Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,128

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