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Billionaire On Her Doorstep
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CHAPTER TWO
A FEW hours later, Maggie glanced down at the mug of Jamaican Roast perched in between her water jars to find it had become paint dust swimming in cold dregs.
She moved to the edge of her drop cloth, wiped her feet—which was more a decade-old habit than any intention to keep the floor paint-free—refixed her hair and then shuffled into the kitchen to make another coffee.
As she waited for the kettle to boil, she leant her backside against the kitchen bench and stretched the crick in her neck. The tendon along the top of her right shoulder was aching. Back in Melbourne she would have taken a quick trip to Maurice for a life-affirming massage. But back in Melbourne she had been able to afford Maurice. Here, with her single bank account dwindling to near drastic levels while she paid the colossal mortgage on the big house around her, she had to make do with a heat pack at the end of the day.
She started at the anomalous sound of thrashing foliage breaching the unvarying Portsea peace and quiet. At first she thought it was Smiley out adventuring. Then she remembered the stranger in her midst. She turned and, standing on tiptoe, looked through the kitchen window. But he must have moved somewhere under the house.
When she’d found Tom Campbell’s name in the phone book she’d half expected some wizened, semi-retired jack-of-all-trades working to earn extra bingo money. She’d fully expected wizened old Tom Campbell to take one look at her brambles, run a sorry arm across his wrinkled forehead and claim the way through an impossibility.
She’d been prepared for that eventuality, ready for it to be the last in a long line of signs that her experimental life at the beach had come to an end. The other clear signs being no money left in the bank, no brilliance happening on the canvas and not even the slightest sense that she would ever fit in, no matter how hard she wished she could.
What she hadn’t been prepared for was Tom Campbell himself. He’d surprised the heck out of her by actually being there when he said he would, and also by being the complete opposite of wizened. He was in his mid-thirties with dark hair in need of a cut. He was broad, strapping, in shockingly good health. And had the kind of smile built to warm the coldest heart. Then he’d further compounded her surprise by taking one look at her impossible brambles and saying, ‘Can do’.
The sight of that thirty metre wide wall of thorns should have sent him running in terror. The guy must have needed a pay cheque worse than she did.
She bit at her bottom lip, not all that sure if she was relieved or disappointed that his can do attitude had given her decision time a stay of execution. She was sure it would cost a considerable amount to pull apart the great twisted wall of leaves and branches blocking her from the promise of—what? A few jagged rocks? Maybe, if she was lucky, a skinny patch of sand? But if he could get through the wall to the virgin beach beyond, then she could stretch out her finances and her resolve until then.
The kettle boiled and, with a fresh mug warming her tender, wood-scratched palms, Maggie slipped out of the kitchen and through the back door. She eased over to the edge of the balcony, rested her forearms along the brittle railing and looked one floor below to where her handyman was once again hard at work.
At some stage that morning he had ditched his sweater. His soft grey T-shirt, now drenched in sweat, twisted around his torso as he used his substantial might to heave threads of dead vines from the mass of brush. His tool belt lay neatly across the bottom step next to a lumpy pillowcase with a rag poking out the top.
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 worksite.
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 mean 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 skilful hands. Which were only welcome in her garden. On her plants.
‘Inside,’ she said to Smiley. ‘I must be more famished than I realise.’
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 realised 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 favourite 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. Sceptical, 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 colours 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 realised that Maggie was humming.
Tom took another step, his boot-clad foot rolling heel, instep, toe, not yet ready to be discovered.
It was such a subtle sound it was more of a tuneful breath than a hum, but he was sure he recognised the song. Was it something classical? He was more of a classic rock fan himself, but he knew the tune. Or maybe he only recognised the feeling behind the husky, sonorous, faraway note threading from Maggie’s throat and curling itself out into the room like the thin tendrils of smoke from a torch singer’s cigarette.
Tom breathed it in, but it was too late before he realised his intake of breath was louder than her subdued singing.
Maggie turned from the hips, a skinny, dry paintbrush clenched between her teeth like a rose for a tango dancer.
‘I’m done for the day,’ he said, his right foot cocked guiltily.
She slid the paintbrush from between her teeth and blinked several times before he was entirely certain she remembered who he was and what he was doing there.
How’s that for gratitude? he thought, placing his right foot and his sensibilities firmly on the ground.
‘The backyard,’ he said by way of a reminder, ‘will take me over a week. Probably closer to two. And you were right about the chainsaw. We’ll also need a skip to dispose of the mess so the spores won’t bring it all back again by the end of the summer. My cousin Alex owns the hardware store in Rye, so I’ll talk to him tomorrow and then I can give you a formal quote.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said, her bare feet twisting until her legs caught up with her hips. ‘Go ahead. Take the two weeks. Order the equipment. Do whatever it takes.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to wait for my quote before deciding?’
‘Positive. If you think you can do it, I want to go ahead. But if you would prefer I pay you upfront, I can give you some cash now,’ she said, her gaze shifting to the edge of his face on the last couple of words. ‘I have enough. Plenty.’
She made a move to step off her drop cloth but then stopped just as her toes scrunched around the edge. Her eyes shifted again until she looked him in the eye, and out of nowhere her sharp edges softened until all he could think of was mussed hair and long lean lines and winsome entreaty.
Tom was infinitely glad in that moment that she hadn’t yet figured out that he was the man who couldn’t say no. If she asked him to work through the night he wondered whether he might just turn around and head back out to the scratchy leaves.
‘Oh no,’ she said, blushing madly. ‘I used the last of my cash on paint yesterday. Can I write you a cheque?’
‘A cheque will be fine,’ he said, his voice unusually gruff. He cleared his throat. ‘There’s no rush, though. You can hardly skip out on me. I know where you live.’
In order to ease some of the unexpected tension from the room, Tom winked and tried his charming smile on for size. But Maggie just blinked some more, those big grey eyes deep and unfathomable. If anything, she drew further inside herself, scrunching her toes into the grey sheet beneath her feet.
Tom had a sudden vision of Tess laughing herself silly at him—grinning and winking and flirting and making plans to wow the beguilingly aloof newcomer with his wit and charm—while the beguilingly aloof newcomer looked at him as if he was a piece of lint clogging what was surely a very nice view of the navel she so liked gazing at.
And Tess would have been in the right. The summer romance he had quite happily envisaged all morning wasn’t going to happen. For Maggie smelled of Sonia Rykiel. And he smelled of sweat. She was a city girl doing an abominable job of pretending to be a beach girl, and he was a beach boy trying his best to pretend he’d never had a life anywhere else.
Her drop cloth said it all. She had no intention of leaving her mark—not on this house, not on this town and not on some cocky handyman flitting through her life.
‘Ten a.m. tomorrow okay?’ he asked, taking a step back.
‘Ten a.m. Ten p.m. I’ll be here, chained to my painting, trying to prise Smiley off my feet,’ she said. Then from nowhere her cheek suddenly creased into the beginnings of a rueful grin and for a brief second she was engaging, not all that aloof, and downright gorgeous.
He took another deliberate step towards the front door. ‘See you then, Maggie.’
‘See you then, Tom.’
Tom turned and walked out the fern-laden front entrance, past the saddest-looking dog in the world and through the crumbling ruins of her front yard; he had the feeling he would never forget any odd detail of meeting Maggie Bryce, no matter how she might wish him to do so.
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