Free The Millionaire by Victoria Purman Page B

laughter coming from inside the house. “She is. She’s pretty passionate about the Flying Doctors, that’s for sure.”
    “There’s a whole lot of life in her. She’s a bloody treasure.” Trev tipped his hat up. “I wouldn’t like to see her unhappy. She’s been through a lot. Too much. You get my meaning?”
    What did the old man mean, that she’d been through a lot? There was a warning in his tone that Chris got loud and clear and it went something like, if anyone hurts my beloved granddaughter, I’ll go after him with the sheep shears .
    “I hear you.”
    The truth was that Chris didn’t want to see Ellie unhappy, either. That laughter he could hear coming from inside of the house? He was suddenly hit with the realisation that if any man did anything to quell that laughter, that lust for life she had, that funny and beautiful and dogged and snippy, he’d want to hurt them, too. Pretty damn bad.
    Trev cleared his throat. “C’mon then. We’d better get inside and eat some of Vilma’s jelly cakes. She’ll get a sad on if you don’t.”
    “Don’t worry, Trev. I make it a practice of never saying no to cake.”
    Chris followed the old man inside. If outside was dust and heat and blinding sun, inside was an oasis. The front door opened directly into the kitchen and it was cool and spotless and something smelt delectable, like strawberries and cream. There were cupboards all around the walls of the large room and a big wooden table sat in the centre with a dozen mismatched chairs around it. One end was covered with a white lace tablecloth, and on that, were cups and saucers and a plate of jelly cakes, little round sponges dipped in jelly and filled with cream.
    Chris pulled up a chair next to Ellie. She was pouring tea from the teapot into four fine china cups.
    “Tea?” She raised her eyebrows in a question.
    “Thanks.”
    “Jelly cake?”
    He smiled. He wanted to shake his head at how normal this all seemed. How this was a million miles from the life he’d been leading. “Hell, yeah.”
    The room fell into silence while the tea was drunk and the cakes devoured. Chris couldn’t believe the quiet of it, the peace. No one spoke because no one felt the need to fill in the silence. The clink of a teaspoon against a plate. The sound of Trev chewing appreciatively. The seconds ticking by on a big clock over the back door. Chris took a deep breath and let the feeling seep through him. This moment was the complete antithesis of the past decade of his life and he wanted to soak it up, store it away for when he returned to the world’s disaster zones. This moment, sitting next to the beautiful Ellie Flannery, eating freshly made cakes in the quiet of a farmhouse, in the middle of nowhere, in outback Australia, would keep him going when he needed to hang on to some sense of normality in the chaos of his reality.
    Finally, Ellie broke the silence. “Thanks for being our super model for the photo, Grandpa.”
    Trev scoffed and waved a hand. “You’d better raise lots of money, that’s all I’m saying. Bloody ridiculous thing.” His playful smile undercut the cynicism of his words and Chris got the sense Trev would have posed in drag if his granddaughter had asked him to.
    The love between them was palpable. It was in the way he smiled at her; in the way she leaned over and rested a hand on his tanned forearm. In the way Ellie flicked back her hair and laughed so brightly that the beautiful sound of it filled the room and seemed to echo right through the house and inside his chest.
    This woman was something.
    He didn’t know what it was, but she had a mysterious way about her. She’d somehow managed to get him to agree to things he never thought he’d do again. Like pick up a camera. Or travel halfway across the State to take a shot for a charity auction. Or think about photography. Because he’d been determined to put it all away, to file it like one of the hundreds of thousands of images he’d shot