Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,155
skitters of sensation down her whole right side.
His lips pressed against her cheek, burning an imprint she feared no amount of scrubbing would make disappear, and then he pulled back.
After one last keen look, as though he was committing her face to memory, he turned and walked away, leaving Siena feeling as if she wasn’t quite sure if she could remember how to put one foot in front of the other to get where she needed to go.
CHAPTER SIX
‘SO HOW was your big date?’ Matt asked, through the flywire screen he was busy cleaning, as James came through the front door of his Apple Tree Drive home.
James all but jumped out of his skin. ‘Don’t do that, mate! Seriously!’
He threw his keys on to the hall table and continued through to the kitchen, where he buried his head in the fridge though he wasn’t quite sure what he hoped to find in there other than a place to hide from Matt.
But, alas, that wasn’t to be. Matt’s head appeared over the top of the fridge. ‘Don’t leave me hanging.’
‘It wasn’t a date, Matt,’ James said, reaching for an apple he didn’t really want. ‘I just met her for coffee to thank her for patching Kane up yesterday.’
‘You could have fooled me, Jimbo. What with the jacket and all, if I didn’t know you were meeting with her, I would have thought you were off to a day with the investors.’
James looked down at his outfit. ‘You’re imagining things.’
Matt reached out suddenly. James ducked away but he was too late to stop Matt from swiping a finger along his cheek. Matt smelled his finger. ‘Aftershave. The good stuff. Did I also imagine you had left the ironing board open?’
James stifled an oath and slowly bit into the apple as a big goofy smile grew on Matt’s lined face.
‘It’s okay, dude. It was an amateur’s mistake. Now spill. How did it go?’
James slumped into a chair by the round kitchen table. It had been a day filled with many firsts—his first date in several years, the first time he had found a woman whose hand fitted into his as though it was made to be there, and the first time he had ever told anyone how much he hoped Kane was like him. Anyone …
‘It was strange,’ James admitted, trying the words on his tongue rather than on his fingertips, and finding they didn’t taste as sharp and hurtful as he had expected they might. ‘Terrifying, mystifying and enjoyable by turns.’
‘Fantastic!’
‘Fantastic?’ He shuffled higher on the chair. ‘Matt, I have no idea what I was even thinking. Kane still stays up talking through his day to Dinah before he goes to sleep, and every morning is still spent in hope he’ll go to school without some sort of hypochondriac complaint. I’m not sure he’s anywhere near ready for anything of this sort.’
‘In all those lame excuses you didn’t say one word about how you feel about this girl.’
James let that comment lie.
‘Am I trying too hard? Trying to get back to the dating scene like it’s part of some twelve step programme to becoming a proper human being again? When really, maybe, I don’t ever have to go through it all again.’
All that feminine mystique. All those girls’ nights out wondering if this time she might not come home at all. And all that pain in wondering that if he had done more to try to stop her, to tame her, to need her the way she needed him, everything might have turned out differently.
‘Okay. That’s a fair point,’ Matt said, straddling the chair next to James. ‘But answer me this: why now?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Have you been thinking about your twelve step theory for some time? Or is this the first time it has occurred to you?’
James wasn’t entirely sure. He had touched on it in his blog, but it had always been a rhetorical argument. A question sent out into the void with no hope of a response.
‘I hadn’t really considered it in detail until now,’ he admitted.
‘You mean you hadn’t considered it in detail until you met her?’
James let the words tumble about in his mind until he was pretty sure that was exactly the right answer. He dropped his face into his palms.
‘Fine. Then tell me why when she asked me about Dinah I said that she was incandescent.’
Matt laughed so hard his whole body shook. ‘You told her Dinah was what?