Meant-To-Be Mother. Ally Blake

blinked.

      Dinah. Dinah was the beautiful blonde with the bedroom eyes in the photograph on the piano. Dinah was Kane’s mother, the woman who had been given a whole house as a wedding gift. And she was gone.

      ‘Hey, do you want to see my swings? They’re way better than the ones you left behind.’

      Siena spun around to find Kane standing at her back, staring at her with big brown eyes full of innocence. If she thought her heart was thrumming earlier she’d had no idea. She could feel it slamming against her chest. Her palms were sweating. Her face had turned beet-red with guilt.

      What was she thinking in reading James’s blog? Was she insane? Obviously the humidity was sending her barmy.

      ‘Sure, Kane,’ she said, spinning him on the spot and giving him a little shove towards the door with one hand as she closed the laptop behind her with the other. ‘But we’ll have to be quick as it’s time for me to go.’

      James hung up the phone from calling a tow-truck.

      He leant his palms against the kitchen bench and watched his son dragging Siena out of his workshop and over to the trampoline.

      She padded behind him on bare feet, her heavy dark curls bouncing, the hem of her long jeans dragging in the dirt, but she seemed not to notice or care.

      Kane clambered up on to his new toy and she stood by, hands on hips, as Kane bounced up and down and chatted away about goodness knew what.

      James breathed in deep through his nose.

      Siena Capuletti was something else, and, no matter which way he looked at it, they had been engaged in some pretty darned enjoyable flirting back in the bathroom. He didn’t even really know whether he had started it or her, but before he’d even known what he was doing he’d found himself in one heck of a natural rhythm.

      He rolled the kinks out of his shoulders, quite liking the feeling that he had stretched some muscles that hadn’t been stretched in a good long time.

      He didn’t have time to think on it much more as suddenly Siena was jogging back through the kitchen door.

      ‘I can’t believe how thirsty I am,’ she said as she leaned against the kitchen bench at his side. ‘It’s so hot out there. But, then again, it’s hot out there every day here.’ She glanced pointedly at the tray of drinks which had never gone further than the kitchen. ‘May I?’