Happy Mother's Day! (29 page)

From nowhere Siena was hit with a wave of vulnerability that was almost stronger than the apprehension repelling her from going inside her childhood home. The charming scene touched her, creating a ball of something entirely new deep in her stomach.

It felt a heck of a lot like longing, but for this focused, no-strings-attached, jet-setting career girl
that
was unlikely.

Maybe it was nausea. She’d been in a car accident after all! Surely such a thing would make anyone a little woozy around the edges and it would explain the wobbly knees, intense interest in the backs of strangers’ necks and weird cravings cramping at her innards.

When she stopped in the shade of the portico, the object of her woozy feelings smiled at her—the same odd half-smile he had afforded her earlier. Up close and personal, his smile didn’t seem so free and easy—it was cool, aloof, barely reaching his slate-grey eyes. Suddenly she wasn’t so sure that she had been sensing the ghosts of her own childhood when driving by this house after all.

‘Da-a-ad,’ Kane said, tugging on James’s arm, and it was enough for his smile to kick up a bare notch, a sliver, a millimetre, but even that tiny alteration turned some sort of switch inside him. And inside her.

With that new low burning light came flecks of the palest blue into James Dillon’s grey eyes, a captivating crease appeared from nowhere in his carved right cheek, and suddenly Siena couldn’t remember what she had been worrying about in the first place.

‘Come on in. We don’t bite,’ James said, bathing her in the affectionate smile meant for his son. He then turned and followed his son into the house, leaving the door open for her to follow.

She had to go ahead with this. There was no way she wanted to feel beholden to these guys. Or guilty for almost running the kid down. Especially not guilty. She’d swum through enough of that to know one could never come out clean at the other side.

If she could confiscate cellphones from
Fortune 500
CEOs, tell sheikhs to sit down and shut up and show milliondollar football players how to use their airsickness bags, she could do this.

With a determined flourish she kicked off her red Jimmy Choos, tucked them neatly against the doorway with a quick prayer to the fashion gods that no suburban housewife with a discerning eye for designer footwear might happen by, and with her hot bare feet curling against the cool tiled floor she followed him inside.

Her feet slowed once she realised that, though on the outside she never would have mistaken her old home, on the inside the ground floor was absolutely nothing like it had once been.

Whereas the home she grew up in had been dark and overstuffed with fake Italian statues, old furnishings and too many rugs, James Dillon’s home was like the perfect summer day. Buttermilk-yellow walls, soft cream carpet and a collection of the most beautiful highly polished wooden chairs and side tables and cupboards created the illusion of endless space. Walls had been knocked down to create an open flow throughout a house which to her had always felt claustrophobic. She could see all the way through to skylights and bronze hanging pots in the spotless white and wood kitchen and a sunroom had been added to the back of the house, housing a small cane sofa overloaded with scatter cushions.

Finding herself alone, she wandered to a shiny black piano, eerily situated exactly where hers had once been. And, just like hers, it housed a bunch of framed photos scattered across the closed lid.

She laid her red handbag on the piano lid and leant in to get a closer look.

James now wore his brown hair short with a sprinkle of ash throughout, but in the main photo he had longer hair curling about his face, he wore frayed shorts and a T-shirt and had Kane thrown over his shoulder as they ran down a tract of perfect white sand at the beach. She sighed, recognising the landscape as Palm Cove—the peaceful little hamlet where she ought to have been if Rick hadn’t guilted her into staying with him in the ‘burbs.

Her eyes devoured other photos in which James fished, jumped from planes and taught Kane how to ice-skate. And, in all of the photos, he was smiling. All big white teeth, pink wind-burned cheeks and crinkling blue-grey eyes.

‘Well, there you go,’ she said aloud, her voice echoing in the lofty space. Whereas polite, quiet James of the half-smiles and worn clothes was a looker, Action James was a true blue—no doubting it—gorgeous son of a gun.

Siena gulped down a strange thickness in her throat. The very fact that she was thinking such thoughts about some guy with a kid should have sent her walking out of the house then and there.

As her hand reached for the handle of her bag and her itchy feet made a move to do just that, Siena suddenly caught sight of a photo of a woman hidden amongst the two dozen of Kane and James. She reached in and took it in her hand.

Sunlight gleamed off thick tousled blonde hair. Rows of neat white teeth beamed from a wide smile. Brown bedroom eyes looked not at the camera but at the person behind the lens.

‘Siena?’ James said from somewhere out of sight.

‘Coming!’ she called out, quickly placing the photo back on to the piano lid.

