Can a rebel ever change his ways?

Being a single mother and successful florist is tough, especially when your new next-door neighbor is the man who shattered your heart. Eight years ago, bad boy James Bracken walked away from Adrian Carlton...and their unborn child. Now he’s back. And Adrian’s desire to protect her son from the truth of his biological father isn’t enough to hide the wild blue eyes of father and son, or to keep Adrian from surrendering to the raw passion between her and James. But is he truly the changed man he claims to be? Maybe this time his rebel heart really is home to stay.

“I don’t want you to be alone...”

Adrian sighed. “James, I have been alone, for a really long time.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Adrian...I am so, so sorry.”

When he drew her into his arms, she was helpless to stop him. She felt his lips come to rest on the top of her head. His arms wrapped around her back, closing her in, tightening.

He simply held her, for what seemed like ages.

A small eternity passed in the space of moments. Memories stirred, whispering to life, ghosts of what had been.

When his lips touched hers, it felt so natural. The simple press of his lips brought her back to life. Her heart fluttered, lifting and soaring.

She should have pushed him away. After everything, she should shove him back, make him leave. Instead, she let the moment stretch, deepen until she felt him brush up against the soul she’d buried from everything and everyone...

Dear Reader,

Revisiting my hometown, Fairhope, through the eyes and hearts of my characters is something I look forward to every time I write a book in this series. But there’s something about Adrian and James that made me anticipate writing this book more than any other. Penning their story was an emotional experience I won’t soon forget. Mostly because I wrote this story within a year of having my first child, a blue-eyed boy much like Adrian’s.

Writing love stories that involve single parents can be a delicate process. Being a mother opened my eyes to the special bond between mother and child. Even on days when writing had to be put off until bedtime, I wasn’t bothered because I knew that the bond he and I have built was the inspiration I needed to do justice to these characters.

And speaking of inspiration...I have to give props to my beloved husband. Not only is he a tall, bearded man in a tool belt—just like James—but his knowledge of engines, mechanics and BB guns was invaluable while researching this book, particularly for a certain scene involving a squirrel and a trip to the emergency room for my unfortunate hero.

I hope you enjoy Adrian and James’s story, readers! You can find more about James, Adrian and other characters from previous books in my Fairhope series at amberleighwilliams.com.

Amber Leigh

His Rebel Heart

Amber Leigh Williams

www.millsandboon.co.uk

AMBER LEIGH WILLIAMS lives on the Gulf Coast. A Southern girl at heart, she loves beach days, the smell of real books, relaxing at her family’s lakehouse and spending time with her husband and their sweet blue-eyed boy. When she’s not running after her young son and three large dogs, she can be found reading a good romance or cooking up a new dish. Readers can find her at amberleighwilliams.com!

To my firstborn…. Live always in a world

where dragons fly and fairies dance.

Chase dreams and dragonflies.

Breathe deep and get your hands dirty.

Build wisely and love faithfully.

Listen to stories—and tell a few of your own.

And to Sassy, who we miss….

Dear friend and spirit animal.

Meet you at the Rainbow Bridge.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Dedication

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Extract

Copyright

PROLOGUE

THENIGHT ADRIAN CARLTON first saw James Bracken naked, he was bloodied and bruised. He’d gone several rounds with a bottle of Wild Turkey 101, then crawled behind the wheel of his father’s old Mustang convertible.

The joyride ended abruptly on a backcountry road when the speeding muscle car skated off the pavement, plowed through the entry sign in front of Carlton Nurseries and skinned the side of a giant oak tree before barreling into the glass front of the office building.

From the farmhouse behind the nursery, Adrian had heard the deafening crash and gone running—out the front door and through the rows of her parents’ shrubs and saplings, her bare feet sinking into the damp earth. A light drizzle was falling from the leaden night skies and the humidity had swelled at the onset of rain. By the time she reached the nursery’s office and saw the cherry-red Shelby that had decimated it, sweat was crawling from her neck to her back.

“Oh, my...” She trailed off as she took in the scene. Her hands lifted to her mouth as she shook her head. “What in God’s name...”

She trailed off at the sound of a grunt and tinkling glass. Her feet unstuck and she took several steps forward. Surely no one had survived this carnage.

The grimacing man unfolding himself from the driver’s seat as he struggled to push the car door open suggested otherwise. Swearing under his breath, he grabbed the top of the car for balance. He hissed, lifting his arms away from the glass shards that were littered there, tilting his wrists to the dim light from the street to reveal fresh cuts on the undersides.

“Somabitch,” she heard him mutter, the foul words tripping over each other.

Adrian scoffed. The guy was drunk. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a sneer as she hissed, “You stupid moron! You could have killed someone!”

He started at the sound of her voice. His head turned. Through the blood leaking from a large gash close to his dark hairline and the thin cut below his left eye, recognition struck her. Adrian’s eyes rounded in surprise. “James?” she said, her voice laden with dread. “James Bracken, is that you?”

He stared at her face for a moment, his eyes moving slowly, sluggishly over her features. Then he staggered forward, his mouth warming into a devilish grin. “Adrian.”

