His Rebel Heart

She reached up to knead the pulsing vein in her temple. “You don’t know me, James. You might have once. But I’m different. I’ve changed.” You changed everything.

His eyes scanned her, heating. “I can see that.”

Adrian felt the rush of incredulity again and let it lead her out of the numb, defenseless state his words had bound her in. She scoffed, planting her hands on his chest and using them to move him back.

Normally, she knew that even if she had thrown a shoulder into his solid frame, she couldn’t have budged him. But he stepped back for her and she shoved by, scrubbing her fingers through her hair again. This time they mussed more than straightened, but she couldn’t bring herself to care. “You need to go.”

“You haven’t told me whether or not you’re okay,” James pointed out, bracing his hand on the wall, the other still buried in his pocket. It was a wonder someone as big as he was could look so casually graceful.

“Oh, I’m fine,” she snapped. “I’m just peachy. Now are you satisfied?”

“Satisfied?” he asked and ran his tongue over his teeth, considering. “I might be. If you hadn’t looked so lost yesterday. If you hadn’t run from me as though I was the grim reaper.”

“You weren’t supposed to come back,” Adrian told him, wanting to hit him where it would hurt the most. Maybe then he would know what he was doing to her. “You weren’t ever supposed to come back.”

“Truth be told,” James said, pushing off the wall and straightening to his full height, “when I left, I fully intended it to be for good.”

“So, why are you here, James?” she asked, fighting hard to keep desperation from breaking over her voice. It was like walking on eggshells. “Why did you come back?”

James moved his shoulders. “I have unfinished business.”

“Me?” she demanded. “Is that why you moved in next door? Because you wanted to fix things with me? Or mess them up for me like you did the last time?”

His face went blank. “I would have messed things up more if I had stayed.”

Adrian let out a bitter laugh. “You idiot.”

“I didn’t ask you to vouch for me that night, Adrian,” James pointed out. “You shouldn’t have vouched for me.”

“But I did!” she shouted. “I did. And how did you repay me? You up and left!”

James started to argue, then stopped himself, grinding his back teeth. For the first time, a dark light blinked to life in his eyes, a warning glimmer. It was a snatched glimpse of the old James, the dark side of the hell-raiser he’d been. His chest moved as he pulled in a slow, deep breath, seeming to gather himself. He lifted his hand from his pocket and scraped two fingers over his mouth—the exact way Kyle did.

Adrian’s heart dropped and she almost reached for the chair beside her for balance.

James didn’t notice how much the gesture affected her. Thank God. Instead, his eyes cooled, the anger effectively vanquished, and he said, “We both know what happened eight years ago. I’m not dragging it out and picking a fight over it. I did what I thought was right.”

“And we both had to live with that,” she said, then bit her tongue. Damn it, why had she said that?

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She lifted her gaze back to his, challenging. “You don’t know?” she asked, again punching the words out. Unable to help herself now that she’d started.

His eyes narrowed. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“Come on, James,” she said, exasperated. “You expect me to believe you moved in next door by pure chance? Am I supposed to believe you closed your eyes, drove in circles and wound up at my place of work, too? Or did you throw darts at the map?”

James shrugged. “Adrian, I didn’t even know you were still in Fairhope, much less living next door to the house I bought.” He advanced again. “And even if I had known, what would it matter? Why are you afraid me?” Before she could reply, he pointed at her, the muscles of his face tight. “The Adrian I knew wasn’t afraid of anything, least of all me. What the hell’s happened in eight years to make that change?”

Adrian opened her mouth to retort, to deflect, but the sound of the bells jangling over the entry doors of the shop stalled her. Crap. She didn’t need customers overhearing this. With a sigh, she tempered the heat of argument inside her and lowered her voice. “These are business hours. If you want to continue this, it’ll have to be later.”

“Sure, later,” James said with a rigid nod. “How ’bout your place at six?”

“No!” she shrieked. “You can’t come over!”

“Why not?” he asked. Something crossed his face and it wasn’t friendly. “You got a territorial, live-in boyfriend or something?”

“No, but—”

“Hey, Mom, guess what!”

Adrian turned, horrified. Her blood turned cold as Kyle sprinted into the room. “H-how...?” She trailed off as Van Carlton stepped into the room next and laid his hands on his grandson’s shoulders. “Dad.”

