Chapter 5
Come on, legs, Sienna silently commanded her reluctant appendages. Don’t do me like that. You guys are being over-dramatic.
It was just after lunchtime in one of the largest shopping malls in Aix, Alicyn, Xander, and Benji had run rings around her. She was glad that William and Naisha’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Willa, was competent at handling the trio, because they’d been in and out of stores for what seemed like hours, and if she didn’t have help, surely she’d have collapsed by now.
Jacyn and Alex had left for Congo yesterday, and now she was on full stand-in mommy duty.
It was one thing to take on the responsibility of squiring around a bunch of toddlers whose favorite words were “More! Why! and Again!” to give their parents and nannies a break, but it was entirely another to be doing so on a pair of legs that three days earlier — for several hours — were wrapped around the back and hips of a beautiful man.
And as they shopped, Sienna worried herself with unspoken questions. Could people tell just by looking at you that you’d had five or six orgasms in a single night? Could the sway of her hips be telling a story?
The hickeys on her neck and breast were beginning to fade. If only her legs would follow suit.
Next to her, Willa was struggling to part Xander and Benji who, despite being buckled into a double stroller, had managed to twist themselves around each other in a tangle of limbs, hair and teeth, in a brawl over a lollipop the size of a tea plate. One of them — Sienna no longer remembered which—had flung their lollipop out of the elevator doors just as they were closing. A high-decibel round of shrieking had ensued, following a tug of war over the remaining candy.
“Maybe we should just buy another lollipop,” Sienna suggested, shoving her messy hair out of her face in frustration.
“Or maybe,” Willa responded with a twinkle, “you should have taken heed of Mom and Tante Shaundra’s—and my advice and not given them any candy at all.”
Sienna protested. “What kind of outing would it be without candy?”
“A quieter one,” Willa suggested mischievously.
“When did you become smarter than the rest of us?”
“Salut.” The deep voice circumvented any effort to respond, and on a visceral level, Sienna recognized the voice at once. She spun around to meet the bright, beaming face of Maxim. He was casually dressed in jeans and a shirt, but since the bike helmet was nowhere in sight, she assumed he’d come in a car.
“Hey,” she said, even as the kids continued to whine, brawl and bicker. “Fancy meeting you here!” She could sense Willa coming to her side, and wondered if the girl, being certainly old enough to understand such dynamics, was picking up on the fact that the legs she had been struggling to walk on had gone weak once again.
“I see you’ve got your hands full,” he pointed out with humor.
“Oh, yeah. My girlfriends’ kids.” She introduced him to Willa, and then pointed at the rest of the writhing mass of humanity, naming names and hoping he could identify them before they wriggled out of view again. “And this one is Alicyn.”
“The kid you’re babysitting. Jacyn’s daughter.”
She was almost pleasantly surprised that he remembered. “Yeah.”
He stood there smiling, and she struggled to keep any telltale evidence of thirty-six-hours-ago-I-had-this-dude-in-my-mouth from showing on her face. He recognized her awkwardness and tried to put her at ease. “Hands full, huh?”
“We’re going to a movie,” Willa volunteered. “Peter Rabbit.”
He tilted his head, smiling at her. “Aww. I’ve been meaning to watch that one.”
Willa had a brainwave. “You should come!”
Sienna immediately protested. “That’s sweet of you, Willa, but Max is a busy man—”
“That may be, but I’m free right now.”
She gave him a meaningful look. “Don’t you have to, you know, tend a bar?”
He shrugged. “Not until much later. I’d love to hang around with you guys.”
Read the room, will ya?Sienna thought. But she smiled. “Cool.”
Max gestured grandly towards the bank of elevators. “I believe the cinema is on the lowest floor.”
∞∞∞