Happy Mother's Day! (31 page)

She was saved from further scrutiny by the longed-for arrival of the tow-truck.

‘Hey, this is Rick’s car,’ the large hairy driver shouted as he slid from his high cab, paunch first.

‘Rick’s sister,’ Siena said with a sigh, pointing to her chest.

‘Oh, right. The deserter,’ the tow-truck driver said.

Yep. That sounded like Rick—able to grate on her nerves even through a third party.

She should have known she couldn’t slip away quietly in the twilight after all this. Even though Cairns was practically a city hub now compared with when she had left, everyone still knew everyone. Everyone would know she was in town, everyone would know she had crashed her brother’s car, and now everyone would know that she had spent part of her day with James Dillon—widower.

‘The car’s unlocked, so how about we get her all hooked up and outta here before word gets back to my two hundred pound brother with a temper to match?’ she said, using her polite but insistent sky girl voice.

She clicked her fingers and the driver remembered who he was—a guy who got paid by the number of jobs he delivered in a day. That put a spring in his step as he hotfooted back to the winch.

She turned to Matt and James, who were watching the interplay, and she felt she owed it to them to tell them who the Capulettis were. ‘I grew up here,’ she explained. ‘I moved away several years ago and this is my first time back and my big brother is a pain in the butt who should mind his own business.’

It was such an impressive introduction she felt she ought to curtsy at the end.

‘Families, eh?’ Matt said. ‘You can’t live with ‘em.’

Siena grinned. ‘That’s the bumper sticker of my life.’

‘So you don’t live around here any more?’ James asked, honing in on the essentials.

‘No,’ she said, shaking her head and concentrating on the rose rather than on the setback in James’s eyes. ‘Melbourne. Mainly.’

‘Melbourne,’ Matt repeated, his face screwing up as if he had sucked on a lemon. ‘Why would anyone move to cold rainy Melbourne after knowing about this slice of heaven?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she shot back. ‘Maybe the world class sport, fantastic restaurants, out of this world shopping, the art and culture and actual seasons might be considered a drawcard to some.’

‘Shopping?’ Matt repeated. ‘Well, now I’m convinced.’

James made a sound that sounded a heck of a lot like a snort of laughter. Her gaze skittered to his, to find his eyes sparkling.

The sparkle hinted at the warmth she had felt in his fingers when he had gripped her arm earlier. The warmth reminded her of what the guy looked like when he smiled. The memory of that smile made Siena feel as if she was once again enclosed in this single dad’s unwitting gravitational pull. And
that
reminded her why she wanted to leave his presence as soon as was humanly possible.

She dragged her eyes away from his, gave a brief goodbye glance at the old house, a demon she had quite proudly slaughtered that day for sure, then with a quick wave goodbye jogged over to the truck, and asked to bum a ride with the driver.

‘I can watch Kane if you need James to give you a lift somewhere,’ Matt called out, giving James a bump with his shoulder at the same time.

‘No, thanks,’ she said, giving them both a big wave as she leapt into the cab and mentally hurried the tow-truck driver, who was taking way too much time winching the green monster on to his truck. Funny, but she instinctively knew it would be easier to suffer Rick’s temper than share a confined space with James Dillon.

‘I’d better be there when this arrives or Rick will blow a gasket,’ she called out. ‘Thanks for the lemonade, though. And thank Kane for the tour of your workshop. It really was a delight.’

The driver hauled his bulky frame into the high cab and she could have kissed him, though he was much further down the evolutionary scale than the types of guys she usually saw than even James.

‘Ready to go?’ he asked.

‘You bet.’
More than you know,
she thought, for although Siena was experiencing stomach flutters of the first order, she was free as a bird and the Dillon house was already a cage to the men who lived there.

Matt gave her one last wave before heading indoors.

James wasn’t so easily swayed.

As the tow-truck diver pulled away, she watched James in the side mirror all the way to the corner. Standing there in his tired jeans and his dusty T-shirt, with his lean muscled arms hanging loosely at his sides, he didn’t move.

