His Rebel Heart

She was about to find out. Straightening her shoulders, Adrian walked into the tall grass. The movers were nowhere to be seen. Beyond the torn screen door with its rusted hinges, the front door was wide-open. As she climbed the sagging porch steps, she heard the hard clash of rock music drifting from within along with clipped male voices and a few choice words.

She took a moment to peer into the house. Through the tattered screen door she saw a wide, empty foyer with scuffed, dark wood floors. The worn hardwood led into a yawning space with windows overlooking a raised, uncovered deck. Though she’d known the previous owners, she had never actually ventured inside the residence. Even from this distance, she saw that the glass was smudged and dirty. Again she wondered who in God’s name could have seen the house’s potential, as she balanced the pie on one hand and lifted the other to knock on the wood frame of the screen.

Adrian bit her lip. The knock had hardly made a dent in the din of conversation and dueling guitars. She knocked louder and called out, “Hello?”

Something heavy clattered to the floor. She heard more cursing, then the rhythmic clump of footfalls. Adrian watched a long shadow fall across the floor, followed by the solidly built form of a man who, from her faraway estimation, had to stand well over six feet.

Her eyes widened as he neared the door. He was wearing a simple cotton T-shirt and faded jeans that rode his hips well. There were colorful tattoos down the length of one arm and another peeking out of the collar of his shirt, feathering the base of his neck. “Who is it?” he asked in a non-too-gentle voice that had her freezing in place.

She was surprised when her heart picked up the pace, in tune with his approach. Her gaze traveled up over his bearded chin and finally, as he came to the door, to his eyes.

He slowed, reaching for the handle. “Oh,” he said, “sorry. I wasn’t expecting anyone but the pizza delivery guy. How can I help you, miss...”

Trailing off, he opened the screen and smiled at her in greeting. One of those long, muscled arms held the door open as he stepped down to the sagging porch. The boards groaned beneath him.

His eyes were blue. But not just any blue. Maybe it was that his face was so tan or his shaggy head of hair and eyebrows were so dark. But no, those eyes were a fierce, wild, familiar shade of blue.

Adrian’s lips went numb...as did her legs. The pie tipped over the ends of her fingers and landed facedown on the porch boards with a splat.

That smile was devastating and, again, familiar.

It had been years. Back then, his face had been close-shaved, his hair more kempt. Not one tattoo had marked his body, much less the thick cords of his neck. But there was no way she could have forgotten James Bracken’s devil-may-care smile.

Adrian watched the smile slowly fade from his features. They didn’t stray to the pie on the ground or to her useless fingers, which were spread between them like a supplicating statue. The mirth in those blue eyes faded, too, as they searched hers, pinging from one to the other and back in a quickening assessment. His mouth fumbled and he braced a hand against the yawning screen door. “Adrian?” he asked, finally, the name launching off his tongue.

It made her jump. Suddenly, she could feel everything again. The blood spinning wildly in her head, dizzying her, before it fled all the way down to her toes and left her cold, hollow except for the panicked rap of her heart.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” James asked, shifting his stance toward her as hope blinked to life in his eyes—the Scandinavian blues that were a perfect match for her son’s. “Adrian. Adrian Carlton.” The smile started to spread again.

She shoveled out a breath and, on it, one word. “No.”

Puzzlement flashed across his features. “What do you mean ‘no’? I haven’t seen you in eight years, but I haven’t forgotten you.” He let out a surprised laugh, reaching up to run a hand through his thick, dark cap of unruly hair. There was another tattoo there on the back of his hand. She only saw a kaleidoscope of color. The shapes were a blur, as was the new smile that warmed his face. His eyes cruised over her, fondly, appraising in a familiar sweep that had once made her libido charge from the gate like a Churchill Downs Thoroughbred.

“Sweet Christ. Adrian—tell me how you’ve been, what you’ve been up to...everything. I want to know everything—”

“No,” Adrian said when he took a step toward her. She raised her hands again, this time as a shield, and continued to back away from him. “No, no, no...”

“Careful. Don’t fall,” he said when she tripped on the first step. She managed to right herself but not in time to stop him from advancing. He grabbed her arms to keep her from tipping over onto the concrete walkway.

