12 Days At Silver Bells House Read Online Free PDF

cardboard on the box, took a bottle out and put the knife down onto the kitchen bench at a range where she was closest to it, not him. ‘I’ll put this in the fridge,’ he said, holding her bottle of Chardonnay up. ‘I’ve got a good Shiraz if you’d like a glass of that.’
    He slid her Chardonnay into the near-empty fridge. Must do shopping tomorrow . Especially now he had a guest. He pulled a bottle from the wine rack he’d built into the recess above the bench top. He’d spent every evening and weekend of the last four weeks, since the sale had settled, sanding, re-modelling the bathroom and the kitchen, knocking down the dining room wall and doing a spot of re-pointing and painting. Nothing else to do in the evenings or at the weekends, and he wasn’t the sort who liked having nothing to do. Neither was he the sort to have bought the house on some Goddamn whim. But he had. He was still trying to come to terms with why.
    Now he wished he’d done up one of the spare bedrooms upstairs. Where was he going to put her? He’d taken the master bedroom for himself and had stripped the other two bedrooms. They were four walls. No furniture. She’d have to take his bedroom. He’d sleep in the small spare room. The only other room that had a bed.
    She had her hand around the cap on the bottle of Shiraz he’d handed her, her face angled away and her features telling him she was concentrating hard, but not on the wine.
    Everything about her was all shades of chestnut — apart from her blue eyes. Her hair, her eyebrows, even her eyelashes. But he had a feeling most of the make-up, the dress and the shoes were for show. Like a candy bar. Peel off the snazzy wrapper and what would you find? Nougat; sugar and honey with the odd hazelnut thrown in for bite and flavour. He had an inkling most people in her executive world wouldn’t look for the softer side of her. Why was he seeing it then? Because of Megan, probably.
    She’d styled her chestnut-coloured hair into what he thought of as a ponytail with glamour. She’d secured the ponytail, somehow, with her own hair. Her long fringe swept across her brow in a dramatic way, concealing one eyebrow and almost touching her eyelashes but — again, somehow — it looked smart and casual all at once. The fringe part flopped forwards and the executive ponytail swung around her shoulder.
    He walked over to her and took the bottle off her. ‘Look,’ he said, twisting the cap in the palm of his hand and cracking the seal. ‘We can figure things out in the morning, so why don’t you calm down?’
    He wanted to put his hands on her shoulders and anchor her. He’d like to run a hand over the top of her head too, and smooth her ponytail in his fist, right down to the tip at her shoulder blades, to check if it was as soft as it looked.
    Instead, he turned and took two wine glasses out of a cupboard beneath the island bench. The glass rang with a dull tinkle as he put the stems onto the bench.
    He poured wine into one glass then paused as she moved. He looked across at her as she picked up a house renovation magazine from a stack on the dining room table and flicked through the pages.
    She put the magazine down and ran her fingers through her fringe, eyes downcast, as though ironing out her thoughts. Or strumming through her worries.
    Jamie went back to the wine, poured one for himself.
    â€˜What am I going to do tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘I’ve got to get the hire car out of a paddock and that might take all day to arrange. Then what do I do? Get the evening bus out of here?’
    â€˜Well obviously, it’s going to take a couple of days. So stay a couple of nights.’ He walked around the island bench and handed her a glass.
    She sighed softly as she took it, with what was obviously an unwilling acceptance of her situation. ‘I don’t have much choice.’
    She peeked up at