Billionaire on Her Doorstep by Ally Blake Page A

on her freckled arms, carrying a huge tartan picnic blanket and a cooler filled with gourmet foods.
    “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