She hissed, snatching away from him as if his touch had burned. And it had. By God, this man had burned her. Eight summers ago, he had blazed into her life like an impossible sun—bright, beautiful, remote, untouchable. Only she hadn’t been able to stop herself from touching. That face. That body. The dark, troubled heart he’d hidden under the surface of it all. The soul she’d thought he had offered up to her on a silver platter.

Then, in a supernova flash, he was gone. He’d left her. Heartbroken. Humiliated. Pregnant. Burned. He’d jetted out of Fairhope so fast that rabid dogs might have been chasing him. Adrian had never heard from him again. Nor had she attempted to find him to tell him about Kyle...

Kyle. Oh, dear God. Adrian glanced at the cottage next door, her hands lifting to her head in horror and disbelief.

James followed her gaze, noted the house, the name painted on the mailbox and turned back to her, jerking his thumb toward it in indication. “Are we neighbors?”

She shook her head, continuing to back away from him. She was knee-deep in grass and weeds, but she needed to retreat. To get the hell away from him as fast as she possibly could lest all those terrible, horrible feelings of abandonment and humiliation she’d tried so hard to forget swamp her once more. “Stay away from me,” she told him sternly.

“Adrian,” he called, walking toward her to stop her from retreating. “Hey, come back!”

It was the cowardly thing to do, but she turned and bolted. She ran away from him and all the grim implications his reemergence in her life brought.

CHAPTER TWO

ADRIAN’SMADDASHback to the shop was all a bit hazy. Once there, she immediately sent Penny off to the greenhouse to deal with that morning’s delivery, something Adrian usually handled herself. Alone, she turned off the radio, locked the shop’s door and paced from one confining wall to the other.

The anxiety attack came crashing down on her like a torrent of icy water, chilling her to the bone and robbing her of breath. After a while, once the attack wore itself and her down, she folded into a chair in the corner and put her head between her knees.

She felt sick and helpless, a grim compilation of feelings she’d fought to escape after the torment of her marriage to Radley. She could have very well shrunk into a ball on the floor and cried, but she straightened, bracing her hands on her knees and breathing deep against the gut-wrenching sobs that were packed tight in her throat. She wasn’t going to do this. She’d had enough weakness for one godforsaken lifetime.

When Adrian was sure the sobs had abated, she made herself stand up. She waited for her legs to steady, cursing when it took longer than she would have liked. Then she propped her hands on her hips and stared through the display window that faced South Mobile Street.

James Bracken. Before that fateful summer, they had been little more than ships passing in the night. Sure, they had gone to the same high school, but that didn’t mean they ever spoke to each other.

Though she had attended his father’s funeral after the beloved town preacher died in a car accident. James had been a passenger. Up until that accident, he’d been known as Fairhope’s golden boy, the one who could do no wrong. He’d played football well enough for whispers of scholarship potential. He’d partied, like most other kids who had run in his circles, but not excessively so.

But at his father’s funeral, he’d looked anything but the golden boy. Wearing a somber suit of flat gray, sitting next to his sobbing mother, he’d looked helpless against the tide of reality. Adrian hadn’t been able to watch Zachariah Bracken’s body being lowered into the earth—she hadn’t been able to see anything but that lean shell of a boy with the evidence of that horrible crash still scratched and nicked across his face and hands.

After that, James had developed another kind of reputation entirely. He dropped out of sports. He dropped out of life in general. He partied by night, every night, and slept through class by day. The teachers hadn’t known what to do with him—neither had his friends. He skirted the ones who reached out and meant well, retreating to the center of a darker, more troublemaking circuit. The drinkers, smokers, joyriders and general hell-raisers.

Which had led him to another car crash, this one at Carlton Nurseries. James was still a couple of months underage at the time of the second accident so he was tried as a minor and sentenced to community service, repairing the damage he’d caused and toiling the summer away under Adrian’s parents’ watchful eyes.

