Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,126

on concrete gutter and the acrid smell of burnt rubber.

Siena’s shallow breaths couldn’t dull the sound of her thudding heart.

Then she remembered the kid on the bike. She looked through the windscreen.

Nothing.

She looked out the driver’s window, then craned her neck to see over her shoulder to the road behind.

Neither child nor bicycle were anywhere to be seen.

CHAPTER TWO

JAMES was sure he heard the screech of car tyres over the sound of his electric sander. He let the sander whirr to a slow stop and whipped his protective goggles to the top of his head.

He stared through the sun-drenched dust floating in the air about him in his backyard workshop, listening.

But there was nothing bar the regular sounds of suburbia—a creaky Hills Hoist clothes-line twirling in the tropical breeze, noisy miner birds fighting over scraps, an amateur pianist a few houses over practising his scales.

He must have imagined it.

His hand moved back to the goggles on his head, ready to get back to work, when he heard a car door slam in his front garden.

He was out of his workshop and sprinting down the driveway before his work gloves even hit the ground.

The first thing he saw was a green Ute mounted halfway up the kerb, its driver’s side door open wide, its front bumper crunched in against his front tree and a soft wisp of smoke spiralling from the bonnet.

The second thing he saw was Kane’s bike lying on its side on the street behind the car.

The image ripped through him like someone tearing a photograph in half. If Kane was taken from him too.

Determined to just know, his numb feet took him to the kerb, and once there he saw enough to stop him from thinking such dreadful thoughts.

Kane sat on the road, leaning back against the far side of the car. He was alive. He was animated. And he was talking to a young woman who was crouching down in front of him, running frantic hands over his limbs and head.

A slight young woman with shaggy brown curls finishing just below her ears. A gauzy sort of black top sat high on her back as she crouched, revealing a wide band of olive skin above the waistline of her tight dark jeans.

James stared at the skin, realising in a completely unexpected flash of awareness that it was the first time he had seen that part of a woman’s anatomy in an age.

James brought the disturbing thought and his feet to a very definite stop with a crunch of work boot on gravel.

Kane looked over, his pale brown eyes widening as he saw that he and his new friend weren’t alone. Instant tears ensued as though the magnitude of what had happened was only realised once James was there to witness it.

‘Dad?’ Kane said, his high voice cracking.

‘I’m here now,’ James said as he willed his feet to pick up where they had left off.

One step at a time, he repeated in his head with each footfall.

He had no idea where he had picked up such a mantra—Kane’s varied counsellors, late night Internet browsing or even Dr Phil—but it seemed the right mantra for that moment.

He moved towards his son, still not ready to find blood or pain or cracked bones. ‘Buddy, are you okay?’

Kane nodded and stood as though he knew James needed to see that he was in one piece. ‘I’m fine. I scraped my arm but, as I told Siena, it hardly hurts.’

At the mention of the woman’s name, James looked back to find her face drawn with apprehension, her thin eyebrows arched into a frown, her stunning ocean-green eyes wide and blinking and a full lower lip hooked guiltily beneath her two front teeth.

She wiped shaking hands down her tight jeans as she stood, her slim legs wobbling on ridiculously high fire-engine-red pointy heels. Why anyone would drive in such contraptions he had no idea. He fought down a sudden urge to tell her exactly that. To yell, to let loose with every thought that was streaming through his frantic mind, to twist his recent fright back into much more comforting anger.

But every thought that crossed his mind flitted across her remarkable face and he knew that he didn’t have to. He saw mortification. Embarrassment. Something else so quick he missed it, but he caught the tail-end of it through a brief flash of pink across her cheeks.

And then, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, he recognised the moment she reached the