Okay, so maybe if she shut up he would gush and blather on about Dinah for an hour and a day like newly divorced people she knew tended to, then after a while he would realise he had been blathering and he would be embarrassed by said blathering and he would slink away after their coffee and never seek her out again.
‘What in particular would you like to know about her?’ he asked, taking a measured sip of still water, but with his eyes never leaving hers.
Okay, so not so much blathering. Instead of blathering his sensuous mouth kicked up at one corner. The wretch knew she was really asking about Dinah because she was actually interested in him.
‘I … I saw her photo on your piano when I was snooping about the house. I’m a snoop. There. I admit it. It’s a terrible habit of mine. Incurable. Immoral. But that’s just me. Anyway, there was a photo of Dinah. She seemed much like Kane,’ she said, and was quite pleased with her save, especially since she was able to make herself seem completely irresponsible into the bargain. ‘What was she like?’
‘Dinah was …’ He looked at the ceiling for a few moments as he searched for the word. ‘Incandescent.’
Siena felt her stomach drop to her knees.
Incandescent? Did the guy seriously say incandescent? Well, if he had been punishing her for masking her attraction to him by using the dead wife card, he sure didn’t pull his punch.
Nobody had ever called her incandescent before. Cute, maybe. Single-minded, sure. A pain in the ass, often. But incande
scent? What kind of man even thought to search for a word so beautiful? A creator of exquisite, inventive, deliciously cedar oil scented works like the man who had invited her out for coffee and then taken her on a ride through the sky, that was who.
‘Kane does look like her,’ he continued, finding something outside the window suddenly fascinating.
She wanted to grab him by the chin until he looked back at her again, all sparkling and almost smiling.
‘I have always thought Kane’s temperament was much more like mine,’ he continued. ‘Maybe that’s the bane of the adoptive dad, searching for personality traits that aren’t really there.’
‘He seems a really … nice kid,’ Siena said, choosing her words more carefully as she dragged herself up out of a pit of sudden unseemly jealousy. ‘I’m sure that’s a great deal thanks to you.’
Nice? Yep, nice was a good safe word. But, even as she lauded herself for her vocabulary brilliance, James looked back at her, his mouth kicking up at one corner, and he gave her a short nod, accepting her words as though they were a high compliment, which of course they really were.
Argh!
Their food arrived and Siena could have hugged the over-tanned wrinkly waitress who had obviously seen too much Far North Queensland sun in her lifetime.
She drank the cappuccino in one hit to reorganise her nerves and regretted it instantly. Firstly, James had been right, it was delicious, on par with those she’d had in Rome. And, secondly, it scalded her mouth so that the juicy-looking bacon and eggs on her plate would now no doubt taste like burnt taste buds.
Excellent.
James ate his meal without dropping a crumb. She tried to do the same and failed. She always ate too fast, had too much sauce or too much bread left at the end and at least one dollop of tomato seeds that missed her plate altogether. But James seemed to understand how to do everything in the perfect time with perfect portions.
He even had a sip of no doubt lukewarm cappuccino left to spare at the end.
‘So what about your family?’ he asked, after dabbing at the corners of his crumb-free mouth. ‘Do your parents still live around here?’
Siena quickly ran her tongue around her teeth, checking for sesame seeds. ‘Um, oh, no. I was a late … surprise.’
She was going to leave it there, but the fact that he had been brave enough to tell her about Dinah the night before made her feel it would be unfair not to be as honest. ‘There were complications and my mum, well, she passed away having me.’
His eyes narrowed, brimming with such sudden flaring compassion that Siena leant back in her chair to escape it.
‘It must have been difficult, growing up without your mum.’
Siena waved a hand over her face. ‘I survived. I had an older brother with the requisite eyes in the back of his head. Besides, you can hardly miss what you never had.’
Whereas Kane would, she suddenly realised. The poor thing knew exactly what he was missing not having his sunshiny, incandescent mother on the scene any more. Siena’s heart reached out to the sweet kid.
Stop it! Her heart did not reach. Not to handsome single dads with half-smiles and manly hands and cavernous grey eyes, and certainly not to their kids, even if said kids did not drink cola and their sticky warm hands felt so trusting and small in her own that she actually missed them like a phantom limb when they were gone.
She rubbed her hands together to erase that sense memory and went back to picking at a piece of stray bacon with the end of her fork.
‘And your father?’ he asked.