Happy Mother's Day! (32 page)

As he dragged up his stool to his work desk, he couldn’t help thinking that Siena Capuletti was something a heck of a lot more than right.

A local but not a local.

Kane had repeatedly called her ‘cool’ as he had run through his crazy afternoon with Matt over dinner. And she
was
cool—those clothes, those shoes, the way she held herself, her natural playfulness.

A ‘deserter’ the tow-truck driver had called her, which should have been enough to put her a mile from his thoughtsthe very
last
thing Kane needed in his life was another tearaway.

But when Matt had called her a ‘lovely young flower’ he’d exactly put James’s feelings into words.

She was simply quite unlike anyone he had ever met—with enough latent energy to light a city. When he had touched her wrist, to catch her when she’d tripped—bam! And again when she had laid her small warm hand over his on the window ledge of his car—the energy had resounded from her fine-boned limb into his hand, shooting sparks up his arm until it had kickstarted a deep and all but forgotten pounding in his chest.

That sort of instant attraction was rare—beyond the butterflies a guy couldn’t help but feel when noticing a beautiful woman.

Even with Dinah it hadn’t been like that. For his part there had been more of a slow burn.

One night on the town, his mob of short-back-and-sides friends had wandered into the hard rock Pig’s Head Pub down by the docks wearing their smart casual gear, drinking their
pony necked beers, to find a lot of guys saturated in leather and tattoos.

The gang had voted to mosey straight on out of there when they had all seen her—a scrap of a girl with long blonde hair, midriff top, mini-skirt, fishnet tights and heavy black boots, dancing the night away, her eyes closed as though she was shutting out all thought bar the heavy beat of the music.

At the end of the night, James had been sitting alone at the bar, waiting for his mates to come back from the gents, when she had appeared at his side, her blonde hair wild, her skin shiny with sweat, the make-up around her brown bedroom eyes smudged with eyeliner.

‘Dinah,’ she said, holding out a small hand.

‘James,’ he returned, shaking her hand. But, rather than warm, which he would have expected after her night of dancing, she felt cold. So very cold. And her small cold hand made him look twice.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said.

James raised an eyebrow in disbelief. With all the attention she’d had that night he would have thought himself way under the radar.

‘Why didn’t you ask me to dance?’ she asked.

James laughed.

‘Finally!’ she said, throwing thin arms into the air. ‘A smile! I was beginning to wonder if you had the ability.’

James’s laughter subsided, but his smile remained. ‘I smile plenty when there is something to smile about.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, I’m done here and I would really love to head out of here for a cup of coffee. Are you up for it?’

Are you up for me?
she had meant and it had taken James half a second to say yes. From that day they were James and
Dinah. The nine-to-five cabinet-maker and the wild child who, it turned out, had a child of her own at home. A shy, gentle three-year-old boy James had fallen in love with at first sight.

He had always wondered in the back of his mind if Dinah had sought him out that night because she was looking for someone safe for her son. But he had loved her anyway, perhaps because of the almost desperate way she needed him.

At her insistence they had moved to the suburbs, at his insistence he had adopted her son, and they had become a car-pooling, dinner party holding, regular family.

Until, at the age of thirty, Dinah had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. After six months of unsuccessful treatment and crying herself to sleep at night blaming herself for her wild youth, she was gone.

But, no matter what he had endured in the last couple of years, it seemed he hadn’t been emptied of all aspiration as he had thought. His instincts were whispering just loud enough that he couldn’t shout them down.

Siena. Maybe he ought to … what? Ask her on a date while she was in town? Send her flowers? Write her a card? It had been so long since he had done this he wondered if the rules had changed. Did you call a person these days or was it all about sending provocative text messages on one’s mobile—?

A noise came through the intercom. His ears pricked up. A shuffling of sheets, a small sniffle, then Kane settled again.

Kane.
That one word silenced his whispering instincts in one fell swoop. He had been so busy thinking about what he wanted, what he needed, that he had plumb forgotten about Kane.

James again ran hands through his already over-mussed hair, this time in order to rub away the sudden pounding in his head.

Surely he was messing with forces he had no business
messing with. Though Siena was like chalk to Dinah’s cheese in many ways, she was young, she lived a four-hour plane flight away and drove in red high heels, for goodness’ sake.

