Happy Mother's Day! (33 page)

‘Get your land-legs back on. We’re almost there.’

Siena looked back at him with a relaxed smile. Her cheeks were pink from her time in the sun and, for the first time since he had met her, she seemed loose-limbed and relaxed.

‘If you tell me they’ve torn down the markets and those odd hippy shops to make way for a strip mall and condos I will take back everything I’ve ever believed about the snail pace progress of this place,’ she said.

The tickle of laughter that had threatened earlier bubbled to the surface as he actually chuckled. ‘Don’t get too excited. You’re still more likely to be able to pick up some weird herbal concoction at the markets than you are to find a Starbucks or McDonald’s.’

‘Great,’ she said, beaming so suddenly that James’s next breath lodged in his throat. ‘I know just what to get Rick for Christmas!’

When their capsule reached the other end, a guide reminded them to ‘smile at the frog', which turned out to be a frog-shaped camera. They did as they were told. Siena leaned in towards him, her shoulder brushing his as she smiled amiably until the flash went off.

Caught up in the heady feeling of companionship, James took a hold of Siena’s dangling hand and wrapped it back into the crook of his arm and led her into town. She didn’t argue or pull away, and when he glanced at her again he found the furrowed brow was clear. His cheek twitched into a self-satisfied smile.

She could stay that relaxed if she just allowed herself to live on tropics time,
he thought.

James ducked into one shop alone and came out with a big floppy sun-hat to ward off the hot North Queensland sun.

‘You can’t,’ she insisted when he gave it to her.

‘I must,’ he said. ‘It cost five bucks, and remember I overcharge. Besides your nose is pink.’

Though it was a size too big, she gave in and slapped it atop
her neat bob and he was sure she walked closer as they continued to window-shop.

Nestled in amongst the brightly coloured shop fronts selling tie-dyed clothes, local artwork and bric-a-brac sat Sloppy Joe’s—a rundown café that looked as though the town had been built around it.

When they wandered into the empty room, the couple sitting smoking something sweet at the front table peeled themselves from their chairs. One pulled out a notepad and the other ambled into the kitchen.

‘Busy day?’ James asked the waitress, tongue firmly in cheek.

‘Too busy for my liking,’ the waitress agreed, then grinned at him through her chewing gum and pointed to a booth in the corner.

‘Do you think the people in this place know what a cappuccino is?’ Siena whispered, pulling off her hat and ruffling a hand up the back of her hair, which was beginning to curl despite the effort that had obviously gone into keeping it smooth.

‘We’ll soon find out.’

‘Do you come here often?’ Siena asked, her inquisitive eyes darting about the room, taking in the bright paintings for sale on the dark walls, the unswept concrete floor and slow-moving ceiling fans pushing the humid heat around the room.

‘Not for ages. My grandad was a cabinet-maker before me and he ran a stall at the markets up here. He swore by their all-day breakfast. But that was a while back.’

‘Did he teach you everything you know?’ she asked, sliding into the vinyl booth, which squeaked as she sat.

‘Not everything,’ he said. Again he heard a note of flirtation which was unintended. Okay, so maybe this time it was.

Maybe he wanted to know if she realised that he had taken
a huge leap in inviting her out for
coffee.
The night before he’d confessed to her about Dinah, and he was all but sure she wasn’t oblivious to the effect she had on him.

Siena blinked back at him. His whole body warmed under her direct gaze before she grabbed the jar of sugar and twirled the cut glass distractedly around and around between her palms.

‘What can I getcha?’ the waitress—who looked as though she had probably worked there back in the day—asked when she arrived at their table.

‘Two cappuccinos and two breakfast specials?’ James asked.

‘Perfect,’ Siena said shortly, all her earlier ease dissipated. Something had definitely spooked her. She wasn’t the same free and easy girl from the day before. Now she looked as nervous as he felt.

The waitress gave them a smile and a wink, before tucking her notebook in the waist of her skirt and her pencil back behind her ear and sauntering off to the kitchen.