‘Through here,’ he called back.

She followed the sound of his voice and found Kane sitting on a closed toilet seat while James was on his haunches searching through a cupboard in an airy bright white downstairs bathroom where her dingy old laundry room had once been.

And, though there was a picture of a beautiful blonde on his piano, and she had almost hit his son with her car, and she had somewhere else to be, and it was none of her business, she couldn’t help taking a moment to reconcile James with the guy in the photographs.

Okay, so there was definite gorgeousness still there, only in sepia rather than full Kodak-colour. He looked up to find her staring at him and his grey eyes flickered and narrowed.

Siena blinked several times over, before doggedly turning her attention to the job at hand. Around a dozen different antiseptic creams, lotions and bandages lay on the wide bench top at his side.

‘Are you bunking in for a nuclear winter?’ she blurted out.

‘Somehow I don’t think this part of the world is at the top of the nuclear hit list, if it ever comes to that,’ he returned, his voice unexpectedly laced with sarcasm. And, since Siena was quite partial to a bit of that herself, she felt her stomach flutters returning.

‘Fine. But then what’s with the personal pharmacy?’ she shot back.

‘I’m thorough. Is there something wrong with that?’

‘Hey, I’m not complaining. Only a silly woman would put down thoroughness. Just making an observation.’

James’s brow furrowed ever so slightly, his mouth hooked up at one corner, and he blinked long and slow. And, just like that, she sensed the game was on.

‘And what else have you observed?’ he asked, moving to
sit back on his haunches, one muscular arm leaning casually along the top of the cupboard door.

She glanced at a much safer Kane, who was watching her with big sad puppy dog eyes, completely trusting. ‘Well, I’ve learned that it’s always the big strapping ones who fall apart at the sight of a bit of blood. Now, are you going to sit there with your head in the cupboard all day or will you just move over and let me do it?’

She gave James a little shove on the shoulder and he duly stood and moved to the far side of the room. She then grabbed a bottle of familiar brown liquid, which Rick had preferred when Siena the tomboy had come inside crying after getting in the middle of scrappy fight with local boys.

She felt the temperature in the room change as James moved to sit on the tiled edge of a neat oval spa bath—watching her.

‘If I drop a dollop on this perfect white floor,’ she said, not looking his way, ‘I’m scared that sirens will blast and water will stream from jets in the ceiling.’

‘Don’t panic,’ he said. ‘We have a cleaner.’

‘Oh, do
we
now?’ she asked, pulling a la-di-dah face at Kane. Kane grinned back at her, all too-big teeth and goofy dependence, and her stomach flutters coagulated back into that odd sensation of longing.

‘His name is Matt,’ Kane explained. ‘He comes in most days and vacuums and gardens and turns on the dishwasher.’

‘The dishwasher?’ she repeated, sneaking a look at James. ‘My, oh, my. Whatever would
we
do without him?’

She was surprised to find that the engaging half-smile had not left James’s face. She looked determinedly away.

‘And he picks me up from school,’ Kane continued, oblivious
to the undercurrents swirling about the small room. ‘And he stays on sometimes when Dad has a job to finish or has to go out to see clients.’

‘I see,’ she said, though she clearly didn’t. The image of tousled blonde hair came to mind and she wondered briefly what the sunshiny, piano-top woman in their lives did when James had to finish a ‘job’ or see clients.

But that hardly mattered. She was feeling decidedly better about being in the house of teenage hell than she would ever have expected—and there was no point in pushing her luck.

She picked up a cotton swab.

‘Ouch!’ Kane was already wincing before the swab was within a foot of his elbow.

‘You are making me feel mean, Kane!’

‘Matt did a first aid course because he used to be an ambulance driver,’ Kane, said, his eyes growing huge. ‘Why did you?’

‘I am a Cabin Director with MaxAir—you know the airline with the light blue planes? And I have to look after any people who become unwell whilst flying, so I do an extensive first aid course every year. Did you know that way back in the beginning, the first ever flight attendants were actually nurses?’

Obviously Kane was not nearly as impressed with her qualifications as he was with Matt’s so she decided on another tack. ‘If it makes you feel any better, I have taken a zillion other courses too.’

‘Like what sort?’

‘I have taken lessons on fixing leaking taps, self-defence, I have a scuba licence and I can speak four languages.’

‘Four?’ Kane asked, his pale brown eyes growing large.

‘Yep. My parents were both born in Italy so I knew Italian before I knew English, but I can also speak conversational
German and French.’
I can also juggle, even soft drink cans, which would have sent Jessica into a fit had she been told; I can do the splits and tango with the best of them,
she thought, feeling a bit like a circus clown.

