Meant-To-Be Mother. Ally Blake
took James a few moments to realise she had come to the end of her speech. He looked back down at Kane, who was now leaning beside the car, sniffling but no longer crying. He was cradling his elbow but, of the two of them, James was pretty certain Siena Capuletti had come out of it the more afflicted of the pair.
James offered the woman a smile by way of acceptance of her apology. Thankful for the reprieve, she smiled back, her eyes glittering like the sun off the coral-laden waters off Green Island.
He stamped out his own smile before his imagination got the better of him. He leant over and picked up the bike and rested it against his thighs, creating a wall between himself and the winsome stranger.
‘If Kane says you missed him,’ he said, ‘then you missed him. He shouldn’t have been riding out on to the road as it is.’
She shook her head, her riotous dark curls swishing about her ears. ‘I should have been more careful, especially driving down a suburban street.’
She looked up at his house, staring at it for a few moments, her face haunted, overly so he believed, considering how little damage had been done to either person.
She swallowed and then looked back over at him, her big green eyes blinking nineteen to the dozen. He couldn’t help himself—he just stared right on back. Was it because she was familiar? Perhaps she lived locally and he had seen her at the supermarket.
No. That wasn’t it. He had never seen this woman before. But there was definitely something tugging at him. Something potent enough that he found a sudden need to drag his eyes away and down to Kane.
‘Now, what have you done to your arm, buddy?’
Kane twisted his arm to show him the nasty scrape. And blood. Seeing blood dribbling down Kane’s arm clouded James’s mind until he felt as if he was watching the world through a pinhole.
At the behest of each and every counsellor who had drifted in and out of Kane’s life over the past year—the first recommended by the hospital, yet another organised through Kane’s school and even a private one who James thought smelled of his old gym bag but Kane liked him and that was recommendation enough—James had pared his life back to one core mission: devoting himself to Kane. To protect him. To keep him safe. To shield him from all further pain. So how the hell had he allowed this to happen?
‘Maybe we should whip you down to the emergency room to make sure.’
As soon as the words left his mouth James knew it had been exactly the wrong thing to say. Kane’s pale eyes grew as big as saucers and his face lost the last vestiges of colour.
Damn it! Over a year of being a single dad and he still managed to find new and interesting ways of screwing it up.
The last time the poor kid had seen his mother she had been in the care of a pair of smiling ambulance drivers on her way to the hospital for tests. And she had never come home.
James ran a quick hand back and forth over his short hair. This wasn’t the time for all that. Late at night, while Kane slept, he could kick himself for any mistakes he’d made before and since to his heart’s content, but in daylight hours it was all about keeping Kane on an even keel.
‘What was I thinking?’ he said, bending down until he was at eye level with his son. He reached out and tucked his hand behind Kane’s thin neck. ‘A bit of Dettol and a bandage ought to do it. It might sting a bit, but you can take it, can’t you, Buddy?’
Kane nodded, the fear in his eyes dampening. ‘’Course I can.’
‘I know first aid,’ a modest voice said from behind them. ‘Only last week I took my yearly refresher course.’
James turned to find Siena shuffling from one high-heel-shod foot to the other, wringing her slender hands together so hard he could see her knuckles turning white.
‘This is entirely my fault,’ she said, decreasing the distance between the two of them until she was close enough that he could smell her perfume. Subtle. Expensive. Drinkable. ‘Please let me make it up to you.’
Her stormy eyes beseeched him and in that moment he could not remember what she was referring to. A moment was all it was, but that moment was significant. For in that moment he had no memory. No memory of sadness, or loss, or a life put on hold. All he knew in that moment was the exact colour of her eyes.
He wiped the back of his hand across his hot forehead and was not at all surprised to find fresh beads of sweat had gathered there and they had little to do with the Cairns weather. Tropical temperatures he was used to; this unfamiliar woman he was not.
Worried that she was about to fret herself into a dead faint on his front lawn, and knowing she couldn’t go anywhere in the Ute as it was, James gave in.
‘Come on in out of the heat. I’ll call someone to check out your car. I think we could all do with a cool drink of lemonade.’
James held out an arm and Kane leant against him without argument. He tucked Kane’s slight warm body against him and took the wobbly bike up the driveway, not quite sure how it had come to be that he of all people had invited a perfect stranger into his house when even his closest friends had not been inside those walls in months.
Siena ran around to the open driver’s side door, quickly shoved her PDA into her handbag and slammed the door shut. She didn’t bother locking it; at that point if anyone wanted to try to drive the car away they were welcome to it.
She then found herself following a stranger and his son into Fourteen Apple Tree Drive.
Shock. The only reason she was even contemplating walking into that house again had to be shock.
So why wasn’t she just waiting by the car while the guy called her a cab and a tow truck so that she and her wobbly legs could be on their way? She had somewhere else to be. She had a Dolce and Gabbana suit fermenting on the back seat of her car, for goodness’ sake! She even had Rufus’s business card floating about the bottom of her handbag, and she was certain he could be at her side faster than any cab.
But no. For some reason she was following this man into her house…his house, for lemonade, when she could really do with a strong gin and tonic to calm her seriously taut nerves.
She intently ignored the curved driveway her father had poured the year she’d turned nine and the black shutters on the second floor which she had broken twice when trying to climb out the window after curfew.
Instead she kept her gaze tight on the back of a dusty black T-shirt stretched across a broad back, patches of hair on tanned muscular arms glowing in dappled sunshine, scruffy back pockets of worn old jeans moulded to the lean lines of long legs.
As she neared her father’s beloved rose bushes, which she had deflowered completely to load on his breakfast tray one Father’s Day, Siena focused as close as someone could on the back of James’s neck where short ash-brown hair had been recently shaved into a perfectly straight line revealing a strong tanned neck with a couple of sexy crinkles thrown in for good measure.
Okay, so this was wasn’t going to be easy. But did she really need to be focused on sexy neck creases and moulded jeans to get her through? The guy was a father, for goodness’ sake. No wedding ring—like any self-respecting single woman she had noted that the moment she had seen the guy. But he was definitely the antithesis of what she normally preferred in the male friends she made on her brief stints in different countries around the world.
She liked men in suits. Clean-shaven, single men with time and money and ambition who knew what they wanted and went after it. Men not unlike her.
If her first impression was spot on, and it always was, this guy was a labourer of some sort; the rough pads on the palms of his hands had given that away.
But, remarkably for her, that was as much as she had figured about him. Whether on purpose or through circumstance, this one had a pretty solid wall shielding strangers from seeing too far past that half-smile of his.
Nevertheless she could tell that