“Adrian,” her father greeted her. The warm smile on his face faltered when he turned his attention to the other man in the room. “Bracken?” he asked, surprised.

James didn’t reply. His eyes were on Kyle, studying his face. He didn’t seem to be breathing.

He wasn’t the only one. Adrian felt her face heat and wondered how. She was so cold her bones ached with the chill. She tried to swallow, but her throat was as dry as dust. Instinct broke through and she walked to Kyle, putting herself between her child and the man she hadn’t ever wanted him to meet. “You need to go, hon.”

“But, Mom...”

“Take him home,” Adrian said, praying her father wouldn’t argue.

Her dad considered her for a moment. He glanced over her shoulder at James, then back at her and gave a short nod. “I’ll take care of it.”

Adrian watched Kyle and her father leave the shop, watched through the glass display window as her father’s truck, marked with the Carlton Nurseries logo, pulled out of the gravel parking lot. Only then did she turn back to face James and the secrets of the last eight years.

CHAPTER FOUR

IF JAMESHADN’Tknown better, he would have thought he was in a submarine. The walls of the flower shop seemed to be pressing inward, bowing under some enormous pressure. The floor seemed to tilt. To keep his balance, he held his arms out slightly as Adrian turned back to face him in the absence of the man and the boy.

The man had been her father. James had recognized Van Carlton well enough despite the new sunspots and creases in the older man’s face. He’d worn the same, worn, black Dale Earnhardt cap years ago. But the boy—

The boy was another story entirely. For a split second, James had thought he was staring at a mirror image of his younger self. The mop of hair might have been a lighter shade of brown, but it was just as thick, just as untidy, and it fell over the boy’s brow in just the way James’s fell over his and always had. James knew instinctively that it grew at an unmanageable rate and had to be clipped every three weeks to keep it from covering the boy’s eyes.

His eyes—dear God. They had been the kicker. James knew those eyes, not just from his own reflection. His father had looked at him with the same eyes, in the same light. Considering. Amiable. Curious.

James’s stomach pitched. His throat closed. He reached up. The rafter above his head was close, close enough for a man of his height to wrap his hand around it and brace himself. He was afraid it was the only thing keeping him upright.

The boy had sported a face full of freckles. They’d been a curse of James’s early adolescence. He hadn’t missed them when they began to fade with time and maturity. There was still a dark scatter of them across his shoulders and upper back.

The boy had been tall for his age, too. Seven. James knew he was seven. Not because he was around children all that often. He just knew...he knew, damn it.

His gaze finally found Adrian’s. Her hands were at her sides, her back and shoulders straight, a posture that might have looked calm, composed if not for the fact that her fists were opening and closing into white-knuckled balls.

He had a good sense that her nails were scoring her palms. She’d done that whenever her mother, Edith, started in on her. After Edith walked away at long last, taking her dark, rumbling cloud of disapproval with her, James remembered taking Adrian’s hands in his, opening them to see the half-moon marks on her palms. Then he’d rub the pads of his thumbs over them, lifting them to his lips, soothing hurts he knew she felt outside and in.

Disappointed mothers had been one of their commonalities. James had deserved his. The eternally disappointed Edith was another thing, and for some reason, once James’s relationship with Adrian had heated and gained some tenderness over the weeks they grew to know each other—bodies, hearts, minds—he had been eager to make up for those undeserved hurts...

Now he couldn’t have crossed the room to her if he tried. Now he didn’t feel like soothing. He didn’t know what it was he felt. He’d suffered concussions. He’d been as drunk as ten sailors on a rainy night in Dublin. Still, he couldn’t remember ever feeling so off-kilter. So lost.

A maelstrom built inside him. Something burned the back of his throat. Anger. It was his old fallback, that knee-jerk emotion he’d turned to when Zachariah Bracken died—his chief coping mechanism. The one he’d worked so carefully to learn to curb as an adult.

The anger twisted and burned inside him. It grew and he didn’t do much to stop it. The boy’s appearance had stripped him, left him naked and raw. Suddenly anger was the only thing he had. The taste of it was bitter, but also familiar. And the familiarity was a comfort he couldn’t refuse.