As she travelled down the long, gently winding road, he stood on the footpath, beside his squished roses, watching her go.

‘S
O ARE
you sticking with this airline gig?’ Rick asked when they were alone in the kitchen after an early dinner that night. ‘Or have you come to Cairns to give Max the flick?’

Siena sat back at the kitchen bench nibbling on a fingernail and flicking through a pile of junk mail while the twins ran out the last of their energy, Tina put baby Rosie to bed and Rick put the leftovers into freezer bowls.

‘Of course I’m sticking with it,’ she said, her feet jiggling as they rested on a bar at the bottom of her stool. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You always did get bored pretty quick.’ His thick dark eyebrows shifted skyward, willing her to argue as she distractedly flicked through the pages of some magazine. She slammed the magazine shut and sat on her hands.

‘I have a low attention span. It’s not just me; it’s the bane of my generation. You wouldn’t know about that being that you are
so
much older.’ She shot Rick a bratty smile and he scowled back.

‘When
did
you go so grey,
Riccione?’
she asked, throwing his proper name in his face, her diabolical inner teenager taking over.

‘It appeared overnight the day after you ran away,’ Rick said, his terrorising older brother mechanism kicking in as though it hadn’t been dormant for seven years.

Deep breaths,
she thought.
Happy place …

‘I think you actually care about this job, sis.’

She knew by the look in his eye that Rick was thinking it was because some of his
guidance
when she was younger may have rubbed off. Rubbed the wrong way, more like.

‘Unbelievably, my wayward little sister cares for something other than the wind at her back.’

‘What, me? Care?’ she said, holding a hand to her heart. ‘Never!’ But care she did. She really didn’t want to have to tell Max no.

‘So now we’ve exhausted work, how are things on the boyfriend front?’ he asked. ‘In cousin Ash’s last email he mentioned you had a fellow in New York the last time you visited him on a layover. But the last I heard you were hot and heavy with some guy in Paris.’

She watched him closely to see if he was sending her a sideways barb that the two of them hadn’t communicated by phone or email for months. But his question seemed genuine. She bit down the thought that it was her own guilt for not keeping in touch that was niggling at her.

‘Not a
fellow
as such,’ she said. ‘Gage and I share an obsession for home-made gnocchi and he knows exactly where to find the best Italian in New York. And with Raoul in Paris it’s all about good coffee. I have discovered I have a knack for cultivating casual friendships made in heaven.’

Something crashed in the next room followed by a slowly increasing wail of a twin who had done something wrong. Rick threw a tea towel over his shoulder and went
to find out what was going on. But at the doorway he stopped and turned.

‘There is one problem with having a guy in every port,
Piccolo.’

Siena’s chin raised an inch. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, knowing she couldn’t stop him from telling her anyway.

‘There comes a time when there’s no safe place left to run but home.’

Rick pushed his way through the swing doors and Siena was left alone with nothing to do with her clenched fists but unclench them.

Siena’s mobile phone buzzed, giving her an outlet. She waited for a name to appear on her screen but it was an unfamiliar mobile number.

Rufus? Maximillian?

She answered the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Siena?’

James.
She hardly knew the guy but his name popped into her mind the second his deep, well-modulated voice said her name.

‘It’s James. James Dillon from this afternoon.’

No kidding,
she thought, but all she said was, ‘Hello again.’

‘Um, you left your PDA at my place. I found it on the piano when it started beeping madly about fifteen minutes ago and I wasn’t sure how to get it to stop, so I pressed lots of buttons until it did.’

Beeping? Oh, right, it would be a reminder that her next week’s flight schedule would have appeared in her email inbox—

‘Then I figured it was beeping for a reason,’ he continued, ‘so you might want it back ASAP. The only way to find you was
to go looking until I found Rick’s address and your mobile number … Anyway, I’m at the lights on the corner of Henderson Street right now and I’ll be there in about thirty seconds.’

Siena leapt from the kitchen stool. ‘Oh, right. Okay.’

The last thing she wanted at that moment was handsome James Dillon knocking at Rick’s front door. Especially right after his charming ‘guy in every port’ comment.

