Man About The House
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When he’d first decided to head overseas, renting his house to his newly married cousin for the two years he’d originally intended being away had seemed like a smart thing to do. Then, when he’d deluded himself into believing his future was with Toni, he’d extended the arrangement he’d made with Glen for a further three years. His cousin had since begun reproducing at such a rapid rate Brett suspected the guy had to be ignorant as to what was causing it, but when a guy had three kids under three and a fourth due any minute you didn’t chuck him out in the street.
So, now he was stuck having to share his mother’s house until he could make alternative arrangements. Wonderful. ‘Exactly how long is this Joanna person going to be staying?’
‘As long as she wants to.’ His sister’s look was sharp.
‘You’ll really like her,’ Karessa assured him. ‘Won’t he, Mum?’
‘Just as long as he doesn’t like her too much.’ There was stiff warning in the statement, but before Brett could say he had no intention of getting tangled up with any woman in the immediate future, his sister launched into lecture mode.
‘I mean it, Brett,’ she said. ‘This kid has had a really tough time. When she first came into the agency she had a self-confidence reading of minus one hundred. She’s starting to come out of herself a bit now, but she’s still emotionally fragile. So if you so much as even think about doing a seduction number on her, I’ll personally tear you limb from limb.’
‘Trust me, Meaghan, the girl’s safe from my unscrupulous claws,’ he said facetiously. ‘The last thing I need after Toni is another model.’
‘She’s not a model. Too short. But she’s as far removed from that witch Toni as any other human being with a heart.’
Irritated at having his plans disrupted, Brett grunted, wondering how long it would take him to find a decent place to rent. However, his sister and niece were still going on about Joanna and how sweet she was.
‘She’s a country girl who came into the agency to enrol in a deportment course right when I was looking to replace our receptionist...’ Meaghan was saying, obviously under the misapprehension that he was interested. ‘She had no job, next to no money and was staying in a bedsit in inner Sydney—’
‘Oh, well, it’s easy to see where common sense would advise lashing out on an expensive grooming course in those circumstances,’ he said.
‘As it happens, Mr Know-It-All, in Joanna’s case it was the most practical thing she could do! She’s an intelligent, ambitious girl, but she had absolutely no—and I mean zilch—sophistication. Apparently her parents were well into their forties when she was born, and from what I can gather more Amish than the Amish.’
‘Yeah!’ his niece endorsed. ‘Can you believe she hadn’t even seen a CD player until she had to learn how to operate the one at the agency?’ Karessa was clearly appalled. ‘She was sooo embarrassed. And I felt sooo sorry for her.’
‘What little exposure she had to city life came via a year at some boarding school her older sister dumped her in when their parents passed away,’ Meaghan continued. ‘Unfortunately, she didn’t have any choice but to move back and help her sister run the family business they inherited when she graduated. Apparently it’s been passed from one generation to the next since the turn of the century, or something.’
Brett frowned. ‘I have a hard time believing the heiress to a well-established family business could be as naive or destitute as you two are making her out to be.’
‘You jerk! What are you using for brains?’
It was unclear whether he or the pale-faced cyclist his sister had only narrowly avoided skittling was the intended recipient of her outburst, but before Brett had uncurled his fingers from the dashboard Meaghan had calmly picked up where she’d left off.
‘We’re talking about a feed store here, Brett, not a multinational conglomerate, for heaven’s sake. Besides, she couldn’t access any of her inheritance until she turned twenty-one. The sister sounds like the Wicked Witch of the West with PMS, but to really round off what is the most miserable existence I can imagine, just when poor Joanna thought she’d found true happiness, she discovered the lowlife lump of pond scum she was in love with was married!’
And that, Brett thought, explained precisely why the girl had been taken under the collective wings of his sister and mother.
Meaghan had been only nineteen when she’d got pregnant with Karessa, to a long-time boyfriend who had turned out to be someone else’s equally long-time husband. To say she’d been devastated would be a massive understatement. Emotionally she’d come close to having a nervous breakdown as she’d struggled to get past not just the humiliation of having been taken for a fool but her love for a man who’d demanded she have an abortion.
At the time, Brett had been damned lucky not to find himself charged with assault when, reacting to sibling instincts rather than brains, he’d rearranged the guy’s very pretty face. And it was probably indicative of his baser, less civilised qualities, but he’d never been able to seriously regret that the mongrel had been killed in an accident before Karessa was born.
‘Brett! Are you listening to me?’
Meaghan’s exasperated tone reefed him from his reverie. ‘Huh?’
‘I said...I want your word you won’t put the moves on Joanna.’
She was so intent that if Brett hadn’t been amused he might have been angry. ‘Sure. You want a signed statement to that effect, or will it suffice if I just swear an oath on the Bible?’
Karessa’s laughter from the back seat didn’t infect her mother. ‘Look, all I’m saying is she’s not up to being hit on by you. I know your love ’em and leave ‘em style, Brett, and, despite everything she’s been through, Joanna’s probably still naive enough to fall for it.’
Okay, so now he was starting to get angry. ‘I’d like to point out that as debaucherous as you believe me to be, until a couple of weeks ago I’d been in a monogamous relationship for over three years. And that even in the most decadent periods of my lust-infested life I have never found anything remotely appealing in gauche, heartbroken country waifs I