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Billionaire On Her Doorstep
Ally Blake
To my gorgeous husband, Mark,
and our fabulous first ten years together. Love you always….
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER ONE
TOM CAMPBELL slammed the door of his trusty rusty Ute, not bothering to lock it. Not because he wouldn’t have cared if it was pinched. Or because the area had an unparalleled neighbourhood watch programme. But because it didn’t need to.
The good people of Portsea were more likely to make a steal as doctors or lawyers or footballers than to steal a dilapidated tradesman’s car. For Portsea was the land of high brushwood fences and vast homes with purely ornamental tennis courts and architecturally designed swimming pools posturing magnificently on the tip of the Mornington Peninsula.
Tom hitched his tool belt higher on his hips, threw a pink pillowcase full of old rags over his shoulder and strode through one such brushwood gate graced with the word ‘Belvedere’ burnt into a lump of moss-covered wood.
From the top of the dipping dirt driveway he caught glimpses of white wood and a slate-grey tiled roof, which was not an unusual combination for a house by the beach. What was unusual was that, unlike other properties in Portsea, Belvedere wasn’t manicured to within an inch of its life. In fact it wasn’t manicured at all.
As the foliage cleared, he saw a house that looked as if it had been built over fifty years by half a dozen architects with incompatible visions. At least five levels ambled down the sloping hill towards the cliff’s edge. Most of the original pale green shutters were closed to the morning light and by the deep orange rust on their hinges he guessed many hadn’t been opened in months. The rest was hidden behind what looked to be years of neglected foliage. If the local council had any idea that this place was in such disrepair they’d be up here in a Sorrento second waving their ordinances on beautification and escalating land value.
Many of the homes in Portsea were empty most of the year and needed nothing more than basic upkeep by overpaid full-time gardeners. As a hire-a-handyman he only did odd jobs. But this place…Already he could see it could do with a lick of paint. And the garden could do with some tender love and care, or a backhoe. It was a renovator’s dream. And Tom would be sure to tell Lady Bryce all of that once he had a damn clue what he was doing there in the first place.
Tom smiled to himself. Lady Bryce. That was what the Barclay sisters, the doyennes of Portsea who ran the local haberdashery, had labelled her because she hadn’t yet deigned to frequent their fine establishment.
He’d never met her either, though he had spied her driving down the Sorrento main street in her big black Jeep, large sunglasses and ponytail, eyes ahead, mouth in a determined straight line and fingers clamped to the steering wheel as though for dear life. And when weighing up working for a woman who at first glance seemed pretty highly strung against the time it would take away from his fishing he had considered declining politely. But, as usual, when it came to the crunch, he hadn’t had it in him to say no.
He could picture his cousin Alex laughing at him even considering turning down a damsel in distress, for Alex seemed to think Tom had some sort of knight in shining armour complex. Tom thought Alex ought to mind his own business.
He ducked out of the way of a low-hanging vine, watched his step for fear of turning an ankle and slowed as a magnificent ten-foot-high wood-carved double front door loomed amidst a shower of hanging ferns. The right door was ajar, but guarded by a sizeable old red-brown hound with a great big smiley-face charm with the word ‘Smiley’ written upon it hanging off his thick collar.
‘Smiley, hey?’ Tom said.
The dog lifted its weary head and blinked at him, its floppy ears and sad expression not changing a lick to show that he felt any pleasure at the unexpected company.
Tom reached down and gave the poor old soul a rub on the head. ‘Is the lady of the house about?’
A sudden crashing noise followed by a seriously unlady like spray of words told Tom that the lady of the house certainly was about.
‘Hello,’ he called out, but he was met with silence as sudden as the previous verbal spray had been. Not finding any evidence of a doorbell, he stepped over the melancholic guard dog and walked further inside the entrance to find himself face to face with a square stain on the wall, evidence that once upon a time a picture had hung there, a garden bench that had a mildewed look about it as though it had been relegated from outside, covered in a pile of unopened mail, and yet another fern living its sad, bedraggled life in a bright new ceramic pot.
Another curse word, this one softer than the last, caught his hearing and he followed it like a beacon to find himself in a huge main room with sweeping wooden floors in need of a good polish, lit bright by a series of uncurtained ceiling-to-floor French windows through which he had a thicket-shrouded view of the sun glinting off glorious Port Phillip Bay.
Images piled up in his mind of what he could do with this place if given half a chance. And the whole summer, and an open cheque book, and his old team at his side, and a time machine to take him back ten years…He shook his head to clear away the wool-gathering within.
The room he was in was empty. No furniture. No pictures on the walls. Nothing. Well, nothing bar a twisting cream telephone cord snaking across the middle of the room to the far wall, where a large grey drop cloth, buckets of paint, several flat, square structures draped in fabric, a rickety old table, which held numerous jars of coloured water and different sized paintbrushes, and an easel with a three-by-four-foot canvas slathered in various shades of blue.
And, in front of it all, wearing no shoes, paint-spattered jeans, a T-shirt that might at one time have been white and a navy bandanna covering most of her biscuit-blonde hair was the lady in question.
Tom cleared his throat and called out, ‘Ms Bryce?’
She spun on her heel with such speed that paint from her brush splattered across the all-blue canvas.
Tom winced. It was red paint.
‘Holy