As he loped around the trunk of the car, it wasn’t just his towering height and lean, muscled form that struck her. Her heart rapped against her chest. He was bloody. He was bruised. He was grinning like a fool. And he was naked as a jaybird. She took a long step back and swallowed. “James, are you all right?”

He laughed, stumbled a bit. When she dove for him, he pulled himself up to his full height, his blue eyes winking with laughter and not a hint of remorse. She couldn’t be altogether sure that he wasn’t suffering from a concussion or worse, much less that he was completely aware of his surroundings.

He was six feet five inches tall, easy. Her eyes were level with the wooden cross on his sternum that hung from a leather strap. The religious symbol was so at odds with his devil-may-care persona she frowned, extricating her gaze from his fine, muscled form and, more importantly, his naked hips.

She watched his gaze skim from the top of her head to the tips of her bare toes, and she frowned once more when she felt her red-painted toenails tingle under the smoldering assessment.

“Adrian Carlton,” he drawled, swaying a bit. “Damn. Was that an earthquake—or did you just rock my world?”

He was picking her up? Now? For heaven’s sake. She pursed her lips, ready to give him the what-for. “Listen, hot rocks, you can’t just—”

His eyes rolled into the back of his head and his legs folded beneath him. Cursing, she ducked under his shoulder to catch him but he was too tall. Too damn heavy. She shrieked as they both went crashing to earth. The breath whooshed out of her when his naked form landed on top of her in full supine position. She pushed against his shoulder, couldn’t budge him and cursed again.

“Damn you, James Bracken,” she murmured, teeth clenched as she yanked his head back with a fistful of his thick, tousled hair. Jaw slack, eyes closed, he greeted her with a gurgling snore. With a sigh, she dropped his head back to her shoulder and groaned. “You’re going to be more trouble than you’re worth.”

CHAPTER ONE

Eight years later

SPRINGHADGONE to the birds, and Adrian didn’t mind so much that it had. She encouraged them, setting up bird feeders and birdbaths all around the backyard of her Fairhope cottage. With the weather warming into late March, it allowed for her to open the windows of the house and let the spring breeze waft through the screens. The scents of fresh-cut grass, potting soil and early annuals, as well as the sound of birdsong drifted through the cottage with it.

The squirrels, however, thought the bird food was theirs for the taking.

“I don’t think so,” Adrian muttered as she watched one such offender—a big vermin with a beer belly—creep down to a bird feeder from one of the overlarge oak trees surrounding the yard. She stood up from the nook table and, using one of the chairs, grabbed her son’s BB gun from the top of the cabinets where she’d hidden it.

She crouched next to the half door that led out onto her small patio with the pretty terra-cotta tiles she’d laid herself. Leveling the gun on top of the half door, she closed one eye and sighted it. “I see you,” she said, and felt for the trigger.

“Mom!”

Adrian jumped a mile high and shrieked. The sound and movement startled Nutsy the Squirrel and he lit off up the tree, chattering angrily at the spoiled opportunity.

Adrian fought back a curse and stood, raking a hand through her short crop of red hair. “Kyle,” she said in as normal a voice as she could manage.

Kyle narrowed his eyes. They were a wild shade of Scandinavian blue. Right now they were scrutinizing her as they scanned the weapon and her long, white nightgown. “Were you shooting squirrels again?”

Adrian cleared her throat. “I was just going to pop one in the butt. Teach him a lesson.” When Kyle rolled his eyes, she drew her shoulders back, searching for some dignity. “He was stealing birdseed.” Then she waved a dismissive hand. She didn’t have to explain herself, no matter how ridiculous she felt in the face of his seven-year-old derision.

“Mom.” Kyle sighed. “Please stop doing that. It’s embarrassing.”

Adrian raised a brow and felt the corners of her mouth twitch. “Oh, is it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said, and scrubbed the backs of his first two fingers over his mouth. It was an endearing habit he’d had since his toddling years. “What’s for breakfast?”

“There’s some cereal in the pantry,” she told him, and waited until he went inside before crawling back up on the chair and replacing the gun on top of the cabinets, out of his reach. Then she got down, carried the chair back to the table and met him at the refrigerator. “Orange juice?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, and took a seat at the table, pouring Cap’n Crunch into a bowl. Adrian topped the cereal with milk, then fixed him a glass of juice.

“Did you know there’s a moving van next door?” Kyle asked.

Adrian stopped in the midst of pouring herself a second helping of coffee. “What?”

Kyle craned his neck to look out the bay window over the nook table. “Somebody must be moving in.”

The house next door had been for sale for well over six months. The previous owners had left it in a state of complete and utter disarray, so much so that everyone on the street had begun to resent the overgrown property. Adrian leaned over the table, placing a hand on Kyle’s dark, tousled head, and peered across her trim, perfectly kept yard into the next.

The grass of the adjacent property had grown as tall as reeds. The mailbox was hanging loose on its stand, the driveway was cracked and mottled and the detached garage was even beginning to fall in. The roof of the house was carpeted in dead leaves and strewn with naked oak branches. The screen door of the front porch had been torn. Adrian was surprised to see the For Sale sign gone and an oversize moving truck parked at the curb, butted up against a sleek, black sportster.