Especially since, after the tow-truck had dropped her and the smashed Ute at Rick’s Body Shop, she’d stayed there pondering the idea quite extensively that if James had the same lifestyle and fly-by-night personality as New York Gage, or even bold Raoul in Paris, he would have been serious casual friendship material.

Heck, the second she had laid eyes on him, half the cells in her body had rocketed to life. The connection she had felt to him had been electric. But, within the same second, once it had sunk in that he was Kane’s father, every other cell had already begun to resist everything he had to offer.

‘I’ll meet you out front,’ she offered, her mind turning with ways to get past Rick and out the front door. Boy, if the world wasn’t spinning to make her feel like a sixteen-year-old all over again! ‘Rick’s place is the one with the nauseating Triton fountain in the front yard.’

‘Thanks. See you soon.’ And then he hung up.

Siena pressed the phone off, listened carefully to see where Rick was, then just gave in and made a run for it down the hall and out the front door. The change of air from air-conditioned cool to hot and humid made her skin clammy in half a second.

She power-walked down the gravel driveway as a sleek, dark sedan pulled up by Rick’s letterbox. The tinted window rolled down and Siena jogged up to meet its inhabitant.

‘I’ve got your package,’ James said out of the corner of his mouth like some sort of Chicago gangster. Some breathtakingly handsome gangster made up of shadows and clean-cut lines who made her heart beat faster in her chest. Although that could have been the escape from Alcatraz that had her adrenalin in high gear.

He waved her PDA at her with one long-fingered hand. Long fingers with short fingernails. Tanned knuckles covered in a fine spray of ash-brown hair. Not smooth and manicured like the guys she usually made friends with.

James Dillon had a real man’s hands. And she really
really
liked them. And his inadvertently sexy two-day-old stubble. And his woodsy scent …

‘What’ll it cost me?’ Siena asked, crouching down and resting her palms on her knees.

He leaned out the window, resting his tanned forearm along the window frame until his face was lit by moonlight. ‘Thanks and a smile from a pretty lady are all this chump will ever need.’

Even though the air was so humid she could feel it slithering over every inch of bare skin, her throat went dry. He handed her the PDA. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and though she tried to smile she found that for this guy she couldn’t fake it.

‘No worries.’

‘So where’s Kane?’ she asked, wondering why she was prolonging this when she should have run inside the minute she had her goods.

‘Home with Matt. Helping make dinner. I’m almost too scared to go home to see what I’m in for.’

‘Right.’

She nodded. He half-smiled. And, though she knew she ought to give him a friendly salute and run back inside before
Rick came looking for her, Siena could feel that same tenuous thread from earlier wrapping itself tighter about her. In darkness and moonlight with the still of night about them it felt stronger still. She feared it might reel her in if she wasn’t careful.

She made a move to leave before James spoke up.

‘I’m actually glad I had an excuse to come over tonight.’

‘You are?’ She casually cleared her throat to remove the frog that had surreptitiously made itself at home there.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ he said. ‘It has been a long time since I have seen Kane smile like he did today. You see, Kane recently lost his mother.’

At the word
recently,
her heart squeezed tightly in her chest. She knew from reading James’s blog that it had been more than twelve months since Dinah’s death, but for the guy before her it must feel as raw as the day it happened.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

He shrugged off her platitude. No doubt he’d heard a thousand just the same. ‘You no doubt figured out by Kane’s little outburst that I married his mum when he was around five years old. Thankfully, before Dinah died, we had completed the process of Kane’s adoption or he could have ended up in the clutches of his father.’

So she’d been right. James wasn’t even Kane’s natural father. Oh, help! Siena’s heart squeezed so tight she could no longer remember how to breathe.

‘A drummer,’ James continued as though he had no idea that Siena was fast becoming a juddering mess at his side. ‘On the road a great deal. Bad news. I just thought you ought to know. To understand.’

She suddenly wanted to know everything, but not enough to ask. Her natural born inclination to run was far
too strong, far too ingrained, far too well-heeled. And, though James Dillon may be some kind of catch, for that reason alone she could
not
think of him as
casual friendship
material.