Kane’s eyes all but popped out of his head.

‘Would you like me to teach you how to say one to ten in Italian?’ she asked.

Kane nodded.

‘Excellent. Okay.
Uno …’
Siena dabbed at the scrape with the soaked cotton wool, wiping away specks of dried blood and gravel and doing her dandiest to keep Kane’s eyes on her mouth as she spoke, not on her hands as she tended his stinging wound.

‘Due …’
Siena cleaned the scrape and patted it dry.

‘Tre
…’ Siena unwound the child-proof lid of the top of the antiseptic bottle.

‘Quattro …’
Siena tipped a healthy amount of antiseptic on to a fresh hunk of cotton wool.

‘Cinque …’
Siena dabbed at the scrape, turning Kane’s arm a dull brown.

‘Sei …’
Siena put the lid back on to the bottle.

‘Sette …’
Siena tore a hunk of bandage.

‘Otto …”
Siena placed the bandage over Kane’s arm.

‘Nove …’
Siena ran a soft hand over the bandage, making sure it was in place.

‘Dieci!
Well done! To the both of us. Now, can you remember them all?’

He shook his head. ‘Tell me again.’

Siena did so and had Kane repeat after her. Halfway through she felt a tingle on the back of her neck and she realised it was because James was watching her still. She
glanced at him sideways. His half-smile had graduated into something not bigger but
warmer
and she felt a ridiculous flash of satisfaction.

A few moments later Siena realised she was still staring, caught up in James’s complex gaze for so long that she now knew he had a ring of midnight-blue around his silvery pupils.

James swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his strong throat, and Siena had the distinct feeling he would have been able to describe the exact colour of her eyes too.

‘Teach me another language!’ Kane insisted, shattering the extraordinary tension that had cocooned the room.

‘Not now,’ James said, as he took Kane by the hand and drew him off the seat. ‘I, for one, am in need of a drink.’

And, by the gravel echoing in his voice, Siena had the feeling that if it were not for the presence of Kane, a gin and tonic would have suited him better than lemonade too.

‘Can I tempt you?’ he asked.

She stood, shoving her hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She knew he was talking about something as innocent as lemonade, but the implications of what it could have meant in a parallel universe resonated through her.

‘With lemonade?’ she qualified. ‘You bet.’

‘Yippee,’ Kane said. ‘Then I can show you my bedroom.’

And, just like that, Siena’s breath was sapped from her lungs.

‘U
M,
I don’t know, Kane …’ Siena said, backing away physically and mentally.

Before she could duck out the door Kane reached out and grabbed her hand, small, hot, sticky fingers closing over hers. ‘But I just got a new computer and it plays games and songs and stuff.’

His pale brown eyes began to glisten. His bottom lip trembled. A screaming kid she could handle. She’d been a pretty competent screaming kid once herself. But a kid with big brown eyes welling with tears? First she’d felt empathy for Freddy the cola-flinger and now this? It seemed that, despite the protestations of some of her cabin crew, she was only human after all.

‘You know what,’ Siena said, backtracking frantically, ‘I would love to see your backyard more. The reason I was driving down this street in the first place was because when I was your age I used to live in this very house.’

‘You did?’ Kane asked, his expression now wary.

‘I did. And the backyard was my favourite place. We had a swing set and a pool, and there was this one fence paling that was never attached properly and when I was not much bigger than you I could slip right through the hole it made.’

‘I know! Dad fixed it though when we first moved in. Wow, how cool. Which room was yours?’

‘The front room, I’d hazard to guess,’ James said.

Siena turned to him and nodded. ‘How’d you guess?’

‘When we repainted it took me a week to plug up all the holes left by poster pins.’

She grinned. ‘I was madly in love with several grunge rock bands for quite some time and I proved my love by covering every spare inch of pink floral wallpaper.’

‘I’ve no doubt,’ he said, the half-smile drawing her in. ‘And now?’

‘My tastes have become more … grown-up.’ ‘R and B?’

‘No. Reality,’ she said.

He laughed, the sound rolling over her like an ocean wave on the hottest day of summer, and Siena felt herself warming from the inside out. Okay, now she recognised what this feeling was. It was the zing that came from flirting, and flirting well.

But there was a kid, and a blonde, and crucial dry cleaning to consider. She determinedly switched conversational tack. ‘My brother Rick sold this place about three years ago. Rick Capuletti. Did you buy it from him?’

