The Millionaire's Melbourne Proposal

by Ally Blake

  Now she wished she’d pressed. Just a little.

  Rubbing a finger and thumb over her temple, she searched her memory banks for the times she’d heard mention of his name.

  Once a month or so, Clancy would answer the phone, her face pinched, her shoulders tight, and she’d quietly take the phone to her bedroom. One of those times Nora had heard Clancy say, “Bennett” just before the bedroom door snicked shut.

  Was that it?

  Then it hit her.

  Bennett. Ben.

  Deep into the night, near the end, perhaps even the very last time Clancy had been in any way lucid, she had muttered, “Ben.” Then, louder, more insistent, “Ben? Is that you?”

  “Ben? Ben who? Would you like me to find him?” Nora had asked, not realising at the time Clancy had meant Bennett, the prodigal, hush hush adopted grandson. “Ask him to come?”

  “No,” Clancy had shot back, her face twisting as if in pain. “Leave him be.”

  Leave him be. As if asking a guy to take the time to visit his ailing grandmother was too great a burden.

  Nora shifted on the stair, the skinny plank of wood with its threadbare patch of old carpet biting into her backside, her initial feelings of poor guy having morphed into what the heck?

  This was the person Clancy had left her beloved Thornfield Hall to? Seriously, what kind of man treated a person that way? Never visiting, calling but rarely. Especially someone as vibrant and loving and wondrous and accepting as Clancy?

  Nora allowed herself a rare moment of indulging in feeling all the feelings—the gutting sorrow, the flutters of rage—letting them stew till they coagulated in an ugly ball in her belly before she sucked in a deep soothing breath and reduced them to a simmer.

  It took longer than she’d have liked to let it go. But she managed. Letting go of ugly feelings was something she’d long since learned to do with alacrity and grace.

  Happiness over suffering.

  This was the news she’d been waiting for, unexpected outcome or no. Bennett Hawthorne could come and grab the keys, she’d politely talk him through the vagaries of the old home—the upstairs window that had been painted shut, the noisy downstairs pipe, the wriggly front door lock—then she could draw a nice clean line under what had been a wonderful chapter of her life.

  Before the place got its claws into her any deeper. Before this pile of bricks, this street, these people, began to feel like something as insidious and treacherous as home.

  Nora lifted the papers in her hand, flipped the page and read on, hoping to find a timeline as to when Hawthorne might finally show up so she could be ready.

  But then she reached a section that left her a little stunned, as if she’d been smacked in the side of the head.

  While the house would go to Bennett Hawthorne, Clancy’s will also declared that one Nora Letterman, aka The Girl Upstairs, had the right to stay on in the house for a period of up to two months from the date of Clancy’s death.

  A cleaner would be paid for by the estate. All upkeep and utilities as well. And Nora was not to pay a cent of rent.

  The house was not to be open for inspection, put on the market, or in any way renovated during the time Nora was in residence.

  She was—of course—welcome to leave sooner if she desired. But the rooms were hers, for two months, if she needed them.

  All of which, apparently, suited Bennett Hawthorne, as the reason the letter was from the Melbourne office of a London law firm was because the guy was London-based and thus would not be able to inspect the property in person any time soon.

  “Oh, Clancy.” Nora breathed out audibly, the letter falling to her knee, her gaze lifting to glance into the kitchen.

  The kitchen said nothing in return. Though, in the silence, the clackety-clack of tiny doggy claws echoed somewhere in the big empty house.

  Clancy knew Nora was a wanderer. They’d often chat about where Nora might end up next; Clancy wistfully sighing over Nora’s stories of camping out on other people’s sofas, slinging coffees in a train station café for a day in order to be able to afford the fare to get her to the next place, as if that life were something to aspire to rather than a case of needs must.

  So what had she been thinking, sneaking this into her will?

  Nora felt the slightest twinge tugging on her watch-out-ometer, as if she’d somehow found herself swept up in some larger plan. But she quickly shook it off. Clancy didn’t have it in her to be so manipulative. She’d been good, through and through. The best person Nora had ever known. And now she was gone.

