Billionaire on Her Doorstep by Ally Blake Read Free Book Online Page B

house surrounded by women. Even his daughter’s pet rabbits were female. Alex looked to Tom for manly succor. And Tom looked to Alex as his only remaining family. How could he let him down?
    “I’m afraid you do, Alex. For there is much to appreciate about my good lady employer.”
    “Don’t tell me she’s hot,”Alex insisted.
    Tom baulked at the implication. Hot was completely the wrong word for Maggie Bryce. If anything she was too cool. Friendly but reticent. Inquisitive but isolated. Like a bird that had had her wings clipped.
    “She’s intriguing,”Tom allowed.
    “Right,” Alex said, his disappointment at her not being an undercover Playboy bunny all too evident.
    “And it can’t have even been our third conversation when I told her about Tess,” Tom admitted before he’d even felt the words forming. He took another long sip of his beer as he waited for Alex’s gaping mouth to snap shut.
    “And why was that, do you think?” his cousin eventually asked.
    “I have not one single clue.”
    “Does she… remind you of Tess?”
    Tom shrugged. “Not all that much. She’s graceful, like a ballet dancer. Tess was a pipsqueak and a tomboy who’d never quite lost her baby fat. But Maggie’s a painter and you know Tess was a big art lover. Maybe that’s what made me mention her.”
    He looked to Alex, who merely shrugged.
    “But she is plucky. She has a wicked tongue on her. Pretty sarcastic at times. Tess would have loved that.”
    Everyone could do with a bit of spice in their diet, Tom thought, taking another swig of his beer. But he and Tess had always prized it more than most. Tom still missed their sparring matches. Every single day…
    “So, what’s her first name again?”
    “Hmm?” Tom said, breathing deep through his nose.
    “The painter with the wicked tongue.”
    “Maggie,” Tom said.
    And then suddenly Alex was facing the computer and typing again.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Googling her,”Alex said.
    Knowing it was wrong, and spying, and intrusive, Tom moved to look over Alex’s shoulder.
    “Well,” Alex said, “according to Google, Maggie Bryce is a thirteen-year-old skateboarding champ from Canberra, or a ninety-four-year-old horse strapper in Ireland. I could try adding intriguing and sarcastic as qualifiers but I’m not sure that’d help.”
    “May I?” Tom asked as he motioned to his desk, his chair and his laptop.
    “Of course.”Alex squeezed his large form from the chair and let Tom sit. He leaned over, breathing down Tom’s neck. “This is too much fun.”
    “You need to get out more.”
    “And don’t I know it.”
    Tom added “Melbourne painter” to the search parameters and he found her. He found pictures of her in her late teens, beaming at the camera while standing next to a vibrant, colorful portrait of her art teacher after winning… the Archibald Prize?
    Tom sat against the back of his chair with a thud. There was no doubting it was her. The ear to ear grin was something Tom hadn’t witnessed as yet but the biscuit-blonde hair, the dancer’s grace and those wide grey eyes were unmistakable.
    “Sheesh,” Alex whistled in his ear “That Archibald thing’s a big deal, right?”
    .”About as big a deal as it can get,” Tom said.
    He clicked on another site to find her a few years down the track, looking more like herself - dressed in a T-shirt and jeans with a splotch of paint on her cheek as she taught art to a large group of preschoolers. But again she was grinning, all high cheekbones and comely overbite.
    “What are you talking about?”Alex said. “She’s more than just intriguing, my friend. She’s beautiful.”
    Beautiful. That was the word he’d been looking for. Nothing as crass and undignified as hot. Or as forbidding as cool. Maggie Bryce was beautiful.
    Tom shuffled in his seat and made himself concentrate. He clicked on yet another website, which showed pictures of her at a gallery opening in Armadale. The gallery had shown