‘Dad bought this house for Mum as a wedding present,’ Kane all but shouted, delighted to be able to nudge his way back into the conversation.

Her gaze switched straight from Kane to James to find herself drowning in the suddenly unfathomable depths behind his cool grey eyes. Before her eyes his clear-cut edges blurred, the sharpness that had earlier seduced her into easy flirtation dissolving until Siena had to fight the urge to reach out and tug him back to the present.

‘Oh,’ she said, unable to dredge up a trace of eloquence.
Oh, indeed.
So the sunshiny blonde was not just a ring-in. She was a bona fide Dillon family member. And she was Kane’s mother. And, of all things, she had been given a rather pricey
house
as a wedding present.

Wait a second …

‘But we only sold this place—’ Too late she shut her trap.
Three years ago,
she had been about to say. But the implication was there all the same. Kane had not been a honeymoon baby. Suddenly it was obvious that he had come from the same gene pool as the brown-eyed woman in the photograph, but it was entirely possible that Kane was not James’s natural born kid.

James’s cheek twitched and she knew he was following the trail of her thoughts without any trouble. She felt herself burning up. Blushing. She! Forthright, tough as nails, unflappable she.

James stood, drawing Kane in front of him as a wall. Kane took the attention blindly, hugging on to his dad’s arms as he blinked ingenuously up at Siena.

‘Kane, how about you show Siena your new trampoline while I organise the lemonade?’

‘Sounds like a plan,’ she said, torn halfway between mortification for somehow upsetting her host and a more selfish gratitude that a tour of the upstairs bedrooms had gone by the wayside.

Kane tugged her hand again and they jogged together through the kitchen, leaving James setting some glasses and a plate of packet biscuits on to a tray.

‘First I’ll show you Dad’s shed,’ Kane said, taking her to a large rendered concrete outbuilding, which was a new addition to the beautifully manicured backyard. She barely had time to take in the elegant landscaping around their old
kidney-shaped in-ground pool as Kane gave the shed’s heavy side door a big heave-ho. And inside?

Inside was a cave of wonders.

Sunlight streamed in through high windows, collecting waves of flying wood dust as it settled upon sharp, clean, oil-soaked tools residing in neat rows along the far wall. A long oak work table was clear of debris and bric-a-brac but was coated with splotches of paint and notches from slipped tools. A sander and a set of clear plastic goggles lay strewn on the bench as though forgotten in the middle of a job. Chunks of wood and chopped tree trunks with the bark still attached lay in neat piles all along the left wall.

‘What does your dad do out here?’ Siena asked, her voice a little breathless.

‘He makes cabinets.’ Kane swished his hand like a model on a game show displaying white goods.

She ran her hand along the bench, the soft pads of her fingers tingling at the feel of the rough worn wood. When she reached the end of the bench she found something large hiding beneath a dusty old sheet. She barely hesitated before giving the cloth a tug.

A small gasp escaped her lips as it fell away to reveal the most beautiful piece of furniture she had ever seen.

It was a baby’s changing table—waist-high, with five drawers, resting on stubby little legs. The name
Lachlan
was carved in a heavy neat scrawl along the top drawer and pictures of teddy bears and rattles were carved randomly about the piece.

The detail and craftsmanship was spectacular. In amongst the thousand and one classes she had crammed into her days
off, she had taken wood shop. She had lovingly created what she had thought to be a truly beautiful wooden ashtray, though nobody she knew smoked. It had taken days to carve the simple round shape, buff it to a polish and then carve her initials into the bottom.

But this was a whole other dimension. Each piece of wood was obviously chosen for its peculiar grain, with the graded waves of colour and knots working to form a beautiful inclusive whole.

It was exquisite. The work of someone with patience and imagination. Siena had thought James Dillon a simple labourer, but for once her first impression had been wrong. The man was a creator.

She looked over her shoulder and through the large window which gave an unimpeded view of the backyard and the rear of the two-storey house.

The man in question ambled past the kitchen window with the phone to his ear—calling for a tow truck? Calling for a cab to take her home?

Her heart slipped in her chest and she felt something akin to loss at the thought of leaving so soon. A hand fluttered to her ribs and she swallowed hard.
That
sensation was the most unexpected of all.

She stepped back, needing to distance herself from all of the unwelcome feelings tumbling inside her and she bumped into a small work desk in the corner. A battered, dust-covered laptop resting on the corner of the desk slipped and she turned and caught it before it fell.

She righted it upon its small metal desk and saw that it was loaded on to a simple black webpage with a neat cream font. She knew by the format that it was a web-based diary—a blog.
She’d trawled online blogs often as many of her workmates used them to keep their families apprised of their adventures travelling.

