers. His big frame dwarfed the small seat and his long legs stretched out so that their feet almost touched.

“I’m enjoying every second of it,” he said, smiling over the top of his haIf-empty bottle. He was teasing. She felt it skidding and sliding across her nerves and along the back of her neck, before settling in a swirling mass in her tummy.

“Really?” she asked, taking a mouthful of confidence-inducing amber bubbles. “Because I’m beginning to wonder if underneath the grease and dust and stubble, you’re actually a merlot man at heart.”

Again that bark of loud, confident laughter sparked against her, bringing an indulgent smile to her own face.

Truth was, she didn’t really think he was any such thing. In fact she quite liked the fact that he was a beer and sweat and suntan man. Especially since, for the first time since she had arrived in Portsea, she found herself enjoying acting the part of a beer and sweat and suntan girl.

“And what on earth is a merlot man?” Tom asked.

She kicked out with her foot and pointed at his denim-clad calf, before sliding it down to nudge against his boot. “A man who wears Diesel jeans and two-hundred-dollar Doc Martens to weed a garden.”

For a brief second she thought she saw his cheeks grow pink beneath his stubble.

But she knew better than anyone that clothes rarely made the man. A guy in a beautiful suit could be the biggest villain on the planet. And with the money she could make selling just one portrait, she could afford to wear Ferragamo top to toe and not much care about paint splatters.

“A merlot man is someone who likes the finer things in life,” she continued now she had him on the ropes. “A good wine. Lobster and caviar as opposed to fish and chips at The Sorrento Sea Captain. And, since you love The Big Blue so very much, we’ve already established you know how to appreciate a fine piece of art.”

The laughter in his eyes subsided as his gaze traveled the length of her, from the top of her messy head to the tips of her dirty feet. There was no doubt that the piece of art he was appraising in that moment was her.

But when he looked her in the eye, his gaze was lazy and teasing. “Naaah,” he drawled. “I could go a newspaper filled with hot chips any day, any time.”

Maggie laughed. Just as she’d hoped.

No, not hoped. And why was the word hoped being bandied about so much tonight? It was just as she’d expected. Until he added, “Though it has been some time since I’ve tasted lobster.”

Maggie took another sip of beer and decided to leave that statement alone. “So what are you going to do since your kindly boss has given you the weekend off?”

“Fish.”

“Like in a boat?”

“Perhaps. Or off the Rye Pier. This time of year you can catch calamari by the bucket-load.”

“And then what?”

Then I’ll fish some more. And if I actually catch anything, and if the fish are big enough and old enough and ugly enough, I’ll clean them, de-bone them, cook them over an open fire and eat them. Who needs The Sorrento Sea Captain when you’ve got the ocean blue?”

“I meant what else will you do besides fish? There’s a whole big bright weekend ahead of you with no need for chainsaws or heavy labor.”

““What do you do when you’re not painting?” he asked.

That shut her up quick smart. For the truth was since she’d come here she didn’t do much. Back in Melbourne she visited galleries, went to parties, did interviews, taught classes, went shopping, made friends. Here she bit her fingernails, paced. drank too much coffee and took unnecessary drives around town to get herself out of the house. But she always returned to her work. It had become a compulsion, as if whatever was inside her had to come out on to the canvas. If only she had a clue what she was trying to say.

Tom finished his beer and placed the bottle carefully on the wobbly mosaic table then looked out at the ripe orange sky.

“So we’ve decided I left behind my merlot tastes in Sydney,” he said. “How is your life most different since you left Melbourne?”

Maggie swirled her beer, transfixed by the rising bubbles. “Oh, it’s different, all right. This is the first time I have lived on my own.”

“Ever?” Tom asked.

“Yep. My dad walked out on us really suddenly when I was sixteen. Within the week, in a fit of teenage angst, I’d moved in with my then boyfriend’s family. No big surprise that lasted all of a fortnight. Nevertheless I’ve lived with someone in some capacity or another ever since.”

“And now you’re free to come and go as you please. With whomever you please. Answering to no one. This place has its advantages, don’t you think?”

She shot Tom a quick look but he was still looking out into the growing darkness. “I guess,” she said. “But I miss the feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day. Time here is like the horizon staring back at me from my lounge room windows - it seems to go on for ever.”

“All that unwritten future,” he said, summing it up perfectly.

“It makes me nervous,” she admitted.

“It makes me feel right at home,” he said. “Nothing ever turns out how you expect it to in life. Ever. So I’ve learnt not to expect anything. That way you can only be pleasantly surprised.”

