Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,144

hand. But, rather than warm, which he would have expected after her night of dancing, she felt cold. So very cold. And her small cold hand made him look twice.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said.

James raised an eyebrow in disbelief. With all the attention she’d had that night he would have thought himself way under the radar.

‘Why didn’t you ask me to dance?’ she asked.

James laughed.

‘Finally!’ she said, throwing thin arms into the air. ‘A smile! I was beginning to wonder if you had the ability.’

James’s laughter subsided, but his smile remained. ‘I smile plenty when there is something to smile about.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, I’m done here and I would really love to head out of here for a cup of coffee. Are you up for it?’

Are you up for me? she had meant and it had taken James half a second to say yes. From that day they were James and Dinah. The nine-to-five cabinet-maker and the wild child who, it turned out, had a child of her own at home. A shy, gentle three-year-old boy James had fallen in love with at first sight.

He had always wondered in the back of his mind if Dinah had sought him out that night because she was looking for someone safe for her son. But he had loved her anyway, perhaps because of the almost desperate way she needed him.

At her insistence they had moved to the suburbs, at his insistence he had adopted her son, and they had become a car-pooling, dinner party holding, regular family.

Until, at the age of thirty, Dinah had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. After six months of unsuccessful treatment and crying herself to sleep at night blaming herself for her wild youth, she was gone.

But, no matter what he had endured in the last couple of years, it seemed he hadn’t been emptied of all aspiration as he had thought. His instincts were whispering just loud enough that he couldn’t shout them down.

Siena. Maybe he ought to … what? Ask her on a date while she was in town? Send her flowers? Write her a card? It had been so long since he had done this he wondered if the rules had changed. Did you call a person these days or was it all about sending provocative text messages on one’s mobile—?

A noise came through the intercom. His ears pricked up. A shuffling of sheets, a small sniffle, then Kane settled again.

Kane. That one word silenced his whispering instincts in one fell swoop. He had been so busy thinking about what he wanted, what he needed, that he had plumb forgotten about Kane.

James again ran hands through his already over-mussed hair, this time in order to rub away the sudden pounding in his head.

Surely he was messing with forces he had no business messing with. Though Siena was like chalk to Dinah’s cheese in many ways, she was young, she lived a four-hour plane flight away and drove in red high heels, for goodness’ sake.

And everyone—counsellors, teachers, friends and books and websites alike—all agreed that what Kane needed was time.

His head swimming, James opened his laptop and found the blank weblog page he was looking for.

The one time he had been in such a bad way as to go to counsellors for himself, they had suggested he keep a diary, as though getting his feelings out of his head and down on paper would make it easier to cope.

As a man of the computer age, he had used the blog format instead. Having his words floating out there in the ether made them feel like more of a release than if they were written on paper and tied up in a ribbon at the bottom of his sock drawer, hidden, as though they were a dirty secret.

He cracked his knuckles, freeing up the wave of information he would have to wade through before he could even think about getting to sleep.

And he began to type.

Showered and changed into her favourite red crushed velvet pyjamas—soft, comfortable, easy to pack and a little bit sexy just in case—Siena leant back against a pile of fat frilly floral cushions on the lumpy spare bed and laid her laptop on her thighs as she shuffled her mouse and set to opening her emails.

Despite the PDA’s beeping insistence that it ought to be, her schedule wasn’t there as yet, which only gave her further heebie-jeebies about what Max had in store for her with his ‘fabulous career move'. What else could