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Billionaire On Her Doorstep
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CHAPTER THREE
THE next morning Tom parked at the back of Maggie’s house on the dot of ten, the tray of his truck filled with all sorts of weird and wonderful appliances borrowed from Alex’s hardware store.
In a repeat of the day before, Smiley lifted his head for a scratch behind the ear when Tom met him at the front door, and inside Lady Bryce was to be found staring at her painting.
Overnight Tom had managed to talk down the potency of the impact she’d made on him, putting it all down to becoming overcome with paint fumes. But seeing her in the flesh again, he had to admit that, despite the insomnia and lack of furniture, and issues the likes of which a determinedly casual guy like he had no intention of getting mixed up in, she truly was an enchanting soul.
She was dressed down again, this time in a yellow hooded top and dark brown cargoes, her dust-coloured hair pulled back into a messy ponytail and held back by a red bandanna, but beneath it all she had the posture of a princess.
Add to that her dark and delicious scent that bombarded him the second he walked inside her front door, and Tom knew that if she ever let down that prickly guard of hers for longer than ten seconds over a stale cheese and tomato sandwich, Lady Bryce would be some package.
His gaze slid sideways to the big blue painting. To his eyes it was exactly how he remembered it. No progress had been made.
He’d never tried to paint a picture since primary school, but he knew enough about creativity to know there was more to a lack of inspiration than the need for a deadline. Having to produce a finished painting of a tree by the end of class hadn’t made him an artist.
But then again Maggie was different. Different from him, anyway. Didn’t she crave male company besides that of a glum canine? And something else to drink besides coffee? And furniture? Didn’t she crave furniture? Why did she have no furniture?
The more the questions about Maggie mounted, the more he wanted to know the answers. All the answers. Like how she could still be so dumbfoundingly immune to his smiles and why, despite her reserve, he still cared.
‘Morning, Maggie,’ he said a mite louder than necessary.
When she spun to face him he was pleased to see that it only took about a second for her to remember exactly who he was.
‘Oh, good morning, Tom.’ She had dark smudges of grey beneath her eyes and if she wasn’t in a different outfit he might have guessed that she’d pulled an all-nighter. Though the three coffee mugs lined up behind her water jars told a different story. ‘How did you go with your supplies?’
‘Great. I’m all ready to make a go of it.’
‘Coffee?’ she asked, already moving off her drop cloth and towards the long skinny kitchen.
‘You bet.’
‘Did you get the chance to formalise the quote?’ she asked as she tucked her bandanna into the back pocket of her cargo pants, shook out her long ponytail and retied it, scrubbed her hands clean, then put the kettle on to boil.
They agreed on a time limit—two weeks, and a price—enough to keep Tom in hot dinners for the next month even if the ocean ran dry of fish, and enough that he noticed a rapid widening of Maggie’s soft grey eyes despite the fact that she didn’t hesitate to reach straight for her cheque book from an otherwise bare kitchen drawer.
Tom held up both hands. ‘How about we save all that for the last day?’
Her eyes narrowed, as though trying to figure out how he was planning to screw her over.
‘It’s probably not the best business practice,’ he said, ‘but I’ve found it helps keeps relations friendly. This way I get treated like a helpful guest rather than having to deal with the odd situation of working for a friend.’
‘If you’re sure you’d prefer it that way,’ she said, turning away from him, closing the cheque book and sliding it into the empty kitchen drawer.
‘I do. After all’s said and done, we exchange a discreet envelope and a handshake before organising the next bowling outing or dinner invite.’
Her eyes widened ever so slightly. Did she think he was hitting on her? Had he accidentally given himself an avenue to do so?
Tom wondered what Maggie might say if he made the dinner invite suggestion concrete. Maybe something casual at his place with another couple to keep it relaxed. Alex and Marianne were always good for a laugh when you could get them away from their brood of five girls under the age of eight.
A heavy furry lump landed upon Tom’s toes. And the moment was gone.
‘Smiley, come on,’ Maggie said, clicking her fingers at the despondent-looking creature. But Smiley wasn’t silly. He could play deaf with the best of them.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, her cheek twitching. ‘You could try giving him a little shove.’
But Smiley let his chin slump on to his crossed front legs with a great rush of air streaming from his nostrils. He wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Sorry,’ she said again. ‘He spends half his day sitting on my toes. He looks miserable but really he’s just a big mushy bundle of love.’
Tom smiled. ‘It’s fine.’
She took a step closer and clicked madly at the dog. And over the scent of Smiley, Tom once more caught a wave of Maggie’s perfume. For a woman who wore not a lick of makeup and so clearly didn’t feel the need to dress up for him, the aesthetic nature of that elegant scent was an anomaly.
And anomalies were intriguing. Even to the most invulnerable of men. Search and discover—it was as instinctive to the human male as breathing.
