‘Good.’ He returned her gaze with a perfectly straight face.
‘Is your taste in literature particularly highbrow?’ she queried.
He held up his book cover.
‘Master and Commander,’ she read. ‘Surprise, surprise!’
He grinned. ‘I like sea stories.’
‘That’s an understatement. I’d say you have a passion for all things maritime!’
‘I do have a couple of other passions,’ he objected, and eyed the twisted grace of the way she was sitting with her feet tucked under her.
‘Women in general or me in particular?’ she asked gravely.
‘That’s a leading question.’ His grey eyes glinted. ‘Put it this way, I am enjoying getting to know you better.’
‘Same here,’ she said. ‘I just have this feeling that women may come second in your life.’
He shrugged. ‘A lot of my design work takes women very much into account,’ he said.
‘How so?’
‘I’ll show you.’
First of all he showed her the designs of his catamarans, then he showed her some of his house designs, and she was struck by certain similarities.
‘There’s absolutely no wasted space,’ she said slowly as she studied the floorplan of two admittedly small, compact homes that even had nautical names, The Islander and Greenwich. ‘It’s all rather shipshape.’
He looked rueful. ‘My main ambition was always to design boats.’
‘But some of these space-saving ideas are really good. That, plus the fact that they are not shonky…’ she paused, then glinted him a wicked little smile ‘… do take your houses out of the realm of little boxes.’
His lips twitched. ‘Thanks, but they still don’t fall into the category of your house.’
‘For my sins I inherited my house from my grandmother. Where do you live when you’re at home?’
‘In an apartment at Runaway Bay.’
‘A penthouse?’ she suggested.
‘No.’ He grimaced. ‘A sub-penthouse.’
‘Could we be as bad as each other in the matter of our living arrangements, Mr McKinnon?’ she said impishly. ‘Incidentally, I don’t have a marvellous hideaway on Cape Gloucester.’
‘On the other hand, you’re likely to inherit a cattle station and more very desirable Gold Coast property, amongst other things.’
Maggie blinked. ‘How do you know all that?’
He paused. ‘It’s fairly common knowledge.’
‘I suppose so.’ But she frowned, then shrugged. ‘I get the very strong feeling my father would dearly love to have a son to bequeath it all to rather than me. He’s petrified I’m going to be taken for a ride by a man on the make or I’m going to fritter it all away somehow.’
Jack McKinnon gazed at her so intently, she said, with a comically alarmed expression, ‘What have I done now?’
‘Nothing.’ He rolled up the house plan. As he did so he dislodged a book from the pile on the coffee- table and a photo fell out of it.
Maggie picked it up. ‘Who is this?’ she asked as she studied the fair, tall woman on board, by the look of it, The Shiralee.
‘My sister Sylvia,’ he said after what seemed to be an unusually long hesitation.
Maggie’s eyes widened. ‘Your real—’
‘No. We’re no relation. We were both adopted by the same family as babies. She’s a couple of years older but we grew up together as brother and sister. She still lives with our adoptive mother in Sydney, who has motor-neuron disease now. Our adoptive father died a few years ago.’
‘That must be why she looks sad,’ Maggie commented. ‘Lovely but sad. Has she never married?’
‘No.’ He picked up the ship in a bottle. ‘Ever wondered how this is done?’
Maggie blinked at the rather abrupt change of subject, but she said, ‘Yes! Don’t tell me you did that?’
‘I did. I’ll show you.’
Cape Gloucester wasn’t entirely reserved for relaxation, Maggie found over those days. He kept in touch with his office by phone and twice a day he spent some time on his laptop checking out all sorts of markets: stock, commodity, futures and the like. At these times he was oblivious to anything that went on around him.