James’s lips parted. He finally found his breath and sucked it in raggedly. His voice was rough when he spoke. It sounded dark, deadly even to his own ears. “Explain,” he said.

Adrian’s expression wavered for a moment—one moment of weakness before composure took over again. Practice. That kind of quick, strong composure only came with practice. When she spoke, her words were calm, too. Steady but low, so low he could barely hear them over the pounding in his ears. “I don’t think I have to.”

James’s brows lifted. “You don’t?” he asked, punching the words out. It was his turn to ball his hands into fists. The knuckles cracked from the strain. The maelstrom had turned into a hot, fiery vortex of anger he feared there was no escape from. It scared him just as much as the implications of that face, those eyes that were an exact match for his own.

“No,” Adrian answered. “I don’t.”

“He’s mine.” James wondered where the words had come from. They didn’t seek or question. They were just there.

Something flashed in the dark depths of her eyes. Emotion. He was as relieved to see the small puncture in the wall of her composure, as he was satisfied that he had caused it.

“No, he’s mine,” she said, not raising her voice. The words shook in ferocity. “You might be his father, but you didn’t bring him into this world. You didn’t raise him. So whatever say you think you have in any of this you can swallow. And you’ll forgive me, hot rocks, for not much caring if you choke on it.”

The breath washed out of him and he advanced on her as the fiery storm inside him began spitting hail. “What—”

“No!” she shrieked, her composure finally shattering. She was shaking. He wasn’t altogether sure if it was from weakness or fury. She jabbed a finger at him as her eyes fired. “You can threaten me, rail at me, curse me all you want, but when it comes to him, I will not budge!”

“For Christ’s sake, he’s my son, Adrian!” The words cracked, his voice shattered and he struggled to hold back a blistering oath. He said the words again. “He’s my son. He’s my blood. You just admitted it yourself and you expect me to stand here and not say one damned word about it?”

“No,” she said. Her eyes hardened to pebbles. Her arms crossed. “I expect you to walk away.”

“Walk away?”

“Yes.”

“And why would I do that?” he thundered.

Her gaze cleaved into his, but her words softened. Sure and sad at once. “Because that’s what you did. Remember, James? You walked.”

He faltered, struggled for argument, words, justification. “I didn’t know...”

The sadness spread quickly across her face. She blinked and it vanished, contained once more. “I didn’t know, either. Not when you left. It wasn’t for three or four weeks after that that I began to...” Her breath hitched, throwing her off. She stopped, swallowed, closed her eyes for a brief moment, then opened them and stared hard at his chest. “...before I began to feel the effects. You were long gone.”

When James only shook his head, she loosened a breath slowly. “Look, we both know there isn’t much room for you to point fingers. We slept together and you were gone two days later.”

No, he couldn’t argue with that. The waves of anger that had been pounding at the shore of his control rolled back on themselves until they were a distant rumble. His incredulity splintered and cold seeped into the cracks where fury had been boiling minutes before.

Still, he couldn’t get around the fact that eight years had gone by. His child had lived and breathed and thrived here in his hometown and he hadn’t known about it. James began to shake his head in denial. “You could’ve—”

“What?” she demanded when he trailed off. She lifted her hands when his mouth only hung open, wordless. “You were gone. You didn’t even tell your mother where you were going. Nothing.”

“Wait a second,” he said, holding up a hand. “You went to my mom?”

“Well, yes, of course,” she said. “I thought she would know where you’d gone.”

He reached up to scrub a hand over his temple. “Did she know—about the baby?”

Adrian hesitated for a moment, then she nodded. “Yes. She knew.”

“Son of a bitch,” he said. He had to resist the urge to sit down. “All this time...” His eyes zeroed in on Adrian’s face again. “Who else? Besides your parents and my mom, who else knows?”

“I didn’t tell anybody else that you were the father,” she told him. “My friends know now, but I told them in confidence. You and I were together for just a handful of weeks and we kept it quiet so my parents wouldn’t find out. You were gone before the news that I was pregnant became common knowledge.”