And everyone—counsellors, teachers, friends and books and websites alike—all agreed that what Kane needed was time.

His head swimming, James opened his laptop and found the blank weblog page he was looking for.

The one time
he
had been in such a bad way as to go to counsellors for himself, they had suggested he keep a diary, as though getting his feelings out of his head and down on paper would make it easier to cope.

As a man of the computer age, he had used the blog format instead. Having his words floating out there in the ether made them feel like more of a release than if they were written on paper and tied up in a ribbon at the bottom of his sock drawer, hidden, as though they were a dirty secret.

He cracked his knuckles, freeing up the wave of information he would have to wade through before he could even think about getting to sleep.

And he began to type.

Showered and changed into her favourite red crushed velvet pyjamas—soft, comfortable, easy to pack and a little bit sexy just in case—Siena leant back against a pile of fat frilly floral cushions on the lumpy spare bed and laid her laptop on her thighs as she shuffled her mouse and set to opening her emails.

Despite the PDA’s beeping insistence that it ought to be, her schedule wasn’t there as yet, which only gave her further heebie-jeebies about what Max had in store for her with his ‘fabulous career move'. What else could no schedule mean but no more flights?

There was one email from Parisian Raoul with a subject title so risqué it made her laugh out loud. But it also made Rick’s accusation echo in her head.
A guy in every port …
Well, why the heck not? It made her romantic life innocuous and uncomplicated and that was just the way she liked it.

She made a move to open Raoul’s email when noises in the hallway drew Siena’s gaze to her closed bedroom door. Rick must have been putting the kids to bed. She looked to the clock at the side of her bed to find it was some time after eight.

Her fleeting glance slammed to a halt as she saw the white iceberg rose James had given her lying provocatively on the bedside table.

She reached out and took the rose in her hand, the sweet scent tickling at her nose. It only brought about a strange sense memory of diesel fuel, disinfectant and wood shavings. Who knew such a strange mix of scents could be so evocative?

Before she really knew what she was about to do, Siena ignored Raoul’s email and instead typed out a row of letters in the webpage line of her internet browser. She hesitated only a moment before pressing the Enter key.

Within seconds a simple black page loaded on to her screen. And as the word ‘DINAH’ caught her eye she slammed her laptop shut.

What was she doing? Spying on him? Well, of course she was. But what did it matter? Now she had her PDA back—the PDA which he himself had admitted to snooping through!—she was never going to see the guy again. So how could it hurt to read a very little more?

Slowly, slowly she lifted the screen. There were no photographs on the site. No links. No comment boxes. It was simply
the emotional outpourings of an anonymous guy. Anonymous to anyone who might stumble upon it, but not to her.

Siena shuffled lower on her bed and picked out sporadic posts. She read about the home video collection James had edited together for Dinah’s funeral which he still let Kane watch in his bedroom on bad nights. She read about odd floating memories of his time with Dinah’s dysfunctional family, her alcoholic mother and deadbeat ex, and she understood a little why he saw himself as Kane’s only hope. He revealed moments when he had felt like giving up, and worse, the moments when he verbally slapped himself for even contemplating it.

A good hour later she dragged herself out of deep tunnel vision when she tasted her own tears on her lips. But she couldn’t bring herself to wipe them away.

In one post from a few months before, James had obviously not even taken the time to edit himself, or to spell check; he had merely poured his feelings out on to the page then hit send, forever capturing his raw emotions.

Siena put the rose back on the bedside table as she reached for a tissue.

Dorothy.
She remembered Dorothy. A nice old lady even back when she had been a pre-teen. She’d always had a stash of passionfruit yogurt in the fridge in case Siena came a-calling. Oh, hell, Dorothy and Carl had been the ones to take her in when Rick had had to tend to the details the day her father died.

Feeling emotionally ragged, Siena decided enough was enough. She had a big day ahead of her and the last thing she needed was to wake with puffy red eyes.

She clicked back to the home page to find James had left a post just that evening and she thought,
Okay, just one more.

But the minute her gaze landed upon the first words she wished, and not for the first time in her life, that she wasn’t so damned curious.

