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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.
r /> 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.
‘Dinah,’ she said, holding out a small hand.
‘James,’ he returned, shaking her 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.