Maybe inviting her to dinner wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. But without the chaperons. Candlelight. No, moonlight. On his back deck. Fresh calamari, barbecued. And a cold liberating beer to wash it all down…
Maggie moved closer still, bent down to her haunches and looked Smiley in the eye. Though Tom was sure the dog knew it for the ruse it was, he hauled his great hulking form off the floor and padded over to his mistress for a big cuddle before heading over to sit in the kitchen doorway.
The walking talking anomaly in question stood, and suddenly there was nothing between the two of them bar a metre of space and warm swirls of hot spring sea air. He saw the moment Maggie knew it too. Her mouth slowly turned downwards and she thrust her hands in her back pockets.
Tom’s instincts hollered at him to hunt and gather. To smile, to flirt, to grow a backbone and simply ask her out. What was so important about furniture, really?
But every lick of sense in his body told him to leave well enough alone and get back to work. Despite the bare feet and mussed hair, this woman wasn’t in the same place he was. She was haughty and urbane, all sharp edges and scepticism. His head knew that would hardly make for a fun date. If only his impulses were half as rational.
Tom downed the remainder of his black coffee in one hit, thus negating every scent bar the strong roasted beans. He rinsed the mug and left it upside down on the sink and moved out of the skinny kitchen.
‘What time would you like lunch?’ Maggie called out before he got as far as the back door.
He turned to find her standing in the kitchen doorway, her long length leaning against the door jamb, her fingers unconsciously running up and down Smiley’s forehead and curling about his ears.
And though he had a bunch of ham and avocado sandwiches, fruit and a block of dark chocolate in a cooler in his truck, Tom found himself saying, ‘Whenever you’re having yours.’
As he walked down the back steps he didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He could feel her guarded grey eyes watching him all the way.
Maggie’s work in progress was going nowhere fast. And considering she spent all day every day looking out over one of the most inspirational views any artist could hope to find—well, bar whomever Michelangelo based the David upon—it was frustrating as hell.
True she hadn’t painted a landscape in years. Her talent had always run to portraits. From the first picture she’d ever painted for her dad when she was four years old to grade school art class, to her art school scholarship days, to her first showing and onwards.
But when she’d first moved to Portsea she hadn’t been able to shrug off a few particular faces that she had no intention of painting. So she’d decided to try her hand at something new, something innocuous, something safe: landscapes. But so far they all had the emotional impact of a pot plant.
Rubbing a hand over her tight neck muscles, she stepped off her cloth and let her body flop forward until her hands were touching the ground. As the blood rushed to her head, mercifully blocking out the faces therein, Maggie heard a strain of something familiar tickle at the back of her mind.
She stood up so fast she almost blacked out, but the sound was still there. Music. She’d heard music.
Drawn to the sound like scattered iron filings to a magnet, she followed it down the back steps and around the side of the house, to find Tom sitting on the flat bed of his truck with a grindstone in one hand and a set of garden shears in the other. A small black radio roosted atop the cab of his truck, blaring out an early INXS song.
Maggie stayed in the shadows, watching as Tom sharpened the shears, the muscles along his back clenching with a measured rhythm. There was nothing rushed about the way he worked, as though his time was his alone.
She only wished she could be that laid-back. She’d tried, really she had, going with the Wednesday girls to wine and cheese clubs and early morning t’ai chi on the beach. But all she’d wanted to do afterwards was indulge in a healthy dose of road rage or to scream at the referees at a footy match to relieve the tension build-up in her head.
Freya had suggested she ought to blame it all on her deadbeat dad and that hypnotherapy would help. Maggie thought it more likely she was suffering from withdrawal from the little cherry and white chocolate muffins she used to buy from the café below her apartment every Sunday.
But there was Tom, a Sydney guy oozing a kind of laid-back charm that Maggie had believed she could never achieve even after a million years of t’ai chi. So how did he come to be that relaxed? Melbourne was a challenging city, but Sydney was ten times so.
Unless of course she was thinking about it all wrong. Maybe he’d always been mellow and had never quite had it in him to run the rat race and that was why he’d moved to Sorrento when his sister no longer needed him there. She wasn’t sure if that thought made her feel better or worse.
She must have made a noise. Or perhaps Tom had sensed her watching him. Either way, he turned, pinning her with that hot hazel gaze. He watched her for a few moments, giving away nothing, before his shoulders relaxed, an easy smile melted away all earlier single-minded concentration and Tom the laid-back charmer was back.
‘Howdy,’ he drawled.
‘Hi,’ she said, her voice strangely breathy.
‘What’s up?’
She came away from her hiding place, placing her bare feet carefully as she walked to avoid the prickles. ‘I heard music.’
Tom closed one eye and squinted over his shoulder at his stereo. ‘It’s not too loud, is it?’