Siena blinked. Once. Twice. A third time. But the words remained.

James Dillon had met a girl.

And, though no names were mentioned, no details given away, she knew it as well as she knew her own name.

That girl was her.

T
HE
next morning Siena sat in the lounge of her brother’s body shop flicking unseeingly through grease-stained three-year-old car magazines.

After a restless night—dreaming repeatedly of a certain handsome carpenter sweating and straining as he bent over a workbench wearing naught but man-sized Osh Kosh denim overalls as he carved the words ‘TODAY I MET A GIRL’ into a baby changing table—she had woken to find a note from Rick saying he had found her dry cleaning ticket, taken it and would pick her outfit up for her on his way to an on-site job that morning.

After much hand-wringing at the fact that her interfering brother had wiped out the plans she had made to keep herself busy before Rufus was due to pick her up around one o’clock, she had wasted some time dolling herself up for her afternoon interview—hair blow-dried from a pert side parting and flicked at the ends, and make-up of the smoky eye, pink-cheeked and natural lip variety—and dressed in her jeans of the day before, beige and green layered tank tops and her red high heels, ready to change into her suit the minute it arrived back into her waiting arms, and caught a cab to the auto-mechanic to wait.

And wait. And wait.

‘Siena?’

She turned, expecting to find another of Rick’s kindly grease monkeys offering her another cup of undrinkable coffee while she waited, only to find the handsome carpenter himself standing by the couch.

She leapt to her feet. ‘James!’

At her enthusiastic reaction, James’s mouth kicked into a brief smile. Still only a half-smile but she swore she caught a glimpse of neat white teeth. Her heart rate doubled in an instant.

Gone were the dusty black T-shirt and worn jeans of the day before, and in their place he wore a white T-shirt, a lightweight grey linen jacket and dark grey trousers, all of which brought out faint streaks of blue in his silvery eyes. With one hand in his trouser pocket and his cheeks freshly shaved, the guy looked as if he had walked straight off the Spanish Steps.

‘What … what are
you
doing here?’ she asked, her voice rising.

‘Matt told me where your brother worked,’ James said, running a quick nervous hand over his short hair. ‘I came on the off-chance you might be here. Or, if not, that they might tell me where you were. But you
are
here. So … here you are.’

‘Here I am,’ she agreed. Her heart leapt in her throat and she mentally slapped it down because, though he had no idea that she knew why he was there, she knew. And the reason terrified her to the soles of her Jimmy Choos.

‘Piccolo,’
her brother’s voice boomed out from the office behind reception. ‘Are you here? I’m heading out to pick up your suit now. I’ll be another half hour at least. Do you want some cheese on crackers to get you by before lunch?’

Siena felt disaster looming. If Rick caught her with a
guy
there would be no living it down. But she was her own worst
enemy on that count as her pause brought the bear from his cave, wiping his grease-stained hands on an old rag that looked dirtier than he was. ‘Siena?’

When he saw her standing with James, the two of them looking equally guilty and nervous and unsure, he slowed. ‘Well, what have we here?’

Siena grimaced at Rick before damping down her nerves, turning on a polite smile and introducing the two men. ‘James, this is my big brother, Rick Capuletti, the owner of this fine establishment. Rick this is James Dillon—’

‘The furniture guy,’ Rick finished, flapping his rag at James.

‘That’s me.’

‘Right. Right. With the big fancy showroom in town. My wife begged me until I bought your signature lamp tables. She had seen them in some celebrity magazine. Cost me a bloody packet.’

Siena looked back at James in redoubled surprise. The beautiful Queen Anne, art deco fusion lamp tables in Tina’s lounge room were his design? The changing table in his workshop had been gorgeous. Delightful. But those lamp tables were beautiful. More than beautiful. They were works of art.

He smiled at Rick but the light barely reached his eyes. Hmm. Could it be that the glimmer and blue flecks and half-smiles weren’t for everybody? She couldn’t even begin to hide her mischievous delight.

‘Pleased to meet you, Dillon,’ Rick said, holding out a hand then retracting it when he saw how dirty it still was.

James saluted him. ‘Consider it shook.’

Rick grinned, taking in Siena in its beaming light. ‘How do you two kids know each other?’