  “Dammit.” Nora rubbed a hand over her eyes, knees juggling with excess energy as she mentally gathered in all the parts of herself that were threatening to fly off into some emotional whirlwind.

  Breaking things down into their simplest forms:

  Clancy was simply being kind.

  But staying was impossible.

  So this Bennett guy had to come back. Now.

  Irresponsible or no, on the other side of the world or not, whatever the story, he was one of Clancy’s people. And Clancy never gave up on her people. He’d know what this house meant to his grandmother. And would take care of it.

  If not...

  While Clancy had loomed large in Nora’s life these past months, had treated her with such kindness, respect, and fierce support, she wasn’t family. So, it was actually none of Nora’s business.

  Ignoring the latest twinge that brought on, Nora grabbed her phone and searched for Bennett Hawthorne, but she had no clue what he might look like and, since he was adopted, she couldn’t even look for a similarity to Clancy. A plethora of images and articles popped up, all the same, most regarding the sweet-looking, elderly mayor of some small town in America who’d tried to make it so that dogs could legally marry one another. Ah, algorithms.

  Figuring it mattered little—the guy was who he was—she popped her phone away, grabbed the legal letter, took it upstairs, turned her Taylor Swift playlist up nice and loud, and emailed the lawyers.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “MR HAWTHORNE?”

  Bennett Hawthorne lifted a quieting finger towards the voice at the office door while he listened, hard, to the message left on his phone by the head of his insolvency division...

  Dammit.

  Word on the street had been that simply by signing with Hawthorne Consultancy, Metropolis Air was set to be released from their involuntary administration order, the firm’s brand of zealous forensic accounting and future planning as good as a golden ticket out of bankruptcy.

  The street had been misinformed.

  Bennett felt the dig of his short blunt fingernails in his palms, and slowly unfurled his fingers.

  It was a blow. Time now concertinaed, the team would need to be scrappy and smart to pull this off. But hard work wasn’t the problem. He relished the physical and mental satiation that came with hard work; the kinds of days where he fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow.

  It was just that this week, of all weeks, he could have done with an easy win.

  If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the exact timbre of the attorney’s voice, dry and sober, as she’d sat on the other side of his desk and read from a sheet of paper. “Clancy Finlayson passed peacefully in her sleep a week ago Friday. Cause of death, cancer of the pancreas. Cremation took place three days later. No funeral, by request of the deceased.”

  A wash of pity had passed over the attorney’s face at the last, as she apologised, prodigiously, for the delay in passing on the news, assuring him that the timing had been stipulated, in unflinching detail, in the will.

  It had been written that he was not to be disturbed.

  Disturbed.

  They’d had their issues, he and Clancy, but he struggled to accept she’d actually believed that was how news of her passing would affect him.

 
Then again, disturbance could account for his wandering mind, the fitful sleep, the fact he’d listened to the rumours about Metropolis Air and believed them. All reverberations from that initial hit. He only wished he knew when the aftershocks would end.

  Bennett pressed finger and thumb into his temples.

  No. Likelihood was, he could do with a day off. To see daylight while outdoors rather than through the floor-to-ceiling windows in his office suite high up in The Shard. To watch something more diverting than the Bloomberg channel.

  But with the volatility of the current market, finance was fast, furious, and fragile. Cowboy investors and workaday drones, old apparatuses and new technologies, government turnovers and special interest groups were all scrambling to find their feet in the new order. If he stepped off the treadmill, he’d lose traction and never catch up to where he was today.

  Clancy’s voice echoed in his head. “Life is change, kid. Making hard choices on the fly is all we can do. It’s also short as hell. Don’t you dare mourn an old lady who had a good run; worry about your own life.”

  “Mr Hawthorne—?”

  Ben rubbed a hand over his face, tossed his phone onto the couch beside him, and looked to the younger man hovering in the doorway.

