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“Mommy, I’m back!”
Sienna chuckled. “I noticed, Simi. How was your day, baby?”
Her son took a flying leap the last few steps before he reached her, and he landed in her open arms. Her heart skipped a beat when she hugged him and ruffled his hair.
Maybe he was why she kept bringing Toron to mind. Simeon was the spitting image of his dad.
Her son rambled off about pre-K and his new friends, while Sienna listened with only half an ear. She glanced up from the love of her life to greet the man just walking through the door. “Thanks for getting him, Hawke. I appreciate it so much.”
His green eyes sparkled with his kind smile. “Of course. Anything for you.”
She shifted in her seat uncomfortably. For a while now Hawke had been pushing for their friendship to go in the direction of a relationship, but she continued to hold off.
Hawke loved Simeon, and she knew he would be a great father if she offered him the role, but somehow she couldn’t commit. Fear of ruining the closeness they already enjoyed kept her from going further—that and the damn lion that took up residence in her head after one night of sweaty, hot sex.
“No new cases?” she asked to direct the conversation away from herself.
His knowing look told her he recognized the ploy and let it happen. “Not right now. I thought I would take a break after the last one.”
She made a noise of agreement. Hawke worked as a private investigator, and he shared the challenges of having rich, bored housewives hire him for the most inane of assignments, such as following their boyfriends to see if they were cheating. Sienna couldn’t understand how a woman already unfaithful to her own husband would protest her lover doing the same. In the same situation, she would have told them about themselves and gotten fired by now.
Hawke’s patience never ceased to amaze.
“How about dinner tonight?” he offered.
“Sure. Simi has been talking about that burger place with the fifty million flavors of milkshakes since the last time we visited.”
“I meant…” He nodded. “Sure. He can have any one he wants.”
“Really, Hawke?” Simeon chose that moment to show he’d been listening to their conversation. “Yippee! I’m having the biggest burger and the biggest peanut butter with chocolate shake.”
“Reese’s,” Sienna supplied, “and you’ll have kids’ size. Thank you, Hawke, but I’ll be paying for us. The shop is doing pretty good this month.”
He sat down on the other side of her desk. “That’s great. I’m glad.”
She’d spoken the truth about business picking up. That hadn’t always been the case. Starting her clothing boutique had been a dream come true, but it was a hard battle, and many nights she and Simeon had gotten by eating ramen.
Of course she’d sacrificed to be sure Simeon had meat.
He was a growing boy, a human boy, she was happy to find. In the four years since she gave birth, he had never exhibited even the slightest hint of being a shifter, a good thing since she dealt with PMS from hell on a monthly basis and fought the full moon. Almost from the beginning,
Simeon had been there to help, but she had never told him the truth about what she was. That was another reason why she couldn’t get serious about Hawke. How did a woman tell her lover she wasn’t human, and that if she got too excited during sex, she might turn him too? Hawke didn’t serve that. She wouldn’t do to him what Davon did to her.
Of course just plain weakness and fear had led her to accept his friendship when Davon stayed in Vermont and she found out she was pregnant with her alpha’s baby.
Sienna pushed her chair back, stood, and stretched. She felt Hawke’s eyes on her and turned away from them. Not that Hawke wasn’t sexy as hell . He was. The man’s body was hard as steel, and he had that yummy height thing going. In her mind, he couldn’t hold a candle to Toron, but it didn’t keep her from admiring the view. More than once, when her sexual appetite reached an intense level to the point that she thought she would lose her mind, she’d been on the way to his house and stopped herself.
Hawke didn’t dally with women. She had never even seen him with one. Come to think of it, was he gay? She peeked at him through her lashes and caught his gaze on her ass. No, definitely not. Fear shouldn’t keep her from enjoying her life, and a man like Toron would not be allowed to ruin it.
“Maybe we should—” she began.
Simeon whined, capturing Sienna’s attention. She looked down at him playing in the bucket of toys she kept in her office just for him. Her son tugged at his ear with one hand, while removing miniature cars from his stash with the other.
Sienna bent down. “What is it, baby?” She pressed a hand to his forehead. Simeon hadn’t been sic
k a day in his life, not even the common cold. “Does it hurt?”
Her son whined again without answering, and she peered inside his ear. Little kids had been known to stick crap in their ears like crayons. Simeon’s preschool teacher had mentioned that much, but Sienna didn’t see any foreign objects. She pulled her son into her arms and stood up.