Siena could barely contain her groan.
Here we go,
she
thought, knowing he was about to start acting like a doting over-protective father. He couldn’t help himself. All his life. Even when her poor dad had been alive.

She sucked in a deep breath, knowing the next few would not come so easily as she began to suffocate under his rigid attention. ‘The boy who I swerved to miss when I crashed the green monster was James’s son,’ she blurted.

‘It turns out I bought your old family home,’ James added, and Siena cursed under her breath for not cutting him off before she saw that titbit coming.

It would hardly take a rocket scientist to figure out that she had been cruising by the place on purpose. And after she had told him in no uncertain terms seven years before that she would never step foot in the place again as long as she lived.

She was fast learning that
never
was a much longer time than she had anticipated.

‘Are you sure?’ Rick asked, prolonging the agony. ‘From what I remember, it went to a lady. Campbell? Diana Campbell?’

‘Dinah,’ James said, admirably keeping his voice even, but Siena could sense his whole body tightening.

She couldn’t bear to look at either of them. She could all but hear the echo of the train wreck on the horizon.

‘Right. So you have a son, eh?’ Rick asked.

‘I do. Kane. He’s eight.’

‘I have two boys. Twins. And a new baby girl. A joy, aren’t they?’

‘They can be,’ James said, his voice sliding back into its normal gentle rumble.

‘So you’re married, then?’ Rick asked. ‘Ah, no. I’m not. Not any more.’ ‘Divorced?’

‘Rick!’ Siena cried. It seemed that staring at her toes wasn’t making it all go away.

Rick held up his hands in surrender. ‘Okay. Fine. I am sorry,’ he cried, his loud voice booming across the reception area.

‘Rubbish. You’re a meddlesome pain in the neck.’

‘And you’re not?’

‘Riccione!
Enough. He is so dramatic,’ she said by way of apology, while still glaring at her brother, who glared right back. ‘It’s an Italian thing.’

And a big brother thing. And a Rick thing. And a thing that sets my teeth on edge and makes my skin crawl so bad I just want to scratch and scratch until it goes away. Or I go away …

If James didn’t realise that she was one half of a fruitless, ruinous, dysfunctional family and run for the hills rather than stand there looking so darned handsome, she would be very much surprised.

‘Was there something you wanted from me?’ she asked, turning to James, willing him to just leave and get it over with.

But the light that had been so absent in James’s cool grey eyes since Rick had arrived on the scene had suddenly flared to life while she hadn’t been paying attention. Siena bit her lip, wishing she had phrased her question differently.

‘Well, yes, actually. I was heading out for a coffee and I thought perhaps you might join me as thanks for cleaning up Kane’s wound yesterday.’

‘A wound? My spoilt little sister working in a service industry seemed out of character enough, but now a real flesh and blood wound?’ Rick said. ‘Well, I never.’

Siena turned her back on her brother and shoved a hand through James’s looped arm. ‘Thanks, James. That would be nice. The coffee they serve in this place is criminal.
Please tell me someone in this town knows how to make a real cappuccino.’

Without a backward glance, Siena turned James Dillon on his heel and, trying her best to ignore the heavenly scent of his woodsy aftershave, she marched him out the front door.

‘I would watch yourself, mate,’ Rick called out. ‘She is as much of a hazard off the road as she is on it.’

It was all Siena could do not to grab one of the tyres piled up at the front door and fling it at him.

When she waved her hand back at her brother James thought he caught sight of a rude hand signal but he couldn’t be sure. But even the concept was enough to create a flicker of laughter deep in his chest. A flicker was good. A flicker was promising. A flicker was more than he had felt in such a long time.

Which was why, even after making the decision not to come looking for her again, the minute the words had poured into his blog he had back-pedalled.

Those blog pages were his truth. The things he couldn’t admit to anyone, not even himself. From the start he had always felt that if he lied on the page it would be defying the very point of the thing. And if his blog said to give it a chance, then he was willing to give it a chance.

As they turned out on to the main street, James could not help but notice the warm energy vibrating through his arm from where her soft hand clenched his elbow. He hadn’t been imagining it the day before. Something chemical, or electrical, or biological happened to him when they came into close proximity. And who was he, a simple cabinet-maker, to argue with science?

