Hired by the Brooding Billionaire. Kandy Shepherd

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       CHAPTER ONE

      SHELLEY FAIRHILL HAD walked by the grand old mansion on Bellevue Street at least twenty times before she finally screwed up enough courage to press the old-fashioned buzzer embedded in the sandstone gatepost. Even then, with her hand on the ornate wrought-iron gate, she quailed before pushing it open.

      The early twentieth-century house was handsome with peaked roofs and an ornate turret but it was almost overwhelmed by the voracious growth of a once beautiful garden gone wild. It distressed her horticulturalist’s heart to see the out-of-control roses, plants stunted and starved of light by rampant vines, and unpruned shrubs grown unchecked into trees.

      This was Sydney on a bright winter’s afternoon with shafts of sunlight slanting through the undergrowth but there was an element of eeriness to the house, of secrets undisturbed.

      In spite of the sunlight, Shelley shivered. But she had to do this.

      It wasn’t just that she was looking for extra work—somehow she had felt compelled by this garden since the day she’d first become aware of it when she’d got lost on her way to the railway station.

      The buzzer sounded and the gate clicked a release. She pushed it open with a less than steady hand. Over the last weeks, as she’d walked past the house in the posh inner-eastern suburb of Darling Point, she’d wondered about who lived there. Her imagination had gifted her visions of a broken-hearted old woman who had locked herself away from the world when her fiancé had been killed at war. Or a crabby, Scrooge-like old man cut off from all who loved him.

      The reality of the person who opened the door to her was so different her throat tightened and the professional words of greeting she had rehearsed froze unsaid.

      Her reaction wasn’t just because the man who filled the doorframe with his impressive height and broad shoulders was young—around thirty, she guessed. Not much older than her, in fact. It was because he was so heart-stoppingly good-looking.

      A guy this hot, this movie-star handsome, with his black hair, chiselled face and deep blue eyes, hadn’t entered into her imaginings for a single second. Yes, he seemed dark and forbidding—but not in the haunted-house way she had expected.

      His hair lacked recent acquaintance with a comb, his jaw was two days shy of a razor and his black roll-neck sweater and sweatpants looked СКАЧАТЬ