Adrian remembered the exact moment she first felt the walls of her heart tremble for him. It was an especially hot day and she’d been trying to move heavy bags of fertilizer from the bed of her father’s truck to the storeroom. She hadn’t heard James come up behind her; he hadn’t said a word. All she felt was a hand on her arm, gentle, maneuvering her out of the way. She stepped back, saw it was him and opened her mouth to tell him that she could handle it when, shirtless, without so much as a grunt, he’d hefted a bag over his shoulder.

He’d turned, and his gaze met hers—that wild, blue gaze. There had been beads of sweat on his face, crawling down his chest. He’d looked a shade pale, but there was a determined set to his jaw and, in those eyes, a kind of desperation. She hadn’t known what it meant, but as attraction and answering emotions swam beneath the surface of her skin, she hadn’t been able to do anything but step aside, allowing him to pass and do the chore for her.

They worked like that for several days—wordlessly, side by side. Close enough for her to begin to feel the sadness and torment leaking off him in waves. The helpless boy he’d been at his father’s funeral was clearly trying to fight past his pretense of badassery and James was wrestling with it, the struggle heightened now without the aid of liquor or drugs.

It wasn’t until another moment, when Adrian found James hiding in her parents’ barn, that her empathy turned into understanding. James was slouched on the bed of a tractor, flicking a Zippo lighter and watching the flame burn and die, burn and die, over and over again. She remembered how ill he’d looked. His skin had a gray tinge, there was a sheen of sweat cloaking his face and neck and a noticeable tic in his jaw. His foot tapped restlessly against the dusty concrete.

He wasn’t coping well with the withdrawals. She knew it as soon as he raised his gaze to hers and again she saw the desperation and more than a touch of helplessness.

Unable to help herself, Adrian had taken him by the hand and led him back to the farmhouse. She fixed him a glass of lemonade, watched him drink it and talked herself silly. He began to talk back, haltingly at first. Then their conversation had flowed easily as they emptied the pitcher of lemonade. Adrian even managed to work a smile out of him. He looked loads better, the desperation and helplessness vanquished. The shadows under his eyes weren’t quite so dark as they locked on hers across the room and snagged her breath.

His effect on her had been disconcerting, but she’d held that gaze, thrown it right back at him. Then Adrian’s mother came into the kitchen and eyed James like a hawk. Adrian quickly ushered him out. As they walked back to the nursery together, James had thanked her.

That was the day they became friends. It was less than a week later that she drove him home and he admitted that it was the anniversary of his father’s death. She comforted him. Somehow his mouth found hers and he kissed her. By God, had he kissed her. And their relationship, as it was, had blazed on from there like the doomed supernova it was.

The summer romance ended abruptly when her father was attacked.

It was after hours at the nursery. James had crawled up to her second-floor room in the farmhouse and woken her. Sometime in the early hours of morning, he had snuck out while she slept, spent from his loving.

The next day brought upheaval.

During the night, her father had been assaulted by an unknown assailant. All Van Carlton had been able to remember as he lay in a hospital bed with his head and arm heavily bandaged was that his attacker had been wearing a letterman jacket.

All signs pointed to James. Her mother had been the first to say so. The police dragged him from his father’s moored boat, where he had been sleeping, down to the station to question him. When Adrian found out that James had been arrested, she drove to the police station and, demanding to see the detective on the case, made it known that James had an alibi.

James was released. Her parents were shocked and disappointed by the fact that she and James had been together. It had taken her father months to look Adrian in the eye again. The real perpetrator was never caught.

As the weeks wore on and she neither saw nor heard anything from James, Adrian became deeply disturbed. When she went to his mother’s house, Mrs. Bracken informed Adrian that when his community service time was over, James had skipped town.

Adrian waited for word from James, becoming more frantic when she realized she was pregnant. That franticness eventually warped into devastation. From there, her own brand of desperation had taken over. There could have been no other explanation as to why she married a man like Radley after knowing so little about him. All that had seemed to matter at the time was that he appeared to be a kind man. At her weakest point, she’d latched onto that kindness in the face of her parents’ deep disapproval.

It had taken years for Adrian to dig herself out of that hole of bad decisions, to regain the respect of her parents, her peers, to put the abuse she’d suffered at Radley’s hands behind her and—hardest of all—to forget how hopeless she had felt when she realized the boy she loved would not be there for her, even after all she had done for him.

