Billionaire on Her Doorstep by Ally Blake Page B

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.