This page was simply called ‘DINAH’ and the dates below the title told Siena it was dedicated to a woman who had died a little over twelve months before. Cold fingers of dread crept up the back of her neck.

Needing to know, to make sure that what she was thinking was true, she ran her finger over the mouse pad to shuffle down the webpage and she randomly chose an entry dated a few months before.

Siena looked over her shoulder. Kane was busy in the corner, babbling away about how he helped his dad every Saturday morning and his dad let him choose the sandpaper and that he made five dollars a day when he worked with him. But it soon became white noise as Siena ached to read more. To know more.

She licked her dry lips, her heart suddenly beating so hard she could hear it thrumming in her ears.

But wasn’t this like reading the guy’s diary? Well, no. By definition a blog was
out there,
on the World Wide Web for all and sundry to stumble upon and read.

Convinced enough, she read on.

Siena blinked.

Dinah. Dinah was the beautiful blonde with the bedroom eyes in the photograph on the piano. Dinah was Kane’s mother, the woman who had been given a whole house as a wedding gift. And she was gone.

‘Hey, do you want to see
my
swings? They’re way better than the ones you left behind.’

Siena spun around to find Kane standing at her back, staring at her with big brown eyes full of innocence. If she thought her heart was thrumming earlier she’d had no idea.
She could feel it slamming against her chest. Her palms were sweating. Her face had turned beet-red with guilt.

What was she thinking in reading James’s blog? Was she insane? Obviously the humidity was sending her barmy.

‘Sure, Kane,’ she said, spinning him on the spot and giving him a little shove towards the door with one hand as she closed the laptop behind her with the other. ‘But we’ll have to be quick as it’s time for me to go.’

James hung up the phone from calling a tow-truck.

He leant his palms against the kitchen bench and watched his son dragging Siena out of his workshop and over to the trampoline.

She padded behind him on bare feet, her heavy dark curls bouncing, the hem of her long jeans dragging in the dirt, but she seemed not to notice or care.

Kane clambered up on to his new toy and she stood by, hands on hips, as Kane bounced up and down and chatted away about goodness knew what.

James breathed in deep through his nose.

Siena Capuletti was something else, and, no matter which way he looked at it, they had been engaged in some pretty darned enjoyable flirting back in the bathroom. He didn’t even really know whether he had started it or her, but before he’d even known what he was doing he’d found himself in one heck of a natural rhythm.

He rolled the kinks out of his shoulders, quite liking the feeling that he had stretched some muscles that hadn’t been stretched in a good long time.

He didn’t have time to think on it much more as suddenly Siena was jogging back through the kitchen door.

‘I can’t believe how thirsty I am,’ she said as she leaned against the kitchen bench at his side. ‘It’s so hot out there. But, then again, it’s hot out there every day here.’ She glanced pointedly at the tray of drinks which had never gone further than the kitchen. ‘May I?’

James nodded, watching her drink the tall glass of soft drink in one go, as if she stopped she might not get started again.

As she drank she reached up and rubbed a hand across the back of her neck, ruffling the curls spread along her neckline, and it occurred to James for the first time that she herself might have been injured in the accident.

He frowned. Once he’d known Kane was all right that should have been the first thing he’d ascertained. What was with him these days? So what if he could spin a line or two; he obviously didn’t seem to know how to think logically any more. Had he spent so much time watching over Kane that he had forgotten how to speak to an adult? Lemonade and cookies? Come on!

Siena continued running her fingers up through the back of her curls until they tumbled back against her neck in messy disarray. Okay, so she didn’t seem hurt. She just seemed to like to run her hands through her hair. He didn’t blame her. The affect of those bouncing dark curls agreed with him plenty.

‘Pretty nifty set-up you have out there,’ she said, when she came up for breath. She licked a sheen of lemonade from her lips. ‘I kind of peeked a look at the changing table you were working on. It’s gorgeous. Really. You’re very talented.’

He tipped his head in thanks. ‘So they tell me.’

‘What would one have to fork out for one of those?’ she asked.

She leant a hip against his bench and crossed her feet at the ankle, revealing a truly dirty underneath of her right foot.

He glanced at the floor to see a run of dirty footprints. He bit his lip, thinking Matt would have a fit when he found them marking the white kitchen floor.

But to James they kind of felt like the first footsteps on the moon. They were proof of a proper grown-up conversation he was having in his kitchen, which was something unique and a bit of a breakthrough really.