And then they were alone. Alone. On a date. Of sorts. James and a girl. A woman. A lovely woman. A woman who was obviously for some reason second-guessing being there with him.

As Siena looked about the room, her skittish glance landing on everything but him, he wondered what the hell he had been thinking when he’d woken up that morning.

But, since he had always been pathologically intent on making the best of things, he asked, ‘What did you call your brother earlier? Rigatoni?’

As intended, the sideways barb at her brother brought about a flash of a smile. She shoved the sugar back against the wall and started flicking through the pile of paper napkins.

‘My brother and cousin and I were all named after towns in Tuscany,’ she said, ‘where our parents were all born. Rick
is Riccione. My cousin Ash is actually Asciano, and I am, well, Siena.’

He had to stop himself from reaching out and laying a hand over hers to stop her fidgeting, but her nerves were all of a sudden running so hot he had the feeling she might spontaneously combust if he tried.

‘It’s a beautiful name,’ he said, trying to get a reaction from her that wasn’t born of nervous tension. She was giving off so much energy that even his usually solid on the ground feet tapped beneath the table. ‘It suits you.’

Her mouth curled in what was meant to be a smile, but to him it seemed more of a sort of grimace, and he felt himself deflating.

He’d made a huge mistake.

He’d been reading into things she had said and done that simply mustn’t have been there. Maybe she was just a really good listener and it had been such a long time since he’d talked to anyone about his life, bar his blog. Just because he felt things, new things, deep down things, when he was with her, didn’t mean she felt the same way.

He’d gone way out of his comfort zone, relying on gut instinct rather than on what he had been told by experts would be best for him and Kane, and it seemed his instincts weren’t what they used to be.

He was fast thinking that science left a lot to be desired when Siena suddenly looked his way. Like a heat-seeking missile that had found its target, their gazes clashed, jolted, and told James a lot more about the situation than either of them were likely to admit aloud after such a short acquaintance.

He felt as though fireworks were going off in his stomach. And he knew then that he hadn’t in fact been thinking a
whole lot when he’d woken up that morning. Not with his head, anyway.

Siena couldn’t look away. It was the train wreck thing again. James’s eyes were still masked by a layer of melancholy, but there was an almost grim determination behind them today. As if he had seen a way through the sadness and had latched on for all his might.

And, though she was deadly afraid that he mistakenly thought that
she
might be the way through,
nobody
had ever looked at her that way before.

She was the delinquent little sister, the aggressively ambitious worker or the exotic Aussie stranger in town for one night only. Reflected in his soulful eyes she saw herself as so much more.

No. Nope. Na-uh. Bad news.

She
never
should have used him as an escape route from Rick, after he had confided in her about Dinah and especially after reading what he had written in his blog the night before.

But she had been so caught up in his scent and the feel of her hand hooked into his strong arm and the promise of a trip on the Skyrail that she had blissfully forgotten that James was not a
casual friendship
guy.

He was a guy with roots and responsibility and a family, and she was a walking disaster. A destroyer of families. A deserter. Too much hard work. And someone who could not be trusted to take on the responsibility of someone else’s life.

She had to turn him away, gently but in such a way that he knew it was for the best. So she said the one thing she knew would do it.

‘Tell me more about Dinah.’

She waited for him to hang his head in sadness, but his deep grey eyes remained clear and locked on to hers.

Okay, so maybe if she shut up he would gush and blather on about Dinah for an hour and a day like newly divorced people she knew tended to, then after a while he would realise he had been blathering and he would be embarrassed by said blathering and he would slink away after their coffee and never seek her out again.

‘What in particular would you like to know about her?’ he asked, taking a measured sip of still water, but with his eyes never leaving hers.

Okay, so not so much blathering. Instead of blathering his sensuous mouth kicked up at one corner. The wretch
knew
she was
really
asking about Dinah because she was actually interested in
him.

‘I … I saw her photo on your piano when I was snooping about the house. I’m a snoop. There. I admit it. It’s a terrible habit of mine. Incurable. Immoral. But that’s just me. Anyway, there was a photo of Dinah. She seemed much like Kane,’ she said, and was quite pleased with her save, especially since she was able to make herself seem completely irresponsible into the bargain. ‘What was she like?’

