Meant-To-Be Mother. Ally Blake

have been used to haul anything more gritty and cumbersome than plants for Tina’s garden.

      She started up the monster, took a few moments to familiarise herself with the feel of the pedals as it was the first right-hand-drive car she had driven in months, then backed out of the driveway.

      She had to admit it was a beautiful day. Hot and sunny, like every day in Cairns—a huge tourist destination, poised on the edge of the magnificent Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven wonders of the natural world. It really was paradise. For some. For others the hot air felt heavy, smothering, suffocating…

      She switched on the air-conditioning, her breathing coming easier when the car smelt less like the past and more like the inside of a plane.

      After about five minutes of driving Siena passed an intersection with an antique shop on one corner and an antiquated milk bar on the other and felt a massive wave of déjà vu.

      Ignoring the map on the display of her PDA, she took a right turn down a familiar-feeling suburban street, shady with gigantic overhanging gum trees. The stillness of the place washed over her as she meandered deeper along the windy road past lovely large two-storey homes with gables and shutters and front porches and grassy front gardens. It was a picture postcard neighbourhood for a young family.

      But familiarity soon morphed into prickly realisation.

      This was her old street. The home she had lived in for the first eighteen years of her life. The home in which she had grown up as a late child with a bossy older brother and an absentee father…

      She rumbled down the street in second gear. Piano music pealed from one house, making her feel giddy. She peered at numbers on letterboxes to draw her focus elsewhere.

      And then she found it. Fourteen Apple Tree Drive. Even the street name was picture perfect. But she knew that the lives going on behind such façades weren’t anywhere near perfect.

      A flash of movement loomed at the corner of her vision and she looked up from the letterbox to see a kid riding his bike out into the street.

      Swearing loudly, she slammed on the brakes, the big car tugging and shuddering as she held on for all her might. But her unpractised arms couldn’t keep the car straight.

      The wheels locked and skidded sideways and, with a crunching jolt, she mounted the kerb. The car slammed to a halt when it came face to face with a hundred-year-old tree in a mass of screeching tyres, grinding metal undercarriage on concrete gutter and the acrid smell of burnt rubber.

      Siena’s shallow breaths couldn’t dull the sound of her thudding heart.

      Then she remembered the kid on the bike. She looked through the windscreen.

      Nothing.

      She looked out the driver’s window, then craned her neck to see over her shoulder to the road behind.

      Neither child nor bicycle were anywhere to be seen.

      CHAPTER TWO

      JAMES was sure he heard the screech of car tyres over the sound of his electric sander. He let the sander whirr to a slow stop and whipped his protective goggles to the top of his head.

      He stared through the sun-drenched dust floating in the air about him in his backyard workshop, listening.

      But there was nothing bar the regular sounds of suburbia—a creaky Hills Hoist clothes-line twirling in the tropical breeze, noisy miner birds fighting over scraps, an amateur pianist a few houses over practising his scales…

      He must have imagined it.

      His hand moved back to the goggles on his head, ready to get back to work, when he heard a car door slam in his front garden.

      He was out of his workshop and sprinting down the driveway before his work gloves even hit the ground.

      The first thing he saw was a green Ute mounted halfway up the kerb, its driver’s side door open wide, its front bumper crunched in against his front tree and a soft wisp of smoke spiralling from the bonnet.

      The second thing he saw was Kane’s bike lying on its side on the street behind the car.

      The image ripped through him like someone tearing a photograph in half. If Kane was taken from him too…

      Determined to just know, his numb feet took him to the kerb, and once there he saw enough to stop him from thinking such dreadful thoughts.

      Kane sat on the road, leaning back against the far side of the car. He was alive. He was animated. And he was talking to a young woman who was crouching down in front of him, running frantic hands over his limbs and head.

      A slight young woman with shaggy brown curls finishing just below her ears. A gauzy sort of black top sat high on her back as she crouched, revealing a wide band of olive skin above the waistline of her tight dark jeans.

      James stared at the skin, realising in a completely unexpected flash of awareness that it was the first time he had seen that part of a woman’s anatomy in an age.

      James brought the disturbing thought and his feet to a very definite stop with a crunch of work boot on gravel.

      Kane looked over, his pale brown eyes widening as he saw that he and his new friend weren’t alone. Instant tears ensued as though the magnitude of what had happened was only realised once James was there to witness it.

      ‘Dad?’ Kane said, his high voice cracking.

      ‘I’m here now,’ James said as he willed his feet to pick up where they had left off.

      One step at a time, he repeated in his head with each footfall.

      He had no idea where he had picked up such a mantra—Kane’s varied counsellors, late night Internet browsing or even Dr Phil—but it seemed the right mantra for that moment.

      He moved towards his son, still not ready to find blood or pain or cracked bones. ‘Buddy, are you okay?’

      Kane nodded and stood as though he knew James needed to see that he was in one piece. ‘I’m fine. I scraped my arm but, as I told Siena, it hardly hurts.’

      At the mention of the woman’s name, James looked back to find her face drawn with apprehension, her thin eyebrows arched into a frown, her stunning ocean-green eyes wide and blinking and a full lower lip hooked guiltily beneath her two front teeth.

      She wiped shaking hands down her tight jeans as she stood, her slim legs wobbling on ridiculously high fire-engine-red pointy heels. Why anyone would drive in such contraptions he had no idea. He fought down a sudden urge to tell her exactly that. To yell, to let loose with every thought that was streaming through his frantic mind, to twist his recent fright back into much more comforting anger.

      But every thought that crossed his mind flitted across her remarkable face and he knew that he didn’t have to. He saw mortification. Embarrassment. Something else so quick he missed it, but he caught the tail-end of it through a brief flash of pink across her cheeks.

      And then, with an almost imperceptible shake of her head, he recognised the moment she reached the ‘get over yourself and go talk to the guy’ phase.

      ‘I’m Siena Capuletti,’ she said in a lilting voice, holding out a thin hand.

      ‘James Dillon,’ he said in return, moving to her to shake.

      Her hand was warm. And almost impossibly delicate. This was a hand that had known more manicures than manual labour. For the first time ever he actually felt self-conscious of the work-hardened calluses marring his own large hands.

      He let go first but she whipped her hand back with equal speed. As she tucked it into the back pocket of her dark low-rise jeans, James caught a flash of flat tanned stomach.

      His insubordinate gaze flickered upward, but he then had to contend with those eyes. Big, green, framed by the darkest thickest lashes he had ever seen. Suddenly he wasn’t