She shook her head. ‘Not at all. I love this song. I haven’t heard it since I was a teenager.’
Tom reached over and turned the stereo up a fraction and Maggie felt the familiar assertive beat pulsing more strongly through her veins with every footfall.
‘I used to always have music playing in the background when I worked,’ she said. ‘Though it was usually classical CDs. Sometimes I would get one piece in my head and I had to listen to it over and over for weeks while I worked on a particular painting. It drove everyone else mad.’
Her voice faded and she waited for him to enquire as to whom the ‘everyone else’ might be, but he merely looked up at her with that carefree, smiling face of his. Such a nice face, she thought—lots of character. The kind of face that would light well, easily capturing shadows and allowing those intelligent eyes to become the focus of the piece. Not that she had any intention of painting the guy, ever.
‘I’ve got this song on CD. I could lend it to you.’
‘I could probably do with all the help I can get right now,’ she admitted. And it was a pretty nice song actually. Moody. Evocative.
‘Have you got an iPod?’ he asked.
She shook her head. She had once. She wished then that she’d thought to bring it with her when she’d left Melbourne. But she’d been in such a terrible hurry that night, such a blinding self-directed rage, and all she’d been thinking of was the need to get away…
Maybe a small second-hand stereo wouldn’t be such a stretch. She could shift the dial a centimetre to the left from where it usually rested and it might make all the difference. A new music station for a new place. A new song for a new painting.
‘So why do you need help?’ Tom asked.
‘My painting sucks,’ she shot back, and felt as surprised as he looked. ‘Wow, I can’t believe I just said that out loud. I’ve never told anyone when I’ve felt blocked before.’
‘Why on earth not?’ he asked. ‘Everyone’s allowed to have a down patch every now and then.’
‘Once it’s out there,’ she said, ‘you can never take it back. Like if I ever said my painting sucked, then that would make it so.’
It occurred to Maggie that she had given her life the same treatment—smiling her way through the down patches, only pouring out her feelings on to the canvas, and look where that had landed her. Alone, all but broke and drooling over the idea of buying a second-hand stereo.
Tom lowered his shears and shuffled his backside sideways, leaving a space for her to sit beside him if she so desired. And it didn’t take much thought for her to decide that she did.
She placed a hand on the hot metal tray and lifted herself up. Tom’s feet touched the ground but she had to point her toes to touch dirt. She gave up and let her long legs swing free.
‘I like it,’ he said. ‘Your painting.’
She turned her head an inch and squinted up at him, to find that those dark hazel eyes were even more intimidating up close and personal. It made her feel slightly unsettled.
‘No, you don’t,’ she said.
‘Sure I do. Blue’s my favourite colour,’ he insisted. ‘And your painting has a lot of blue in it. So far there’s nothing about it for me not to like.’ His mouth didn’t need to move for her to know that he was smiling inside.
‘Heathen,’ she said, rolling her eyes, and turning away to hide her own budding smile.
After a few moments of collective silence, Tom asked, ‘So what is it a painting of, exactly?’
Maggie laughed, the sensation decompressing her a little. Her feet stopped swinging. Her hands unclenched from the edge of the truck’s tray. And her shoulders lowered a good inch.
She went to tell him it was the vista out of her window, but even she knew it wasn’t that. It wasn’t even nearly close to being that. ‘It’s the last in a long line of paintings of a blue smudge,’ she said. ‘And, since you like blue so very much, if you want it you can have it.’
He glanced at her and then he nodded. ‘Deal. But only if we agree that I can have The Big Blue in lieu of payment.’
Maggie opened her mouth to argue, to ask how he could survive on her job alone if he wasn’t getting paid for it, but the devil on her shoulder screamed at her to take the deal. The money she’d earmarked would come in more handy to her than she would ever admit out loud. But the angel on her other shoulder gently reminded her she’d been kidding when she’d made the offer.
‘It’s a deal-breaker,’ Tom said before she could get a word in. ‘I get the painting or the dough. I won’t accept both.’
Maggie closed her eye to the angel and said, ‘Okay. Deal.’ Heck, if they’d made the same arrangement a year before he would have come out the better by far. It wasn’t her fault his timing was unlucky.
Tom leaned back, away from her, so that he could make sure she was really looking at him. ‘But it’s not finished yet, is it?’
‘How can you tell?’
‘You wouldn’t spend so much time staring at the thing if you were done with it, would you?’ he asked.
She shrugged and looked up the grassy hill towards her front gate, not at all equipped for this stranger, this man, to know her quite so well so quickly.
‘So go on,’ he said. ‘You’ve given me two weeks to get this mess of a backyard cleaned up. I’ll give you the same two weeks to finish my painting.’
‘Two weeks? At the rate I’m going, I reckon it’s going to take more like two years.’
