скачать книгу бесплатно
Her stomach tightened, trapping her breath. “Audited?”
“Yes. I’m here to go over your accounts with you and assess taxes owed for the period of delinquency.” He glanced over her shoulder into the small foyer. “Is this a good time?”
“No.” Her house was a mess, her work in limbo, her life in chaos. “I’m busy, very busy. I must get back to what I was doing.”
Lying on the floor pretending to be a crystal. It was vital to her creativity but hard to explain to a sexy young man in a suit. She started to close the door.
Quick as a wink he wedged a polished shoe between the door and the jamb. “I understand you’re an artist.”
“Y-yes,” she said warily. She could imagine what tax accountants thought of artists—about as useful to society as bicycles were to fish. “I’m working on a portrait for the Archibald Prize.”
“I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. May I come in?”
“As I said, I’m busy. I’ll file my tax return soon. Promise. On my honor and all that.” She gave the door another shove.
His foot didn’t budge. With his leg braced, his thigh muscle was outlined against his pant leg. “Then I’ll come back later. What time do you finish for the day?”
“I work all hours. Right through the night sometimes, when things are flowing.”
In reality, she hadn’t done any work on Sienna’s portrait for weeks but he didn’t need to know that. She hadn’t been completely idle, having whipped off a couple of small seascapes of Summerside Bay for the tourist trade. She just hadn’t done anything important.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be busy then, too!”
Again she pushed on the door to no avail. No doubt the Australian Taxation Office issued steel-reinforced shoes for cases like hers.
Apparently the agents were reinforced with steel, too. His black eyes glinted; his smile was grim. “Ms. Thatcher, you haven’t filed a tax return in four years. I will come back every day. I will camp on your doorstep if necessary, until you make the time to go through your accounts. Whether it takes weeks or months is of no difference to me. I have a job to do and I will do it.” He let his words sink in before he added almost casually, “If you don’t comply, I have the authority to call in the Federal Police.”
A flutter of panic made her reconsider the situation. But she hadn’t done anything wrong. True, she hadn’t filed her taxes but then again, she didn’t think she’d made enough money to pay tax. This was all a misunderstanding that would be cleared up quickly once he’d had a look at her accounts.
“Okay,” she capitulated, opening the door wider. “Come in. Let’s get this over with. Shoes off, please. I have a friend with a baby who’s still crawling.”
Color tinged his cheeks as he bent to remove his croc-skin loafers. Avoiding her gaze, he placed the shoes neatly beside her sandals, making them look tiny by comparison. Then she saw the reason for his embarrassment. His fourth toe poked through a hole in the left sock.
Suddenly Rafe Ellersley seemed less daunting, more human. She would have preferred to see him as the enemy.
Lexie led him into the sunny living room. Visible through the big window was the backyard containing a trampoline, her detached studio and, in the corner, a koi pond beneath a red-flowering camellia tree. She moved some art books off an armchair. “Have a seat.”
He lowered himself onto faded chintz covered in overblown pink roses, like Ferdinand the Bull in a field of flowers. Lexie sat opposite on the matching couch beneath the window, squished in between her sleeping Burmese cats, Yin and Yang. She tucked her legs up cross-legged and pulled down her full skirt.
“Why am I being audited?” she asked. “Is it random or are you guys targeting starving artists this year?”
“The tax office is focusing on small businesses,” he explained with a shrug. “This is an election year. The government wants to be seen to be doing its job.”
“But why me?” Lexie asked. “I’m a small fish.”
“Small fish, big fish, they all get caught eventually. As I said, you haven’t filed a tax return for the past four years.” He whipped out a small notebook and consulted it. “Yet last financial year you sold two paintings to an American tourist for forty thousand dollars.”
“Oh, right.” Lexie pressed paint-stained fingers to her mouth. They’d been her best sales to date. How could she have forgotten them? “I meant to declare them, honest.” She paused. “Er, how did you find out?”
“The man hung them in his office and declared them as a tax deduction. The American Internal Revenue Service, doing a random check, cross-referenced with our tax department. And here we are.”
“I don’t have any of that money left,” she said. “It’s gone. On rent, clothes, food…” Trivial things like that.
“Why didn’t you declare it?”
Procrastination again. “I was planning to average my income over five years.”
“Yet you didn’t do that, either.”
Lexie fidgeted, disturbing Yin, who looked up through green slits of eyes and twitched her creamy tail. Lexie stroked her, soothing her back to purring slumber. “I missed the cutoff date.”