Eventually Adrian’s heart did harden and turn cold. Thoughts of James Bracken and the hot summer they spent together grew fewer and farther between as she threw herself into making a new life for Kyle and herself.

She never counted on seeing James Bracken again, much less his moving into the house next door.

Growing restless once again, Adrian paced the shop before shouldering out the front door.

Spring air greeted her. Drinking it in, she veered around the silver buckets of blossoms and the chalkboard easel she’d set out announcing today’s sale. By the time she reached the worn wooden door of Tavern of the Graces, she was muttering to herself.

The bar was empty. Her footsteps echoed in the absence of boisterous conversation and jukebox rock that usually blasted through the tavern. Knowing where to find her friend Olivia, Adrian made her way behind the counter and past the swinging doors. The first door to the left in the hallway beyond was open, the light streaming out.

Blowing a relieved breath, Adrian entered Olivia’s office with its cluttered desk, large wall safe and sagging, green couch. “I have a problem,” she announced, then stopped short, feet halting when she saw her friend sitting in the desk chair, hands on her knees, head hanging.

“Liv?” Adrian asked, alarmed when Olivia didn’t look up or stir. “Are you okay?”

Olivia lifted a hand. The fingers trembled a bit. “Fine. I just...oh, crap.” Her head lowered farther between her knees, her blond curls falling forward as she braced her hands on the arms of the chair. “Hang back... I may hurl on your shoes.”

“What’s wrong?” Adrian asked, taking a step into the office.

“Oh, just sick as a damned dog.”

“The flu’s still going around,” Adrian warned her. “Maybe you should go home.”

“I’m not contagious.”

“Are you sure?” Adrian narrowed her eyes.

Olivia waved it off and finally, after some hesitation, sat up, slumping against the back of the chair. She looked pale, tired, but the corners of her lips twitched in something of a smile. “What’s up? I need a distraction.”

Adrian scanned Olivia closely. Her friend still looked a little green around the edges, but despite her weary movements, her eyes were alert and her eyebrows raised in expectation. Adrian cleared her throat and went ahead. “You won’t believe this, but...do you remember what I told you last November? About how Radley isn’t really Kyle’s dad. It’s—”

“—sexy James Bracken.” Olivia’s expression warmed several degrees. “Oh, yeah. I remember.”

Adrian took a deep breath, as if she were about to plunge deep underwater. Then she blurted, “He’s here.”

Olivia’s smile faded after a moment. “Who’s here?”

“James!” Adrian exclaimed. “James Bracken. He’s back—in Fairhope!”

Olivia’s brows drew together and she lifted a hand to rub them, closing her eyes as she did so. “Wait a minute. James is here? He’s been gone, like, eight years.”

“I know that,” Adrian pointed out, fighting impatience. “I’m telling you, Liv, that he is, at this very moment, moving into the house next door to mine.”

Olivia’s jaw dropped. “Holy crap, Batman.”

“Yeah,” Adrian said with an asserting nod, resisting the urge to pace Olivia’s office. “Olivia, what do I do?”

Olivia’s eyes scanned Adrian’s face closely and she rose carefully from her chair. “Okay, first of all, you need to calm down. Here. Maybe you should be sitting.”

Adrian shrugged off the offer. “No. I need to do something about this. I need to call whoever it is who’s in charge of selling that damn house. If they knew who they were selling it to, they’d back out. Escrow might not have closed by now. There’s a chance they could—”

“What?” Olivia demanded to know. “The worst thing James Bracken ever did was run his car off the road into your parents’ nursery, and he paid that debt. Getting you pregnant and leaving you high and dry was shitty, sure. But, for one, he didn’t know about the baby. And two, it’s not a criminal offense to sleep with someone and never call them again. If it were, he and I would both be repeat offenders. Plus, for all we know, he’s a model citizen now.”

Adrian snorted in disbelief. In rare moments through the years, low moments, whenever she had ventured to think about James Bracken, she’d imagined him in some seedy, twenty-first-century equivalent of a brothel. Her bitterness might have also conjured for him a handlebar mustache and a beer belly like Nutsy the Squirrel’s.

