Happy Mother's Day! - By Sharon Kendrick Page 0,174

broached the one great stumbling block as he saw it. Distance didn’t frighten him, nor her skittishness, nearly as much as how his son would take the news.

‘What about Kane?’

‘What about Kane?’ Matt repeated, his eyes narrowing.

‘Shouldn’t he have some sort of say in all this?’

‘In who gets invited to his birthday parties? Sure. In who gets to play on his trampoline? No doubt. But in who you love? Because I think you are trying to tell me that you love this woman.’

He glanced at James, who gave him one sure—certain—nod.

‘Nope. Uh-uh. Kane doesn’t have a say there. Not even you can have much of a say in that one, buddy. And, if you’re looking for my take on all this, Kane could do with having such a cracker of a girl in his life nearly as much as you could.’

Matt tapped James on the knee, then gathered their empty iced tea glasses and headed into the kitchen, leaving James alone with his thoughts.

And the one thought that rose above all others was that when he had kissed Siena, she had kissed him right back.

It had moved him so much he had forgotten himself completely in her warm giving lips. He had forgotten all responsibilities bar kissing her until the end of time. And, when he had looked up and seen Kane at the window, he knew that his responsibilities had been blurred behind fear long enough.

Meeting Siena, knowing Siena, and, yes, loving Siena had only shone a bright big ray of North Queensland sunlight on what his responsibilities were.

To be happy.

For his son to be happy, well-adjusted, ready to be out in the world, he had to be happy first.

And to be happy he needed Siena.

He didn’t want her to look him up in six months’ time if she came back to visit her family. Contemplating six months between seeing her face, touching her hand, kissing her … His heart felt as if it was being ripped from his chest.

Talking it through with Matt, or writing down the multitude of conflicting feelings into his blog, wouldn’t solve the problem. He knew that now.

Confronting the problem head-on would be the only way through.

‘Matt, sorry to keep you so long again today. But I have a big favour to ask.’

Siena sat cross-legged on her bed reading her emails when she heard a knock at the front door.

Rick, Tina and the kids had gone out for their regular Friday night pasta at Tina’s parents’ place and Siena hadn’t been kidding when she’d begged off with a headache. So she sat still and waited for the door-knocker to leave.

But, a few moments later, Siena heard it again. And this time she realised it wasn’t a knock at the front door; it was a rap of pebbles against her bedroom window.

She hitched her pyjama bottoms higher and moved to the window, peering out to the moonlit suburban front garden to find James, standing in the middle of the yard with arms outstretched and a bunch of flowers in his hand with Rick’s big stupid Triton fountain shooting water into the air behind him.

Her head hurt from thinking all afternoon, and she knew that she had a big night of thinking ahead of her still. Surely the last thing she needed was for James to make some great romantic gesture to cloud things.

But she could hardly shoo him away. He was out there with flowers, for goodness’ sake!

Feeling like a character in a movie, she pulled open the window and yelled out in a stage whisper. ‘Stop throwing things or you’ll break the glass! Stay right there. I’m coming down.’

She ran from her room, down the stairs two at a time and out on to the front lawn, the cool grass squishing beneath her feet. She only realised she was in her pyjamas when James’s mouth dropped open.

‘Jeez Louise.’ He whistled, his eyes raking in the skimpy expanse of crushed red velvet and the crescent of exposed skin above the elastic of her trousers.

Doing her best to ignore the effect such a comment had on her libido, she stormed over to him, grabbed him by the bouquet-free hand and dragged him into the shadows of an overhanging willow tree at the side of the house.

‘What the hell do you think you are you doing?’ Her lungs were tight with the extra work her pumping adrenalin was giving them.

She stared at the flowers—iceberg roses, at least a couple of dozen of them—though he wasn’t quite suave