“You had seven months from the sale of the painting in which to file.” Rafe Ellersley consulted his notebook again. “I understand you were an art teacher at Summerside Primary School until five years ago. Presumably you know how to file an income tax statement.”
“As a teacher with a fixed income, preparing a statement was easy. Since I quit my regular job I haven’t figured out all the ins and outs of what I need to do as a self-employed artist.”
“So you’ve simply ignored the problem, hoping it will go away.” Rafe wrote a few lines in his notebook.
“In a nutshell.” She glanced out the window, calculating the angle of the light slanting through the trees onto her detached studio. She’d hoped to have meditated her way into a creative state and be working by now. Instead, she was stuck here, talking to a tax agent. “How much time will the audit take?”
“That depends,” he said. “If your records are in order and easily accessible it could take only a few days.”
“Records?” Her fingers pleated the soft fabric of her skirt. She hadn’t been able to find her “filing system” for over a month.
“Tax receipts. As in, when you purchase paints and canvases you keep a receipt.” His dark eyes bored into her. “You do keep your receipts, don’t you?”
“Of course. I save everything in big manila envelopes.”
“I’d like you to get them for me, please. Everything for the past five years. Plus bank statements, utility bills, home and contents insurance, et cetera.”
“I would but there’s a small problem. I put the envelopes away for safekeeping and now I can’t find them.” When his black eyebrows pulled together, she added quickly, “Oh, don’t worry. I never throw anything away.” As anyone could guess just by looking at her house.
“What have you been doing with your receipts since then?” he asked.
“They’re around,” she said vaguely. Tossed in a drawer, tucked inside a novel as a bookmark, stuffed into a shoe box.
“You’ll need to locate them and the envelopes, of course.” He glanced about the room. “Where can I set up my laptop? Is there a table or desk I can use as a workspace?”
“Um…” The coffee table, an old trunk she’d painted white, was covered in assorted debris—a used teacup, her sketch pad and box of charcoal and cat toys. The side table at his elbow was obscured by seashells and pretty stones she’d found on the beach. The dining table was strewn with magazines, newspapers and junk mail. And a framed seascape ready to be delivered to the local Manyung Gallery, where she sold works on commission.
“I guess the dining table.” She got up and placed the painting on the floor, leaning it against the wall.
Rafe set his briefcase on the table in the space cleared and removed a laptop. Lexie moved around him, gathering the newspapers and magazines. She was aware of how tall he was, at least a head higher than her. And he smelled good, spicy and warm. He was emitting enough pheromones to set her blood humming again.
“Perhaps you have a computer spreadsheet detailing items purchased and the dates?” he asked. “I’d still need the receipts, of course, for verification.”
“No spreadsheet,” Lexie said. “My sister, Renita, is a loans officer at the bank. She tried to organize a bookkeeping system for me but I couldn’t be bothered filling in all those columns.”
He turned his incredulous gaze on her. “Did you read the letter my boss sent you a month ago? Or any of his emails?”
Shaking her head, she took a step back. Pheromones or no, she didn’t like an inquisition.
“Did you listen to the messages on your answering machine, at least?”
She rubbed at a spot of Crimson Lake paint on her knuckle. “I did. But when I’m working I tend to tune things out.”
“Tune out?” It all seemed too much for Rafe. With a grimace, he pressed a hand to his abdomen.
“Is your stomach bothering you?”
“It’ll pass.” His voice was tight, his shoulders slightly hunched.
“Is it an ulcer? My uncle had an ulcer.”
“I’m fine.” He lowered himself onto the chair in front of his laptop, the lines of his face pulled taut.
“I’ll make you a cup of peppermint tea.” Before he could object she strode out of the dining room into the adjacent kitchen. She filled the kettle at the sink. Crystals hanging in the window cast rainbows over her arms. People sometimes got exasperated with her for being scatterbrained, but she didn’t think she’d ever actually made anyone physically ill before.
“My stomach would feel better if you got me your records,” he called.
“I’m working on that.” While the water heated she looked in the cupboard beneath the telephone where she stored cookbooks. Not surprisingly, there weren’t a dozen large envelopes stuffed with receipts and tax invoices. Where had she put those things?
Ah, but here was a receipt for mat board that she’d bought last week. It was tucked inside the address book. Of course. Because she’d rung the gallery right after buying the materials for framing.
Sitting on the tiled floor, she pulled out cookbooks and riffled through the pages. She found a few grocery store receipts itemizing pitifully meager provisions.