“And that works for you?” she asked.

“That works for me.”

Tom leant back and crossed his arms behind his head so that Maggie had a fabulous view of more manly muscles than she had probably seen in a lifetime of knowing suit and tie men. She really was glad this man had never worked behind a desk.

“Though when I first lived alone I admit I did miss the constant company,” he said, but he kept his gaze on the sunset.

“I can’t complain there, really,” Maggie said. “I have the girls at least once a week, even though they are barking mad. I have Smiley. And the weekly grocery delivery guy from Rye, though he can’t string more than two words together around me. And, well, I now have you.”

He finally turned at that. Maggie had known he would, but whether buoyed by half a bottle of beer, or the tranquil haIf-darkness, or the relaxing lull of conversation, she’d said it anyway.

She’d grown accustomed to having him around. And at the end of the next week she hoped he wouldn’t disappear from her life altogether. Maybe they could - what? Be friends? Go fishing? He’d mentioned bowling once.

For once Tom’s eyes weren’t overflowing with charm and laughter; they were filled instead with unfathomable depth and shadows. And it did worse things to her equilibrium than usual. Who was she kidding? The last thing she had on her mind when she’d said those words was bowling.

She uncrossed her feet and cleared her throat, the international sign for this has been fun but maybe we should call it a night. But Tom reached over and opened the packet of crisps. He held out the bag to her.

“Want some?” he asked.

And it didn’t take a genius to figure he wasn’t talking about the crisps. But she could hardly say no. She was the one who’d supplied them in the first place. She settled back into the chair, took a handful of crisps and gave him an ambiguous smile.

“So, Mr Handyman, here’s a question for you,” she said, trying to act nonchalant, as though a new level of tension hadn’t suddenly come to settle on the night. “Did I make the most stupid decision of my life buying this old house on a whim?”

She found she really wanted to know. For the first time since she had moved into the huge empty house, she wanted to know what might one day be done to fix it up, to make it beautiful again, desirable. She wanted to see it through Tom’s eyes.

“They say real estate is the best investment a person can make,” he said. “If something ever happened to the house, at the very least you’ll always have a patch of land on to which you can pitch a tent.”

Maggie’s heart wrenched unexpectedly at the thought of something happening to Belvedere. She pressed her bare toes into the splintered deck as though holding on a little bit tighter than she had been before that moment.

“There’s a peeling piece of wallpaper in my bedroom upstairs,” she said. “And though from day one I have been itching to peel it away, to see what’s hiding beneath, I’m kind of scared it would turn out to be a load-bearing strip and the whole house would collapse around me.”

Tom laughed. Then, deciding that her original question had been on the level, he looked through the open back door, his keen eyes taking in the warped wooden floor and the flaky ceiling paint.

She followed his gaze to see the messy drop cloth, the lack of furniture and the fact that she could still throw all her possessions in the back of her Jeep and be gone from the place in an hour and there would be no evidence she had even ever been there.

It hit her like a sucker punch to the stomach. How had she imagined she was doing right by herself, living like that, just to keep a roof over her head? To prove to people who probably couldn’t care less that she could manage on her own? She thought of the fridge full of exotic groceries and felt way more proud of that decision than the majority she’d made over the past six months.

She looked back at Tom to find him no longer looking at her house with a handyman’s eye. He was watching her. “So what do you think?” she asked, her throat dry. ““What should I do?”

“I think,” he said, taking his time with each word, “it’s fine the way it is.”

Maggie laughed out loud and was surprised by the harsh sound. “But it’s a dump. On that recommendation I would guess that you were booted out of the renovation industry!”

“It’s not a dump, Maggie; it’s unique and utterly charming. There are no wholesale changes needed. It just needs a little tender love and care.”

Tom’s eyes softened, crinkles fanned out, making him look as though he was smiling, though there really wasn’t any reason for him to be. Then his long strong arm slowly lowered from its place behind his head and he ran a finger across her forehead and tucked a stray wisp of hair behind her ear.

Maggie couldn’t even hope to disguise the sigh that escaped her lips at his small sign of tenderness. A human touch. A man’s touch. Tom’s touch. It was all she could do not to lean into his hand and purr.

But then, before she was able to fully enjoy it, it was gone. Tom was moving away from her, standing, stretching his arms over his head, the manly creak and crack of joints jolting her out of her shameful reverie. She let out a long wavering breath and stood on wobbly legs.