But, now that he had confirmed it, he wasn’t exactly sure what he was going to do next. He hadn’t really thought past the asking.

He’d sent Kane off to school despite another ‘headache'. He’d come to her, he’d asked her out and she’d said yes. Heck, those quacks would have fallen over themselves to see the progress he and Kane’d made in one single day!

He risked a glance at Siena. She had done something to her hair and the curls were smoothed away into a sassy bob. She wore make-up that made her eyes seem dark and deep, but no matter how she might be trying to hide beneath the flight attendant construct he knew that in a crowded room she would still stand out to him like a red umbrella in a sea of black.

Despite the warm feelings buoying him just being with her again, it didn’t blind him to the fact that she wasn’t a happy camper. Her brow was furrowed and her full lips stretched tight. She didn’t look as if she was prepared for a nice coffee date. She looked like a kid playing spin the bottle who had ended up paired with her cousin. He reluctantly let her arm slide through his.

‘Hey, Speedy Gonzales, where are we going?’

She slowed and only just seemed to remember he was there. ‘Oh. Sorry. Is there somewhere along here we can grab a bite? I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, and I kept refusing Rick’s goons’ offers of cheese and crackers and now I could eat a horse. And if I don’t have a proper coffee in the next five minutes I won’t be worth knowing.’

He had somewhere in mind but it would take longer than five minutes to get there. He weighed up the fiery temper of hers that he had just witnessed firsthand with the thought of having her in his company for longer than it would take her to throw down an espresso. Her company won out.

‘Would you trade a mediocre takeaway coffee and a muffin now for a great cappuccino and the world’s best bacon and eggs a tiny bit later? I promise it’ll be worth it.’

Her focus shifted until he was caught in the intense light of her gaze. ‘You’re a man of mystery today, aren’t you, Mr Dillon?’

‘That I am. So what do you say?’

After a few moments of unintentionally enticing lip nibbling, she nodded. ‘Great. Follow me.’

Fifteen minutes later, with their appetites subdued, they were queuing to board the famous Skyrail—a seven and a half kilometre cableway of over one hundred small, round, glassed-in capsules that could take six at a time up to the mountaintop town of Kuranda. And Siena was so hyperactive he wasn’t sure he ought to come through with another coffee at the other end.

‘I can’t believe I’d forgotten all about this thing,’ she said, jumping from one foot to the other on her high red heels, as they came closer to the front of the queue. ‘It opened only a couple of years before I left. I would beg and beg and beg Rick to bring me up here, but he never did as he’s afraid of heights, which is half the reason I begged and begged.’

She shot him a cheeky grin. ‘You met him. He deserved it, right?’

‘I’ll say.’

A local in a khaki uniform helped the two of them into a small swinging capsule suspended from a fist-thick overhead wire, locked the glass door and told them to remember to ‘smile at the frog’ once they reached the other end.

‘Smile at the what?’ Siena asked and then her mouth dropped open as the concrete base slid away from under them and, just like that, they were hanging suspended over the rainforest. ‘Holy heck!’

As she gripped on to her seat, her eyes huge in her face as she peered out the three hundred and sixty degree windows at the view unfolding as their capsule swung up the mountain, James leant back against the hot glass, crossed his arms and simply watched her.

She turned to him, her eyes questioning, and he couldn’t help but smile back. ‘We put on quite a show up here for the tourists,’ he said.

‘You can say that again. Wow, this is amazing! How long does it take to Kuranda?’

‘Non-stop? About thirty-five minutes,’ he said, which was a little longer than the ‘tiny bit later’ he had promised her.

He waited for her to explode at being kidnapped, which was pretty much what he had resorted to, unsure as he was that she was as far along in this attraction thing as he was, but she just nodded and continued to shift and shuffle to get the best view.

Their capsule swung back and forth with her movements. If she had been half as energetic as a teenager, he was sure big burly Rick Capuletti would have been green about the gills by that stage.

They bumped and trundled their way up the mountain in silence, masses of ferns and vines, hot red flame trees, towering conifers and thick dark rainforest vegetation sliding away secretively beneath them. When the grand Barron River peeked through the foliage, twinkling silver in the late morning sun, James spoke up.