  Every year Bennett hand-picked a bunch of the first-year employees and put them on an assistant/mentee rotation with the heads of departments. Meaning Damon had been in the room when Clancy’s lawyer had dropped her bombshell. The kid was keen, canny and discreet, and Ben couldn’t have been more grateful Damon’s turn had fallen into this quarter.

  “What’s up?” Ben asked.

  Damon held up a tablet. “You wanted me to let you know when we heard back—”

  “I just got word,” said Ben with a dismissive shake of his hand.

  Damon shook his head. “Not the Metropolis Air hearing. The lawyers. Apparently, there’s an issue regarding Nora Letterman.”

  Ben raised an eyebrow.

  “The girl upstairs from your grandmother’s—”

  “Right,” said Ben, cutting him off. The last thing he had time for right now was managing the feelings of one of Clancy’s band of merry acolytes.

  Damon glanced over his shoulder, towards the bustling workplace outside the door. “I think you need to see it.”

  Ben waved Damon into the room. The kid was smart. Didn’t need the whole office listening in. Work was work. Private life was private. Compartmentalising the two kept things clean. Tidy. Efficient. If numbers were his thing, high drama was definitely not.

  Ben stood, buttoned his suit jacket, and moved to sit in his big leather office chair. The desk—with its smoky glass windows and imposing view of London from his corner office—was a better spot from which to make important decisions.

  He began, “So, you mentioned an issue.”

  Damon landed with a lanky kerflunk in the chair on the other side of the desk and tapped the tablet. “Paraphrase?”

  “Please.”

  “Cool. So, she’s sorry for your loss. But while Nora is appreciative of Clancy’s offer, she’d actually rather not stay.”

  Ben waited. Realised he’d have to keep on waiting unless he spoke. “That’s it?”

  “In a nutshell. She also looks forward to you ‘coming home’, so she can ‘hand over the keys in person’, which was a promise she made to your grandmother ‘on her deathbed’.” Damon didn’t hold back on the air quotations. “That’s pretty much the gist.”

  Ben sat back in his chair; the absorbers sighing as it rocked him gently in place, his mind no longer wandering.

  While the lawyer had winced when reading the subsection of the will regarding the tenant, Ben had been relieved. The existence of a grey-haired, sparkly-eyed, slightly stooped woman keeping watch over the house seventeen-thousand-odd kilometres away gave him breathing space; a good month or two before he had to make any decisions regarding the estate. Before he had to really think about it at all.

  Turned out the universe was not about to give him a break this week, at all.

  Done with his wandering mind, or any excuses for anything less than his usual mental acuity, Bennett grabbed a sharpened pencil from the stash kept in his World’s Best Boss mug on his desk, opened a fresh notebook to the first page, wrote The Girl Upstairs on the title page, and readied to tackle the issue at hand.

  “She’d rather not stay,” Bennett repeated, jotting down the words, then letting his fingers scribble, sketch, and shade, his mind following.

  It seemed odd. Why would Clancy make the offer if it wasn’t fait accompli? Was this woman simply being polite? Was she looking for solace? Was she angling for a better deal?

  Ben looked down at the page to find a series of zigzags. “The stairs.”

  Years back, in the before, he’d tried to get Clancy to sell the old terrace house because of the dodgy old staircase. She’d laughed at the very thought. She’d finally agreed to move into the downstairs section, after he’d paid to have a second bathroom put in.

  “The stairs?” Damon asked.

  “Too small for my feet, even as a kid,” he muttered. “They’d be a hazard for old knees. Have the lawyers let Ms Letterman know she’s to use the ground-floor rooms only. And look into liability on that score.”

  Damon blinked, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, as he reached over the desk and handed Ben the iPad.

  “There’s more?” Ben asked.

  Damon shook his head. “I don’t think old knees are the problem.”

  The tablet was open to an Instagram page.

