Two Against the Odds. Joan Kilby
that she’d bought last week. It was tucked inside the address book. Of course. Because she’d rung the gallery right after buying the materials for framing.
Sitting on the tiled floor, she pulled out cookbooks and riffled through the pages. She found a few grocery store receipts itemizing pitifully meager provisions.
“Can I claim food?” she yelled to the other room.
“No, it’s not a deductible business expense.” Already he sounded long-suffering and he’d been here less than an hour.
She was putting back her mother’s copy of Joy of Cooking, which she’d borrowed to make quince preserves, when an old photograph fell out of the pages. With paint-stained fingers she slanted it toward the light.
She, her brother, Jack, and sister, Renita, were playing on the front lawn of the dairy farm where they’d grown up. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. Jack would have been about four and Renita just a toddler. Lexie smiled, her eyes misting. They’d had good times as kids.
Now Jack was getting married again and Renita, too. Lexie was the only one of her siblings who hadn’t found a life partner. She’d never had the kids she longed for, either. A sharp pang for the baby she’d lost made her press a hand to her chest. She counted back the years.
Her boy would have been twenty-one years old now.
“The kettle is boiling,” Rafe said, right behind her.
Lexie tucked the photograph back in the cookbook and, rising, placed the mat board receipt in his open palm. “It’s a start.”
He stared at the crumpled slip of paper. Resignation washed over his face and his mouth firmed. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up over his forearms. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“You have no idea,” Lexie murmured.
RAFE TOOK a sip of peppermint tea and tried not to grimace. He would give his right arm for a strong cup of espresso—even if it did aggravate his gut. Carefully he set the delicate china teacup with the hand-painted roses in its saucer.
With Lexie’s records this disorganized he bet she had other undeclared painting sales. How was she going to pay her taxes? Anyone could see she had no money.
Not his problem. His job was to do the audit and get the hell out of Summerside.
Hopefully after he’d had a chance to sample the fishing.
Seated at the dining table, he went about setting up a spreadsheet for Lexie’s tax records. So far she’d managed to find a dozen receipts, gleaned from strange hiding places. The teapot had yielded a receipt for scented tea candles—naturally. Apparently Lexie sometimes meditated by candlelight to enhance her creativity. Too bad for her, the tax office didn’t consider them an allowable expense.
Lexie was moving around the living room, searching in decorative wooden boxes and flipping through the pages of books. Never in his six years of auditing had he come across anyone like her. She’d pick something up, carry it a few steps and put it down in another spot.
Nutbags, these artist types.
“Maybe instead of looking for individual receipts, you should concentrate on finding those envelopes you were telling me about,” he said.
“I’m deliberately not thinking about them in the hopes it’ll pop into my mind where I put them.”
Nutbag she might be, but she was easy on the eyes. With her straight back and graceful, sleek limbs she could have been mistaken for a dancer. Long tangled blond hair fell past her shoulder blades. She’d bend to search a low shelf then unfold, flipping that hair back, humming to herself as another book or a picture caught her fancy and she spent a few moments studying it. Completely unselfconscious, she didn’t seem to care if he watched her.
Not that he was watching her.
With a frown he dragged his attention back to his woefully sparse spreadsheet, labeling columns across the top.
“Do you mind music while you work?” she said, picking out a CD from the vertical rack.
“Go ahead.” He gritted his teeth and braced himself for whale songs or some such New Age thing.
“I think you’ll like this. It’s Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.” She inserted the CD and a soft haunting voice began to sing in another language.
Yep, just as he’d thought. Rafe tuned out and started tapping in numbers. The sooner he got through this, the sooner he could get down to the pier with his fishing rod.
“Ooh, here’s a whole bunch,” she said, peering into a carved wooden box. She sauntered over to the table and plunked them in front of him. “Here you go.”
Four of the six receipts were useless for tax purposes. He added the other two to his meager pile. “Fourteen down, God knows how many to go.”
Lexie slid onto a chair and pulled her legs up beneath her. “So, Rafe, did you always want to be a tax agent when you grew up?”
“Yes, accountancy fascinated me from an early age.”
“Really?” Lexie asked, with a dubious frown.
No. But he had a facility for numbers and after graduating from high school, accounting had seemed like the quickest ticket out of the small country town of Horsham where he’d grown up.
Rafe shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“It can’t be nice going to people’s houses and threatening them with the police if they don’t hand over their receipts.”
Another twinge in his stomach. He clenched his teeth to control the wince. Nobody got it. Sure, it wasn’t the most thrilling job but it wasn’t fair that people saw him as the bad guy. “I’m here to help you. You’ve gotten yourself in trouble and I’m bailing you out. At taxpayers’ expense, I might add.”
“So you think you’re doing a good thing?”
“Yes, I do.” His fingers tapped the keys as he inputted her details at the top of the spreadsheet. “Where would we be without roads, hospitals, schools? I’m not the bad guy here.”
She laughed incredulously. “You’re saying I am?”
“You don’t take your responsibilities seriously. Absentmindedness is no excuse for failing to file a tax return.”
“Humph.” She stood up in an indignant tinkling of bells, swished away a few paces then spun around, her skirt whirling. “You’re just like my family. That scatterbrained Lexie—she can’t handle her finances, she can’t take care of herself, much less a baby. Maybe I have different priorities. Maybe money and…and receipts…aren’t the most important things in life. Maybe people are.”
“That’s what I’m saying. People who need hospitals and schools and roads.” His hands rested on the keyboard as he stared at her. “What baby?”
“Pardon me?” Her skirts settled, her hands clutching the fabric. Color tinged her cheeks. “I didn’t say anything about a baby.”
“Yes, you did.”
“No, I didn’t.”
CHAPTER TWO
RAFE STARED after her as she hurried from the room, wondering if he’d imagined her saying that about a baby. There was no evidence of an infant or a husband about the house, at least that he could see at a glance. She’d actually mentioned a friend’s toddler, not her own. Maybe she was pregnant and didn’t have a partner. Maybe she was worried about her future and wasn’t sure what to do.
He shrugged and shook his head. Lexie’s baby—real, imagined or pending—was none of his business. Kids. He shuddered.
He could hear her banging pots around in the kitchen and glanced at his watch. It was already past noon. The smell