Rufus? Maximillian?
She answered the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘Siena?’
James. She hardly knew the guy but his name popped into her mind the second his deep, well-modulated voice said her name.
‘It’s James. James Dillon from this afternoon.’
No kidding, she thought, but all she said was, ‘Hello again.’
‘Um, you left your PDA at my place. I found it on the piano when it started beeping madly about fifteen minutes ago and I wasn’t sure how to get it to stop, so I pressed lots of buttons until it did.’
Beeping? Oh, right, it would be a reminder that her next week’s flight schedule would have appeared in her email inbox—
‘Then I figured it was beeping for a reason,’ he continued, ‘so you might want it back ASAP. The only way to find you was to go looking until I found Rick’s address and your mobile number … Anyway, I’m at the lights on the corner of Henderson Street right now and I’ll be there in about thirty seconds.’
Siena leapt from the kitchen stool. ‘Oh, right. Okay.’
The last thing she wanted at that moment was handsome James Dillon knocking at Rick’s front door. Especially right after his charming ‘guy in every port’ comment.
Especially since, after the tow-truck had dropped her and the smashed Ute at Rick’s Body Shop, she’d stayed there pondering the idea quite extensively that if James had the same lifestyle and fly-by-night personality as New York Gage, or even bold Raoul in Paris, he would have been serious casual friendship material.
Heck, the second she had laid eyes on him, half the cells in her body had rocketed to life. The connection she had felt to him had been electric. But, within the same second, once it had sunk in that he was Kane’s father, every other cell had already begun to resist everything he had to offer.
‘I’ll meet you out front,’ she offered, her mind turning with ways to get past Rick and out the front door. Boy, if the world wasn’t spinning to make her feel like a sixteen-year-old all over again! ‘Rick’s place is the one with the nauseating Triton fountain in the front yard.’
‘Thanks. See you soon.’ And then he hung up.
Siena pressed the phone off, listened carefully to see where Rick
was, then just gave in and made a run for it down the hall and out the front door. The change of air from air-conditioned cool to hot and humid made her skin clammy in half a second.
She power-walked down the gravel driveway as a sleek, dark sedan pulled up by Rick’s letterbox. The tinted window rolled down and Siena jogged up to meet its inhabitant.
‘I’ve got your package,’ James said out of the corner of his mouth like some sort of Chicago gangster. Some breathtakingly handsome gangster made up of shadows and clean-cut lines who made her heart beat faster in her chest. Although that could have been the escape from Alcatraz that had her adrenalin in high gear.
He waved her PDA at her with one long-fingered hand. Long fingers with short fingernails. Tanned knuckles covered in a fine spray of ash-brown hair. Not smooth and manicured like the guys she usually made friends with.
James Dillon had a real man’s hands. And she really really liked them. And his inadvertently sexy two-day-old stubble. And his woodsy scent …
‘What’ll it cost me?’ Siena asked, crouching down and resting her palms on her knees.
He leaned out the window, resting his tanned forearm along the window frame until his face was lit by moonlight. ‘Thanks and a smile from a pretty lady are all this chump will ever need.’
Even though the air was so humid she could feel it slithering over every inch of bare skin, her throat went dry. He handed her the PDA. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and though she tried to smile she found that for this guy she couldn’t fake it.
‘No worries.’
‘So where’s Kane?’ she asked, wondering why she was prolonging this when she should have run inside the minute she had her goods.
‘Home with Matt. Helping make dinner. I’m almost too scared to go home to see what I’m in for.’
‘Right.’
She nodded. He half-smiled. And, though she knew she ought to give him a friendly salute and run back inside before Rick came looking for her, Siena could feel that same tenuous thread from earlier wrapping itself tighter about her. In darkness and moonlight with the still of night about them it felt stronger still. She feared it might reel her in if she wasn’t careful.
She made a move to leave before James spoke up.