  Ben’s gaze skipped over photos of what looked like a row of dresses hanging on a rack, a fruit and veg platter, the shopfront of a florist bursting with arrangements. Glaringly bright, a cacophony of colour, the page was an assault to eyes that were used to the more subtle nuances of a London winter.

  “What am I looking at?” Ben asked.

  “Nora Letterman.”

  “Where?” Was she hiding behind a cantaloupe?

  “The whole thing. It’s her page.”

  Ben looked up. “She’s on Instagram?”

  Clancy had refused to even have a smartphone, sticking with one of those flip things, a clamshell phone, even though she jumped every time it snapped shut. At least, that was how she’d been a couple of years back, at the time of his last visit. Before everything went to hell.

  Damon leant back in the chair, a definite gleam in the eye. “Keep scrolling.”

  Bennett—who most certainly did not have time for this—scrolled with speed through the feed.

  More colour-rich photos of café menus, a clutch—compendium? flurry? sneeze?—of orange kittens that made him itch just to look upon them, and street art that was so indicative of the kitsch, anti-establishment mien of Fitzroy he’d have recognised the place even without the slew of energetic hashtags.

  For all that they were a violation of the retina, the photographs were quite good. The thematic nature also ticked his liking for symmetry and consistency.

  And then his thumb came to a sudden halt, pausing to hover over the screen as his gaze snagged on a picture of an actual person.

  A young woman, mid-twenties, tucked up on a chair by a window. Long blonde hair in loose braids tumbled over a soft-looking cardigan, the rest of her swamped by what looked like pyjama pants and fluffy socks. A shaft of sunshine hit the side of her face, lighting up a neat straight nose, a smattering of freckles, and huge blue eyes that smiled over the top of a cup as big as a soup bowl.

  The heading beneath the image: My job is better than your job ;)

  As a whole, the image was cosy and appealing, offering the viewer a glimpse into someplace warm and inviting. Artless. Enviable. Private.

  But it was the wallpaper behind her that had the wheels in Bennett’s mind spinning with crystalline precision for the first time in days. Dark gr
een, it was, and covered in massive brown moths. The woman in the picture was sitting in Clancy’s upstairs bedroom.

  The next picture showcased what he could only assume were her knees and a goodly part of her bare tanned thighs, poking out of the bath in the upstairs bedroom—the one with the peacock wallpaper. The water very light on bubbles while she read a paperback covered in wet thumbprints...purchased, apparently, from some local bookstore.

  Then an image showed her sitting before a massive cheesy pizza at Brunswick Pizza—the décor hadn’t changed in twenty years—elbows on the table, chin propped in her palms. Again those eyes, looking through the camera. Right at him.

  He scrolled slowly back to the top of the page, which was entitled The Girl Upstairs, leaving him in no doubt that Damon had found his new tenant.

  Running a hand over his chin, Bennett breathed out hard. Who was this woman in his grandmother’s home?

  “So what do you think?” Damon asked.

  “I think she is unlikely to struggle with the stairs.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Did the lawyers send you this?”

  Damon shook his head. “I went looking. First thing I’d have done, if I was in your shoes. First thing I ever do before a job interview. Or a blind date.”

  Ben shot the kid a look, and Damon sat back, hands lifted in surrender.

  Ben wasn’t on social media. Not personally. He’d outsourced to a brilliant company to look after that side of things for the business, but did not see a single reason why anyone needed to see a photograph of his dinner, or where he went on holiday—if he ever took holidays. It was akin to forcing people to look at one’s vacation slideshow, only now people chose to watch on purpose.

  What Bennett did with his life was serious. Consequential. Forensic accounting was about uncovering the raw data, the raw truth, from beneath the tangles and fog of human interference. It was more cathartic than yoga—he knew, he’d tried it.

  Social media was the antithesis of what he did. All show and no substance. Hooks and tricks and filters and curation; people showing only the side of themselves they thought people would like. And by the tone of the comments and the eye-popping number of followers, Nora Letterman was clearly good at it.