Happy Mother's Day!

But her lips did not move, even to tell him goodbye.

And, with that, he turned and walked away, his eyes blurred by more than the sudden driving rain.

Siena’s throat was clogged with fear and love and confusion and self-recrimination as she watched James run through the belting rain, get into his car and drive away.

She’d let him go. She’d actually been strong enough to let him go.

Well, she wasn’t going to get a minute of sleep that night so at least she had hours ahead of her to beat herself up about it.

The sudden tropical shower died enough for her to make a quick dash for the house. She kept running, up the stairs and into her room, where she threw herself on to her lumpy bed.

Her poor flowers looked even worse for wear than when he had given them to her. More had lost their petals and some had lost their heads completely. She didn’t blame them. She felt as though she’d lost hers days ago.

As she twirled them about she noticed there was a card attached. Curiosity got the better of her, as always, and she opened it to find a copy of the photo that had been taken of them on the Skyrail when they had smiled at the frog. He must have bought it on the sly when she’d been browsing in the gift shop for a present for the twins.

As she stared into the photo, in its silly rainforest-inspired cardboard frame, two single tears spilled from her misty eyes and down her hot cheeks.

In the photo she was leaning into James, smiling wider than she had ever known herself to smile. And James only had eyes for her.

CHAPTER TEN

ONE o’clock Saturday afternoon, Siena sat by Max’s pool in the same seat in which she had sat merely twenty-four hours before.

After sleeping not a wink the night before as she had stayed up finding a way through the fog to see what she really wanted her future to entail, the only thing keeping her awake was nervous tension.

‘So?’ Max said, watching her over the top of a Martini. ‘What will it be, Siena? Do you plan to continue rising to the top in taking the Rome position or are you going to be like the majority of my girls and let real life get in the way of a good thing?’

‘Neither, Max,’ Siena said, her voice sounding a heck of a lot stronger than she felt. She was about to take the biggest gamble of her life and she had no idea if she could pull it off.

But all the sacrifices she had ever made of her time, and her loyalty to the company, and most importantly the reward at the end, would make taking the biggest chance of her life worth it.

‘Max, I have an offer to make you I think you can’t refuse.’

His eyes narrowed. ‘I thought my remuneration package for the Rome gig was fairly unbeatable.’

‘And it was. But it’s not the package that concerns me. I want … I need to be here. Not Rome. I need to stay in Cairns.’

Max watched her over the rim of his glass before he sighed and ran a ringed hand across his temple. ‘Oh, Lord,

if you tell me you’ve met a boy I’ll drown myself in my Martini right now.’

‘I wouldn’t want you to do that, Max. But I’m afraid I have met a boy.’

Max rolled his eyes. ‘If only one could hire eunuchs with the talent you girls have. But alas. It seems that, having a mostly female workforce, I will continue to lose my favourite girls to family.’

‘But that’s just my point. You don’t have to lose me, Max. I just think you could use me in a way that suits both of us.’ She pulled a piece of paper out of her handbag with a shaking hand. ‘May I?’

He waved a flamboyant hand her way, allowing her to continue.

It would mean less pay, it would mean more hours, and it would mean that never again would she have to push a ridiculously heavy drinks trolley down an aeroplane aisle while wearing heels at thirty thousand feet.

It meant that she would have to find herself a permanent base in Cairns instead of a tiny serviced apartment in Melbourne that merely served as somewhere to store the hoards of clothes she was partial to collecting on her European stopovers.

But that was fine with her. Because it meant that she could also make James a counter offer to the one he had made the night before, which she hoped would be too good for him to refuse as well.

It was time to stop running. And, as she had sat watching the sun rise from Rick’s back porch that morning, she realised that she already had.

She set out to tell Max what her new job would entail, with all the confidence in the world that he would then blithely fire her on the spot for daring to presume that she knew more about his business than he did.