Tom’s bottom lip jutted out as he absorbed this new piece of information. ‘I thought I remembered you telling me you work better under pressure.’
Maggie felt a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth but she kept her gaze dead ahead. ‘Was that me?’
‘It was. So consider this pressure. But because I think you drink too much coffee, and I’d like you to get some sleep during that time, I’ll let you off the hook just a little. I’ll still be here in two years, so if that’s what it will take, that’s what it’ll take.’
Maggie blinked. Imagining where she would be two weeks into the future was quite enough to grasp, but two years? Two years ago she was living on another planet, living another person’s life. Two years ago she was the toast of the town, selling faster than any other fine artist in Australia, happily married, or so she’d thought…
She took in a deep breath and looked around her. Salty sea air tickled the back of her nose. The distant sound of circling seagulls split the air. A big, beautiful, unconventional house disintegrated silently beside her, while a disturbingly charismatic man she barely knew sat all too comfortably a bare inch to her left. So whose life was she living now?
With a heartfelt sigh that was a million miles from contented, she slid slowly off the back of the truck and took a couple of steps back towards the house.
‘Off in search of more distractions?’ Tom asked. There was a definite twinkle in his eye that Maggie chose to ignore, for this guy was already becoming the kind of distraction she oughtn’t to indulge in.
‘Always. So you really think I can have this painting done in two weeks?’ she asked, walking backwards.
He grinned and nodded. ‘Somebody once told me there’s nothing like a deadline to get a person inspired.’
Maggie gave him a smile, one that she felt bubble up from some long buried place inside her, before she sauntered back to the house, humming a lively tune.
‘I don’t know what you’re grizzling about. It’s great.’
Later that afternoon Maggie blinked frantically to pull herself out of the gold and indigo smeared horizon to find Tom walking towards her, a mug of freshly brewed coffee in his hands.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The Big Blue. He’s coming along nicely.’
She twirled a thin, dry paintbrush between her fingers as she watched Tom’s eyes flicker appreciatively over the large canvas. That afternoon she’d added some colourful smears to the upper half, so though it still mightn’t be any good, or any thing, at least it was progress.
Tom moved to stand beside her, so close Maggie could feel heat waves emanating from his sun-drenched skin. His heavy work boots half disappeared into the folds of her huge drop cloth. He brought his coffee to his mouth and took a swig, but his eyes never once left the painting.
Her stomach took a small happy trip as she experienced the thrill that came with seeing someone making a connection with one of her paintings.
‘It’s really growing on me,’ he said. ‘Yep, this one’s going to look just right on the wall in my john.’
Maggie coughed out a laugh. It was so without warning that her stomach kind of clenched. The sensation wasn’t in any way uncomfortable but it made her feel off kilter all the same. She crossed her arms low over her belly.
‘If you’re even thinking about putting this painting on your toilet wall, Tom Campbell, the deal’s off.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Okay. Though more people would get to enjoy it there than anywhere else in my house.’
He turned to face her so quickly she hoped he didn’t realise she had been staring at him rather than the subject of their conversation. She glanced away quickly, but not before she’d noticed the solid crease appear above the corner of his mouth.
‘I’m kind of glad my agent won’t get to see this one,’ she admitted.
‘You have an agent?’
She faced him fully and glared. ‘I thought we had decided you thought I was talented.’
He laughed, his eyes creasing, every part of him seeming to overflow with amusement. Beneath her crossed arms it now felt as though her stomach had flipped all the way over.
‘Sorry,’ he said, his eyes dancing. ‘Of course we had. That came out wrong. It’s just that we get painters out here all the time. In summer they line the beaches, painting beach huts and sunsets over Sorrento. But I just never knew anybody personally who’d actually sold anything.’
Maggie shrugged. ‘Well, now you do.’
Tom nodded, kept watching her, and she felt the word personally dig into her mind and take hold. She let her arms drop, then began twirling the paintbrush again to give herself something to do with her suddenly nervy hands.
‘How do you do that?’ he asked, shifting closer and glancing at her hand.
‘It’s easy,’ she said. ‘Much easier than actually painting, therefore one of the all-time great distractions.’
He held out a hand. ‘Show me how?’
Maggie stopped twirling, clamping the wood into a closed fist. She dropped the brush into Tom’s open palm, careful not to let her fingers touch his.
He looked down the barrel of the brush for any aerodynamic imperfections, weighed it in his palm, then held it between his forefinger and his thumb, swinging it back and forth, as though the brush would give into his mighty will and perform the trick on its own.
‘It’s physically impossible,’ he finally said. ‘It’s too long to fit between the gaps in my fingers.’
‘Oh, rubbish.’ Maggie plucked a larger brush from her stash and tucked it between her first and middle fingers. ‘It has nothing to do with physics and everything to do with faith.’
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.
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