“Can I claim food?” she yelled to the other room.
“No, it’s not a deductible business expense.” Already he sounded long-suffering and he’d been here less than an hour.
She was putting back her mother’s copy of Joy of Cooking, which she’d borrowed to make quince preserves, when an old photograph fell out of the pages. With paint-stained fingers she slanted it toward the light.
She, her brother, Jack, and sister, Renita, were playing on the front lawn of the dairy farm where they’d grown up. She couldn’t have been more than six years old. Jack would have been about four and Renita just a toddler. Lexie smiled, her eyes misting. They’d had good times as kids.
Now Jack was getting married again and Renita, too. Lexie was the only one of her siblings who hadn’t found a life partner. She’d never had the kids she longed for, either. A sharp pang for the baby she’d lost made her press a hand to her chest. She counted back the years.
Her boy would have been twenty-one years old now.
“The kettle is boiling,” Rafe said, right behind her.
Lexie tucked the photograph back in the cookbook and, rising, placed the mat board receipt in his open palm. “It’s a start.”
He stared at the crumpled slip of paper. Resignation washed over his face and his mouth firmed. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up over his forearms. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“You have no idea,” Lexie murmured.
RAFE TOOK a sip of peppermint tea and tried not to grimace. He would give his right arm for a strong cup of espresso—even if it did aggravate his gut. Carefully he set the delicate china teacup with the hand-painted roses in its saucer.
With Lexie’s records this disorganized he bet she had other undeclared painting sales. How was she going to pay her taxes? Anyone could see she had no money.
Not his problem. His job was to do the audit and get the hell out of Summerside.
Hopefully after he’d had a chance to sample the fishing.
Seated at the dining table, he went about setting up a spreadsheet for Lexie’s tax records. So far she’d managed to find a dozen receipts, gleaned from strange hiding places. The teapot had yielded a receipt for scented tea candles—naturally. Apparently Lexie sometimes meditated by candlelight to enhance her creativity. Too bad for her, the tax office didn’t consider them an allowable expense.
Lexie was moving around the living room, searching in decorative wooden boxes and flipping through the pages of books. Never in his six years of auditing had he come across anyone like her. She’d pick something up, carry it a few steps and put it down in another spot.
Nutbags, these artist types.
“Maybe instead of looking for individual receipts, you should concentrate on finding those envelopes you were telling me about,” he said.
“I’m deliberately not thinking about them in the hopes it’ll pop into my mind where I put them.”
Nutbag she might be, but she was easy on the eyes. With her straight back and graceful, sleek limbs she could have been mistaken for a dancer. Long tangled blond hair fell past her shoulder blades. She’d bend to search a low shelf then unfold, flipping that hair back, humming to herself as another book or a picture caught her fancy and she spent a few moments studying it. Completely unselfconscious, she didn’t seem to care if he watched her.
Not that he was watching her.
With a frown he dragged his attention back to his woefully sparse spreadsheet, labeling columns across the top.
“Do you mind music while you work?” she said, picking out a CD from the vertical rack.
“Go ahead.” He gritted his teeth and braced himself for whale songs or some such New Age thing.
“I think you’ll like this. It’s Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu.” She inserted the CD and a soft haunting voice began to sing in another language.
Yep, just as he’d thought. Rafe tuned out and started tapping in numbers. The sooner he got through this, the sooner he could get down to the pier with his fishing rod.
“Ooh, here’s a whole bunch,” she said, peering into a carved wooden box. She sauntered over to the table and plunked them in front of him. “Here you go.”
Four of the six receipts were useless for tax purposes. He added the other two to his meager pile. “Fourteen down, God knows how many to go.”
Lexie slid onto a chair and pulled her legs up beneath her. “So, Rafe, did you always want to be a tax agent when you grew up?”
“Yes, accountancy fascinated me from an early age.”
“Really?” Lexie asked, with a dubious frown.
No. But he had a facility for numbers and after graduating from high school, accounting had seemed like the quickest ticket out of the small country town of Horsham where he’d grown up.
Rafe shrugged. “It’s a living.”
“It can’t be nice going to people’s houses and threatening them with the police if they don’t hand over their receipts.”
Another twinge in his stomach. He clenched his teeth to control the wince. Nobody got it. Sure, it wasn’t the most thrilling job but it wasn’t fair that people saw him as the bad guy. “I’m here to help you. You’ve gotten yourself in trouble and I’m bailing you out. At taxpayers’ expense, I might add.”
“So you think you’re doing a good thing?”
