on the floor pretending to be a crystal. It was vital to her creativity but hard to explain to a sexy young man in a suit. She started to close the door.
Quick as a wink he wedged a polished shoe between the door and the jamb. “I understand you’re an artist.”
“Y-yes,” she said warily. She could imagine what tax accountants thought of artists—about as useful to society as bicycles were to fish. “I’m working on a portrait for the Archibald Prize.”
“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. May I come in?”
“As I said, I’m busy. I’ll file my tax return soon. Promise. On my honor and all that.” She gave the door another shove.
His foot didn’t budge. With his leg braced, his thigh muscle was outlined against his pant leg. “Then I’ll come back later. What time do you finish for the day?”
“I work all hours. Right through the night sometimes, when things are flowing.”
In reality, she hadn’t done any work on Sienna’s portrait for weeks but he didn’t need to know that. She hadn’t been completely idle, having whipped off a couple of small seascapes of Summerside Bay for the tourist trade. She just hadn’t done anything important.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be busy then, too!”
Again she pushed on the door to no avail. No doubt the Australian Taxation Office issued steel-reinforced shoes for cases like hers.
Apparently the agents were reinforced with steel, too. His black eyes glinted; his smile was grim. “Ms. Thatcher, you haven’t filed a tax return in four years. I will come back every day. I will camp on your doorstep if necessary, until you make the time to go through your accounts. Whether it takes weeks or months is of no difference to me. I have a job to do and I will do it.” He let his words sink in before he added almost casually, “If you don’t comply, I have the authority to call in the Federal Police.”
A flutter of panic made her reconsider the situation. But she hadn’t done anything wrong. True, she hadn’t filed her taxes but then again, she didn’t think she’d made enough money to pay tax. This was all a misunderstanding that would be cleared up quickly once he’d had a look at her accounts.
“Okay,” she capitulated, opening the door wider. “Come in. Let’s get this over with. Shoes off, please. I have a friend with a baby who’s still crawling.”
Color tinged his cheeks as he bent to remove his croc-skin loafers. Avoiding her gaze, he placed the shoes neatly beside her sandals, making them look tiny by comparison. Then she saw the reason for his embarrassment. His fourth toe poked through a hole in the left sock.
Suddenly Rafe Ellersley seemed less daunting, more human. She would have preferred to see him as the enemy.
Lexie led him into the sunny living room. Visible through the big window was the backyard containing a trampoline, her detached studio and, in the corner, a koi pond beneath a red-flowering camellia tree. She moved some art books off an armchair. “Have a seat.”
He lowered himself onto faded chintz covered in overblown pink roses, like Ferdinand the Bull in a field of flowers. Lexie sat opposite on the matching couch beneath the window, squished in between her sleeping Burmese cats, Yin and Yang. She tucked her legs up cross-legged and pulled down her full skirt.
“Why am I being audited?” she asked. “Is it random or are you guys targeting starving artists this year?”
“The tax office is focusing on small businesses,” he explained with a shrug. “This is an election year. The government wants to be seen to be doing its job.”
“But why me?” Lexie asked. “I’m a small fish.”
“Small fish, big fish, they all get caught eventually. As I said, you haven’t filed a tax return for the past four years.” He whipped out a small notebook and consulted it. “Yet last financial year you sold two paintings to an American tourist for forty thousand dollars.”
“Oh, right.” Lexie pressed paint-stained fingers to her mouth. They’d been her best sales to date. How could she have forgotten them? “I meant to declare them, honest.” She paused. “Er, how did you find out?”
“The man hung them in his office and declared them as a tax deduction. The American Internal Revenue Service, doing a random check, cross-referenced with our tax department. And here we are.”
“I don’t have any of that money left,” she said. “It’s gone. On rent, clothes, food…” Trivial things like that.
“Why didn’t you declare it?”
Procrastination again. “I was planning to average my income over five years.”
“Yet you didn’t do that, either.”
Lexie fidgeted, disturbing Yin, who looked up through green slits of eyes and twitched her creamy tail. Lexie stroked her, soothing her back to purring slumber. “I missed the cutoff date.”
“You had seven months from the sale of the painting in which to file.” Rafe Ellersley consulted his notebook again. “I understand you were an art teacher at Summerside Primary School until five years ago. Presumably you know how to file an income tax statement.”
“As a teacher with a fixed income, preparing a statement was easy. Since I quit my regular job I haven’t figured out all the ins and outs of what I need to do as a self-employed artist.”
“So you’ve simply ignored the problem, hoping it will go away.” Rafe wrote a few lines in his notebook.
“In a nutshell.” She glanced out the window, calculating the angle of the light slanting through the trees onto her detached studio. She’d hoped to have meditated her way into a creative state and be working by now. Instead, she was stuck here, talking to a tax agent. “How much time will the audit take?”
“That depends,” he said. “If your records are in order and easily accessible it could take only a few days.”
“Records?” Her fingers pleated the soft fabric of her skirt. She hadn’t been able to find her “filing system” for over a month.
“Tax receipts. As in, when you purchase paints and canvases you keep a receipt.” His dark eyes bored into her. “You do keep your receipts, don’t you?”
“Of course. I save everything in big manila envelopes.”
“I’d like you to get them for me, please. Everything for the past five years. Plus bank statements, utility bills, home and contents insurance, et cetera.”
“I would but there’s a small problem. I put the envelopes away for safekeeping and now I can’t find them.” When his black eyebrows pulled together, she added quickly, “Oh, don’t worry. I never throw anything away.” As anyone could guess just by looking at her house.
“What have you been doing with your receipts since then?” he asked.
“They’re around,” she said vaguely. Tossed in a drawer, tucked inside a novel as a bookmark, stuffed