Adrian lowered her eyes as she went on. “Your mother pitied me, James. And she wasn’t the only one. There were a lot of people who pitied me when I began to show, and that was the worst part. Worse than the disapproval I got from others. Almost as bad as my parents’ disappointment. Once it sank in that you were gone and didn’t want to be found, I was heartbroken. But worse, I was humiliated.”

James looked at her now, the tears shining through the steel of her eyes. He saw the girl she had been. The seventeen-year-old firebrand. And he was ashamed. He cursed. “You stayed here?” he asked. “You could’ve gone anywhere, started over...”

Adrian’s frown deepened. “I thought about it...but then...” She combed her hair back from her brow and shook her head. “Things happened. I stayed. I’m not getting into it now. I landed on my feet eventually and people finally stopped pitying me, even if some of them still whispered behind my back. The most important thing to me, then and now, is that my son is healthy and happy.”

“Our son,” James corrected. When Adrian only sighed, he raised himself to full height, unable to yield. “You can tell yourself whatever you want, Adrian, but he is my son.”

She looked at him, expression saddened again. “You don’t even know his name.”

James’s brows drew together. Damn it all to hell, she was right. “Right now all that matters is that I want to know it.” When she only looked at him, expression unchanged, he fought another curse. His voice dropped to a whisper. “I want to know, Adrian,” he said. “Please...tell me his name.”

Adrian combed his features with her eyes. When he didn’t so much as blink, she seemed to deflate, the rigid line of her shoulders bowing under the strain he saw in her hands as she scrubbed them over her face. In defeat, she locked her arms over her chest once more and said, “Kyle. His name is Kyle.”

“Kyle,” James repeated, bringing the boy’s freckled cheeks and bright eyes back to mind. As they came into focus, the face did for James what he had admitted to Adrian that her face had done for him through the years. The stillness, the unexpected calm, made breathing a great deal easier. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, James pulled in a deep, cleansing breath. It cleared his head, stilled those few waves still roiling listlessly somewhere inside him. It brought the first real blink of clarity. “Kyle Carlton.”

“Yes,” she said. The single word seemed to hang like a challenge in the air. She backed it up by lifting her chin, daring him to contradict it.

James gave a small nod. Despite everything, he was relieved to see the light that challenge brought back to her eyes, easing the strain and fatigue the confrontation and revelations had caused. “That’s fair.”

She blinked in surprise, thrown off by the easy concession.

James stepped toward her, eager to catch her while her guard was down on one point, at least. “I won’t say that leaving you was a mistake. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.” When she scoffed, he held up a hand. “I won’t make excuses, either, because at this point I’m not sure they would mean that much to you, anyway. I doubt, after everything, that you’d be able to take me at my word.” When she said nothing to contradict that, James crossed to her. He didn’t touch her, but he did lower his head toward hers. “But know this. I will not walk away this time.”

Adrian’s forehead creased. “But—”

“Whatever you want from me, I can’t forget,” James said evenly. “I never forgot you. I certainly won’t forget the child we made together. And however selfish you might think I am for saying and doing so, I’m not slinking away and pretending that this never happened. I’m not staying out of the way. I want to meet him, Adrian.” Alarm broke apart in her eyes and he hurried to say more. “I want to talk to him. Know him.”

“James, you can’t.”

“Why not?” he demanded.

“Listen to yourself,” she said. “All I hear is I want. What about what he needs?”

“He needs a father,” James stated. When a lightning flash of indignation crossed her face, he lifted his brows. “Are you telling me he’s never asked about me? He’s never been curious about where he came from? Did you tell him I died—fell off a building, got trampled by bulls...?”

“Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous!”

“But he has asked, hasn’t he?” James knew he had her there. “He is curious.” When she was silent, he swallowed hard because his next thought perturbed him quite a bit. “Is there someone else—another man you’ve shared him with, trusted him to? Someone he thinks of as a dad?”

Her eyes turned thoughtful and his heart banged away at his chest, knowing the answer.

“Yes.”

When he cursed again, a small smile ticked at the corners of her mouth. It was the first waver of mirth he’d seen from her. “Only...he calls him Granddaddy.”

Van. She was talking about Van. Inwardly, James breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good,” he said after a moment. “I always liked the old man...despite everything. But it’s not enough. Tell me it’s enough for the kid and I’ll walk away right now.”