Thinking back to the man who had come to the door of the house next door, she frowned. The lower half of his face might have been covered in hair, but the full beard hadn’t looked cheesy. It made James look manly—even sexier than the clean-shaven seventeen-year-old she’d fallen in love with. And he’d definitely not been hiding a beer belly under his sweaty T-shirt. There had been more than a faint impression of pectoral and abdominal muscles...

Adrian shook her head, forcing her thoughts back to the dire situation at hand. “So, what do you suggest?”

Olivia braced her hands on her hips. “Talk to him?” When Adrian looked horrified, Olivia shrugged. “Unless you’re willing to pick up and move within the next few days, there’s nothing you can do about living next door to him. And ask yourself this—would you rather he find out about Kyle from you or on his own?”

“Kyle?” Adrian shook her head. “No, no. He can’t find out about Kyle.”

Olivia’s expression went blank. “Huh?”

“He won’t know about Kyle,” Adrian repeated, determined. “I’ll send Kyle to live with Mom and Dad at The Farm before I let James find out about him.”

Olivia’s brow creased. “Adrian, think about this. Kyle’s his son.”

“He left!” Adrian shouted, unable to hold back the dangerous tidal wave of desperation and anger a moment longer. “If James wanted to know about the baby, he would have stuck around. He would have stood by me. He would have done all those things he told me he would.”

“Like what?” Olivia asked.

“Like...” Adrian stopped, breathing hard, and brushed the hair out of her eyes. They had been silly, sweet things that James had said, she thought, looking back now with a bit more clarity. There had been few promises for the future, but she’d been certain James wanted to be with her beyond that summer. For a time, she even thought he was as in love with her as she’d been with him.

Olivia seemed to deflate as she read Adrian’s helpless face. “Okay, let’s try approaching this from another angle. How did you find out it was him moving in? Did you see him, face-to-face?”

Adrian nodded, wordless. She thought of the pie lying facedown, ruined, on James’s front porch. So much for the warm welcome.

“So he knows it’s you, too?”

“Yes,” Adrian admitted. Unfortunately.

“And?” Olivia asked. When Adrian only looked at her in question, Olivia lifted her shoulders. “How did he look?”

Adrian frowned deeply. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Just indulge me,” Olivia insisted.

Sighing, Adrian gave in and lowered to the arm of the battered couch. “He looked...like a grown-up.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he was different,” Adrian said, rubbing her hands together. They were sore. During her anxiety attack, she had clenched and unclenched them over and over. “He used to be long and lean and...well, he’s still long and he’s in good shape, damn it. But he’s bigger here.” She lifted her hands to either of her shoulders. “His hair’s thicker, a bit shaggier. And he’s got a beard and tattoos.”

Olivia raised an interested brow. “Oh?”

“A whole sleeve of them, from what I could tell,” Adrian said. “And one here.” She pointed to her neck. “Though I couldn’t see what it was exactly.” Taking several, calming breaths, she frowned at the floor. “He looked good. The bonehead.”

Olivia looked as if she was trying very hard not to smile. “You know...this could very well be a good thing.”

Adrian’s frown deepened as she saw the gleam in Olivia’s eye. “Don’t even think about it.”

Again, Olivia’s shoulders lifted as she feigned innocence. “What am I thinking?”

“That this is Briar and Cole all over again and you’re going to fix James and me up and we’re going to spend the rest of our lives driving each other crazy.” Adrian rose and walked to the door. “It’s not gonna happen for me, Liv. Especially not with a deadbeat asshole like James Bracken.”

Olivia turned to watch her walk out. “Aren’t you just a little bit curious about what he’s been up to all this time?”

“No,” Adrian replied. “And you know why? Because he left. He had better things to do than stick around and be with me. Why should I care what he’s done with his life or made of it?”

“I don’t know. For Kyle, maybe?”

Adrian’s hackles rose. Then she realized it wasn’t so much a low blow on Olivia’s part to say so as it was clear-cut sense. Kyle knew that Radley wasn’t his real father. Adrian had worked to find the right time and the right words to tell him just that. She’d told him very little about the man who had fathered him. She’d believed there was little chance James and Kyle would ever meet so she had let Kyle’s imagination fill in the blanks.