‘These past months have been tough,’ he continued as though now the floodgates were open he couldn’t stop. ‘And tougher on him, I am sure. But with you, at home, for both of us today was unexpectedly … fun.’

He said the word as though he hadn’t known what it meant until that moment. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even flicker a dimple. But still Siena was moved beyond the capacity she thought possible.

With a deep breath she moved in and placed a hand over his, fighting against the zing that ran up her arm, and said, ‘It was fun for me too. Who would have guessed that a scare like the one I gave the lot of us would lead to that? Sometimes it simply takes a change of scene to show you what you are missing.’

It occurred to her that she had seen a million new scenes since the day she’d left home, yet was she really as fulfilled and satisfied with her life as she could have been? The insidious thought took hold and grew roots and again she cursed herself for ever coming back to this town.

She pulled herself together and moved back to a safe distance, her hand sliding over James’s fingers and on to the cool of the metal window runner and away.

‘Thanks for bringing this back,’ she said, waving her PDA at him as she stepped backwards, further and further away.

‘Thanks for the fun. And for listening.’

‘Consider us even.’

He watched her leave, his face moving further into the shadows as he slid his arm back into the dark car. ‘Goodnight, Siena,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, James.’

She turned and jogged back along the gravel driveway and into the house without looking back, though she heard the soft sound of his car pulling out on to the road behind her.

She made it into the kitchen just in time for Rick to arrive with one chubby sniffling twin in his arms and the other following behind grinning, both in matching blue denim overalls. If he noticed her pink cheeks and extra humidity-induced curls he didn’t say anything.

Siena was all but knocked over by the grinning twin—Leo?—as he bundled up to her, arms raised. ‘Auntie ‘Enna, up!’

She rested a hand on the kid’s head, letting it stay there a moment when she realised how nice the silky soft hair felt between her fingers. Such a cute kid. A cute kid with two loving parents, and as yet no tragedy to temper that cute smile. Nothing yet standing in the way of oodles of future fun.

‘Rick, just promise you won’t ever tell your kids they’re hopeless,’ she said out of the blue, shooting first and asking questions later as she always had.

‘Excuse me?’

‘It might feel like a throwaway line to you, but I promise they won’t ever forget it. And, on that note, I’m going to head up to bed. I have a big day tomorrow.’

Rick looked at her so hard, as though if he let her eye contact swerve, she might fly away.

‘Right,’ he said, drawing his hard eyes from hers to look softly down at his son. ‘I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep.’

Siena slipped her hand away from Leo’s soft head and tucked it in the back of her jeans. ‘Great. I’ll see you in the morning.’

And then she grabbed her PDA and jogged—no, she ran—up the stairs.

It was barely eight o’clock when James shut the door to Kane’s bedroom, but Kane had been out for the count for fifteen minutes already.

He usually had trouble getting him to sleep as he would fret unless James was in sight right up until he could no longer hold his eyelids open by sheer force of willpower. But that night he’d all but dropped off in the middle of dinner.

Was it really as simple as Siena had suggested—that a change of scene was what Kane needed? Had their routine grown from being a coping mechanism into a stale way of life no longer suitable for either of them? Well, truth be told, the only out of the ordinary thing about that day had been the whirlwind that was Siena Capuletti.

James ran a fast hand over his short hair, trying to shake himself awake by way of follicular stimulation. Now Kane was asleep he had to head back to work.

He walked through his moonlit backyard, grabbing an overturned Tonka truck and Kane’s baseball mitt along the way so he could put them away before they were covered in dew.

Once inside his workshop, he pulled the protective sheet off the changing table and stared at it for a full minute. He warmed at the knowledge that Siena had thought his work
gorgeous.
There weren’t that many people who could pull off a word like that and get away with it, but coming from her lips it held weight.

He shifted the drop cloth back into place. It was almost done. Who had known that when he had begun to work from
home that he would have commissions running into the New Year and beyond? Siena had been right there—
that
change of scene had done his business wonders.