“It has to be,” Adrian told him. “For his sake, James, it has to be.”

“For his sake...or for yours?”

She gaped at him. Then she raised her hands to her head. Her fingertips kneaded at her temples as she huffed in frustration. “I know what’s best for him. I’m his mother. You left and—you’re right—I couldn’t care less what your reasons or excuses for it are. You can’t take it back, no matter what you say. There’s nothing you can do to fix it.”

“That may be true for us—you and me,” James acquiesced. And wasn’t that a crying shame? “But Kyle is another story, and you know it.”

“What I know is that you have to respect my wishes, as his mother.”

James blew out a breath, prayed for patience. “Damn it, Adrian. Kyle needs me. Some part of him needs me.”

“You don’t know him,” she said, leveling a finger at him. “So don’t for one minute think that you know what’s best for him. You broke my heart, James, but I’m a grown woman—I learned to deal with it and move on. He’s just a boy, and if you think you’re going to get close enough to break his heart, too, you’ve got another think coming!”

He advanced on her, closing what little space there was between them. “You know what? The same goes for you if you think I’m capable of hurting a kid, particularly one who belongs to me.”

“He’ll never belong to you,” Adrian shot back. “Not if I have anything to do with it.”

He smiled because he knew without a doubt that he would prove her wrong. He’d prove his worth, both to her and Kyle. He’d earn his place in their lives, just as he’d earn his place in Fairhope. “We’ll see about that.” And just because it would catch her off guard, he hooked an arm around her waist. She stumbled into him, navel to navel, and gasped as his lips lowered to her ear. “By the end of this, you’ll both know you can count on me. I promise you that.”

She balled her hands against his chest and twisted out of his grip. “Let go.”

James obeyed. Spurred by the awareness that had flashed briefly across her face, he let his smile soften. “See you around, li’l mama,” he said in an undertone as he slipped by her, close enough to get a whiff of her scent. It was the same as it always had been—subtle, sultry with just a touch of sweetness. He trapped it in his lungs on his way out, striding confidently as he faced the blinding streams of sunlight.

* * *

“HE’SINSUFFERABLE.”

Briar Savitt sipped her tea, not responding to Adrian’s heated words. The tea was infused with chamomile. Adrian’s friend had taken one look at her when she brought Kyle to Hanna’s Inn that evening and ordered her to sit while she put the kettle on the stove.

In her checkered apron and high-necked silk top, Briar looked every bit the calm and collected innkeeper. Which was why Adrian had sought her out instead of Olivia, the matchmaker, or Roxie, the hopeless romantic. She’d needed a place to go that evening to avoid home and, more to the point, her neighbor. The inn offered the warm light of comfort and good food, and Briar was always willing to lend a sensible and sympathetic ear.

As an added bonus, Kyle loved picking her husband’s brain. Adrian could hear Cole’s deep voice from the next room, followed by Kyle’s laugh and the squeal of Cole and Briar’s baby girl, Harmony.

The homey noises soothed some of the frazzled edges Adrian had been struggling with for hours. She picked at the corner of the lemon square on the plate in front of her. She didn’t know how much she would be able to stomach tonight with her insides twisting and turning. Briar lifted the kettle from the trivet in the center of the round kitchen table to refill Adrian’s mug.

“James Bracken might be a lot of things,” Briar said thoughtfully, “but I don’t think even he’d stoop so low as to drop the paternity bomb on Kyle out of the blue, if that’s what you’re worried about. Not without your say-so. He’d be a fool to, at any rate. Especially if he’s telling the truth about wanting to earn a place in Kyle’s life. You don’t do that by force.”

“I wish I could believe that,” Adrian said, drinking the soothing tea. “You don’t know him like I do. He used to be rash, impulsive...he certainly didn’t listen to authority.”

“I remember,” Briar said with a nod. Adrian sometimes forgot they had gone to the same high school. Briar and Olivia had graduated a couple of years ahead of her. “My mom and his were both involved in the church. The reverend’s death hit us all hard. And I’d hear the gossip about James when I came home from college for summer and holidays.” A line appeared between Briar’s brows as she studied the place mat in front of her. “Grief isn’t an easy thing to bear, especially when it comes suddenly.”