The Rich Man's Virgin

It couldn’t have anything to do with Jack McKinnon’s insulting manner and words, surely?

After all, he’d completely misread her. He’d taken her for an idle little rich girl, a daddy’s pet, so how on earth could that start her thinking along some strange lines?

Strange lines such as a sudden dissatisfaction to do with her relationship with Tim?

Not that you could call it much of a relationship, but there was the fact that Tim dearly wanted to make it into something more while she didn’t, and she was suddenly feeling guilty about it.

It wasn’t only that, though. To be tarred with the same brush as her father was extremely annoying. She might, according to her grandmother, have inherited some of her father’s genes, but not, she devoutly hoped, his arrogance. She might have a fairly well- developed commercial instinct when it came to the property market, but a lot of people thought of her father as a ruthless businessman—she certainly wasn’t ruthless.

As usual, her garden soothed her. She’d had no idea she possessed green fingers until she’d inherited her villa. In six months she’d transformed the small garden into a colourful showpiece. She grew roses and camellias, impatiens, petunias and daisies, yellow, pink and white. Her lawn was like green velvet and her herb garden provided basil, mint, coriander, rosemary, sage, parsley, thyme and oregano.

So she watered and pottered and pruned dead heads until both Tim Mitchell and Jack McKinnon faded from her mind, quite unaware that Jack ‘the man’ would raise his undeniably attractive head in the most unexpected way when she went back to work the following morning.

Maggie was the only agent not engaged with clients when an elderly couple walked into the office on Tuesday morning, so she took them under her wing and set about making her usual assessment of what kind of a property they wanted to buy. This could often be a tricky business, but with Sophie and Ernest Smith it proved to be more—it proved to be a marital war zone.

It transpired that they had sold their previous property, a house and eight acres, to a developer. Sophie had not been in favour of doing this at all and claimed she wasn’t going to be happy anywhere else, anyway.

Ernest, with a lack of patience that indicated this battle had been fought many a time before, detailed to Maggie why he’d thought it was such a good idea at the time.

They were getting on and eight acres were quite a handful. Once developers got their eye on an area what option did you have but to sell out unless you relished the thought of being hemmed in by hundreds of houses? The price they’d been offered would assure a comfortable retirement…

‘Yes,’ Sophie Smith said grimly, ‘but if you’d hung on as I suggested, we would have got a lot more for it!’

Ernest bristled. ‘We weren’t to know that, woman, and a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush!’

Maggie spent a few moments calming them down, then asked for more details. The Smiths were the first to be approached in their road by the developer, and the ones to sell out cheapest. Others in the road who had held out over a period of time had received better offers.

It was obvious to Maggie that, not only had Sophie really loved her property and not wanted to sell anyway, but that the higher prices some of her neighbours had attained were going to be a thorn in her flesh and a cause for discontent between her and her husband for the rest of their lives.

‘Who was the developer?’ she asked.

Ernest heaved a sigh. ‘The McKinnon Corporation.’

As Maggie surveyed the two unhappy people before her once again her blood boiled directly on account of Jack McKinnon.

All the same, she might never have done anything about it had fate not intervened.

A few days later, she was doing a property assessment.

The owners had relocated to Melbourne over a year ago. They’d contacted her by phone with instructions to value the property with a view to putting it on the market and they’d posted her the keys.

The house, she discovered, showed every sign of not having been lived in for quite a time—it was distinctly unloved and it was a crying shame because it had obviously once been a beautiful home with loads of character. But the acreage was green and rolling, there were lovely trees on it and a delightful, secretive creek ran through it. A creek, she felt sure, you would find platypus playing in.