Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,143
so hard, as though if he let her eye contact swerve, she might fly away.
‘Right,’ he said, drawing his hard eyes from hers to look softly down at his son. ‘I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep.’
Siena slipped her hand away from Leo’s soft head and tucked it in the back of her jeans. ‘Great. I’ll see you in the morning.’
And then she grabbed her PDA and jogged—no, she ran—up the stairs.
It was barely eight o’clock when James shut the door to Kane’s bedroom, but Kane had been out for the count for fifteen minutes already.
He usually had trouble getting him to sleep as he would fret unless James was in sight right up until he could no longer hold his eyelids open by sheer force of willpower. But that night he’d all but dropped off in the middle of dinner.
Was it really as simple as Siena had suggested—that a change of scene was what Kane needed? Had their routine grown from being a coping mechanism into a stale way of life no longer suitable for either of them? Well, truth be told, the only out of the ordinary thing about that day had been the whirlwind that was Siena Capuletti.
James ran a fast hand over his short hair, trying to shake himself awake by way of follicular stimulation. Now Kane was asleep he had to head back to work.
He walked through his moonlit backyard, grabbing an overturned Tonka truck and Kane’s baseball mitt along the way so he could put them away before they were covered in dew.
Once inside his workshop, he pulled the protective sheet off the changing table and stared at it for a full minute. He warmed at the knowledge that Siena had thought his work gorgeous. There weren’t that many people who could pull off a word like that and get away with it, but coming from her lips it held weight.
He shifted the drop cloth back into place. It was almost done. Who had known that when he had begun to work from home that he would have commissions running into the New Year and beyond? Siena had been right there—that change of scene had done his business wonders.
As he dragged up his stool to his work desk, he couldn’t help thinking that Siena Capuletti was something a heck of a lot more than right.
A local but not a local.
Kane had repeatedly called her ‘cool’ as he had run through his crazy afternoon with Matt over dinner. And she was cool—those clothes, those shoes, the way she held herself, her natural playfulness.
A ‘deserter’ the tow-truck driver had called her, which should have been enough to put her a mile from his thoughtsthe very last thing Kane needed in his life was another tearaway.
But when Matt had called her a ‘lovely young flower’ he’d exactly put James’s feelings into words.
She was simply quite unlike anyone he had ever met—with enough latent energy to light a city. When he had touched her wrist, to catch her when she’d tripped—bam! And again when she had laid her small warm hand over his on the window ledge of his car—the energy had resounded from her fine-boned limb into his hand, shooting sparks up his arm until it had kickstarted a deep and all but forgotten pounding in his chest.
That sort of instant attraction was rare—beyond the butterflies a guy couldn’t help but feel when noticing a beautiful woman.
Even with Dinah it hadn’t been like that. For his part there had been more of a slow burn.
One night on the town, his mob of short-back-and-sides friends had wandered into the hard rock Pig’s Head Pub down by the docks wearing their smart casual gear, drinking their pony necked beers, to find a lot of guys saturated in leather and tattoos.
The gang had voted to mosey straight on out of there when they had all seen her—a scrap of a girl with long blonde hair, midriff top, mini-skirt, fishnet tights and heavy black boots, dancing the night away, her eyes closed as though she was shutting out all thought bar the heavy beat of the music.
At the end of the night, James had been sitting alone at the bar, waiting for his mates to come back from the gents, when she had appeared at his side, her blonde hair wild, her skin shiny with sweat, the make-up around her brown bedroom eyes smudged with eyeliner.