Meant-To-Be Mother

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 he was covered in what looked like sawdust, he was way too polite for the likes of her and he lived in Cairns. Therefore he was utterly out of bounds.

As they reached the front door, James casually kicked off his work boots to reveal black socks with matching holes in the toes. Kane then held on to the other side of the doorway and mirrored James’s actions precisely, pulling off his sneakers by the heel using the toes of his opposite foot.

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 million-dollar 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.