‘Dinah was …’ He looked at the ceiling for a few moments as he searched for the word. ‘Incandescent.’

Siena felt her stomach drop to her knees.

Incandescent? Did the guy seriously say
incandescent?
Well, if he had been punishing her for masking her attraction to him by using the dead wife card, he sure didn’t pull his punch.

Nobody had ever called
her
incandescent before. Cute, maybe. Single-minded, sure. A pain in the ass, often. But incandescent? What kind of man even
thought
to search for a word so beautiful? A creator of exquisite, inventive, deliciously cedar oil scented works like the man who had invited
her out for coffee and then taken her on a ride through the sky, that was who.

‘Kane does look like her,’ he continued, finding something outside the window suddenly fascinating.

She wanted to grab him by the chin until he looked back at her again, all sparkling and almost smiling.

‘I have always thought Kane’s temperament was much more like mine,’ he continued. ‘Maybe that’s the bane of the adoptive dad, searching for personality traits that aren’t really there.’

‘He seems a really … nice kid,’ Siena said, choosing her words more carefully as she dragged herself up out of a pit of sudden unseemly jealousy. ‘I’m sure that’s a great deal thanks to you.’

Nice? Yep, nice was a good safe word. But, even as she lauded herself for her vocabulary brilliance, James looked back at her, his mouth kicking up at one corner, and he gave her a short nod, accepting her words as though they were a high compliment, which of course they really were.

Argh!

Their food arrived and Siena could have hugged the over-tanned wrinkly waitress who had obviously seen too much Far North Queensland sun in her lifetime.

She drank the cappuccino in one hit to reorganise her nerves and regretted it instantly. Firstly, James had been right, it was delicious, on par with those she’d had in Rome. And, secondly, it scalded her mouth so that the juicy-looking bacon and eggs on her plate would now no doubt taste like burnt taste buds.

Excellent.

James ate his meal without dropping a crumb. She tried to do the same and failed. She always ate too fast, had too much sauce or too much bread left at the end and at least one dollop
of tomato seeds that missed her plate altogether. But James seemed to understand how to do everything in the perfect time with perfect portions.

He even had a sip of no doubt lukewarm cappuccino left to spare at the end.

‘So what about your family?’ he asked, after dabbing at the corners of his crumb-free mouth. ‘Do your parents still live around here?’

Siena quickly ran her tongue around her teeth, checking for sesame seeds. ‘Um, oh, no. I was a late … surprise.’

She was going to leave it there, but the fact that he had been brave enough to tell her about Dinah the night before made her feel it would be unfair not to be as honest. ‘There were complications and my mum, well, she passed away having me.’

His eyes narrowed, brimming with such sudden flaring compassion that Siena leant back in her chair to escape it.

‘It must have been difficult, growing up without your mum.’

Siena waved a hand over her face. ‘I survived. I had an older brother with the requisite eyes in the back of his head. Besides, you can hardly miss what you never had.’

Whereas Kane would,
she suddenly realised. The poor thing knew exactly what he was missing not having his sunshiny,
incandescent
mother on the scene any more. Siena’s heart reached out to the sweet kid.

Stop it! Her heart did
not
reach. Not to handsome single dads with half-smiles and manly hands and cavernous grey eyes, and certainly not to their kids, even if said kids did not drink cola and their sticky warm hands felt so trusting and small in her own that she actually missed them like a phantom limb when they were gone.

She rubbed her hands together to erase that sense memory
and went back to picking at a piece of stray bacon with the end of her fork.

‘And your father?’ he asked.

‘My dad died when I was fifteen,’ she said, rolling her right shoulder to ease away the tension that always encroached during the rare times she talked of that part of her life.

‘How?’ James asked, not even pretending to blather inanities as others always had. If only she could be as accepting, but ten years and a heck of a lot of guilt, regret, recrimination and fast living later, the memory still felt as though it was eating her from the inside out.