1
Siena
“You need to get laid,” Becky Franklin announced.
Siena Davenport glanced around the gymnasium, hoping one of the parents hadn’t heard her coworker. She couldn’t afford for a parent or student to hear the conversation since she still had a couple of months left on her probation at her new job. Getting fired twice in one year didn’t fit into her life plan.
Principal Edward Robles wanted vengeance against her for turning his son—and her ex-boyfriend—in to the police. Siena had never told Kyle to cook drugs in the lab at the school. After his son went to jail, Edward looked for anything to fire Siena over. When he couldn’t find anything, he had Pam, the mother of one of her students, report her for yelling at her son. He called her into his office and she was fired on the spot. She wasn’t even given a chance to explain what happened. Siena looked into Pam closer after she was fired and found out the woman was next door neighbors with Principal Edward. Since she never yelled at the boy, she knew it was a setup.
Kyle Robles was spending the next ten years in jail. She felt like he deserved more for making meth in the chemistry lab. Her hatred toward him was amplified by the fact she’d been dumb enough to date him for a year, and without realizing what he was really doing when he stayed late at school. She’d thought he was working on experiments to teach his students.
Becky Mann cleared her throat. “Do you even remember the last time you slept with a real man?”
“Becky—”
“Don’t you ‘Becky’ me. It’s been a month. The only way to get over the asshole is to get under another one.”
Her friend had said the same thing the day after the cops arrested Kyle. Siena knew her friend’s words weren’t true. Siena had fallen in love once, and nobody had taken away the ache of her broken heart. But that quick romance had left her with something she held dear. Every time she glanced into her little girl’s deep-blue eyes, it reminded her of the man who’d crushed her heart. Kyle, on the other hand, had never made her heart flutter when he stepped into the room or pulled her into his arms. Nope. She’d settled, and she couldn’t even pick a normal guy. Mia’s dad had made her stomach flutter with butterflies when he strode into the room.
But he’d wanted nothing to do with Siena. Six months into their whirlwind relationship, he stopped answering her calls. A month later, when she peed on the white stick and the word pregnant flashed, she tried to contact him, but he’d changed his phone number and cleared out his apartment.
Siena had no friends in Virginia, and her career had ended the second she started to show, so she packed up her life and moved close to the only family she had—Kathy, her great-aunt in San Diego. She lived with Kathy the first year after Mia came home from the hospital. Kathy had passed away from lung cancer not long after they moved out.
It was hard raising Mia alone. A year earlier, Siena had finally started to date again, and her first relationship ended up being with a chemistry teacher selling drugs to kids. Siena had the worst asshole detector when it came to men. After having her little girl, men were no longer her priority, only her daughter. Men only led to heartache and an empty feeling that settled deep in her soul.
“You really think picking up one of my students’ fathers is the next move I should make?” she asked.
When she’d first started teaching, she couldn’t believe a third of the dads still hit on her anyway. They didn’t seem to care about their wives at home or the ring on their finger. A few of the moms even asked if she dated women.
Siena knew she was pretty. She’d started modeling when she was a young child. Her mother took her to every casting call she found for modeling. She continued to model well into her late twenties, but when she got pregnant, her modeling career had ended, mostly because she didn’t want to force Mia, as a baby, to travel around the world. Siena would have needed nannies to help raise her daughter.
So, with the money she’d stockpiled over the years, she went back to school and got her master's in mathematics. Numbers had always made sense to her. For the last two years,