“Somebody finally bought it,” Adrian muttered with an unbelieving shake of her head. “I thought they were gonna have to tear it down, the state it’s in.”

“Maybe they’ve got kids,” Kyle said, eyes widening at the possibility. He watched more closely, nose nearly pressed to the glass now, as the movers milled from truck to house with boxes of varying sizes. “Do you see any toys, Mom?”

Adrian, too, watched for a moment, then frowned, dropping back to her heels and straightening. She wondered how many other neighbors were rubbernecking this morning to get a gander at the street’s newest addition. And while, for the most part, rubbernecking was a harmless sport, Adrian knew all too well what it felt like to be the victim of it. “Eat your breakfast,” she said with a pat on Kyle’s shoulder.

“It’d be really cool if there was a guy my age moving in.” Kyle considered as he pushed his cereal around with his spoon, no longer paying Cap’n Crunch much mind. “Then Blaze and I can play two-on-two when Gavin visits in a few weeks.”

“What if they have a girl?” Adrian asked coyly, glancing sideways from the counter just in time to see Kyle wrinkle his nose.

The kid positively moped at the idea. “I guess that would be all right, too.”

Adrian chuckled. Kyle was firmly entrenched in the cootie phase. “It wouldn’t be so bad. You like Harmony, don’t you?”

“Harmony’s a baby,” Kyle told her, referring to their family friends the Savitts’ little girl. “Real girls are mean.”

Adrian hid a snort in her coffee. “Just concentrate on eating. We’ve got to get you to school, mister.”

“Hey, maybe we could send them something to eat,” Kyle suggested, still gazing out at the movers.

“Something to eat?” she asked, brow creased.

“Yeah. Like how we sent the Millers one of Briar’s pies when they moved in. Blaze said it was real good. That’s how we got to be such good friends.”

Adrian smiled as she watched her son’s mind work. With a small business to run and being a single parent, her days were so full she had hardly a moment to stop and breathe. But sometimes when she looked at Kyle her heart ached with how much she loved him and at how fast he had grown. “Good idea. I’ll talk to Briar this afternoon.”

Kyle finally turned his head and grinned at her. In the light spilling in from the open windows around the room, those wild blue eyes shone like stars and the dark freckles across his nose contrasted with his cheeks. “Thanks, Mom.”

She walked to him and touched a kiss to his brow, brushing back the dark hair that was growing over his forehead at a rapid rate. “Take your bowl to the sink. Then get dressed quickly. You don’t want to be late.”

As Kyle slipped by her, Adrian stole one last glance at the house next door. The movers were hauling in what looked like weights and power tools. She frowned at the license plate of the sportster. Out of state, from the looks of it. Though the tall grass was obscuring her view.

She just hoped whoever was moving in got the old eyesore looking somewhat decent again. How they would manage it all, she had no idea.

Only an idiot would buy a house that run-down. Or somebody with some serious ambition. Hoping for the latter, she turned from the windows and went to help Kyle get ready for the day.

* * *

JAMES BRACKENFROWNEDat the cards in his hand. Pocket jacks. He’d always had a knack for knowing what cards were going to show up on the table as well as for reading the people who challenged him to Texas Hold ’Em. Those fine-tuned senses told him that despite the nice, round pile of poker chips between them, his opponent, a scrawny man in a near-to-threadbare work shirt torn at the shoulder, was bluffing.

Scanning the man closely, James wondered when the last time the mover had had a good steak dinner. Not the lean kind of steak. A big, juicy, porterhouse number with fat trimming the edges. He couldn’t have been older than thirty but judging by the deep furrows in his brow and his receding hairline, things like luck and plenty had never been on his side.

After leaving home just shy of eighteen, James had found that the former came far more easily to him than most. For eight years, it had brought him a great deal of the latter. Which was why when the dealer, another mover, this one heavyset around the middle and sweating like a pig in the unaired rooms of James’s new house, flicked the river card onto the table, James took pity on his less fortunate opponent.

Ignoring those smiling pocket jacks, he dropped them facedown onto the siding board laid across two sawhorses to make a makeshift poker table and cursed under his breath. “Nothin’,” he muttered as hope lit in his opponent’s eyes. Reaching for the bottle of water that was sweating as much as their dealer, James lifted a shoulder and leaned back in one of the creaky beach chairs he’d found folded against the wall of the sorry excuse for a two-car garage. “Goddamn, Ripley. The cards love you.”

The dealer—Denning was his name, as James had gathered over the course of the busy morning—barked out a knowing laugh. “Bull. Nothing’s ever loved Ripley. Least of all Texas Hold ’Em.” He reached over to slap Ripley on the shoulder. “Ain’t that right, son?”

Ripley was still blinking in disbelief at the poker chips. He’d gone all-in before he realized he was drawing dead. Carefully setting his cards down, he splayed them on the table and looked up at James. “Denning’s right. I was bluffing the whole time.”

James stared down at the two and the eight. Just as he’d thought. “Hell of a poker face you got there.” It was a lie. James had spotted Ripley’s tell half an hour ago when the lower lid of his left eye twitched after the man wound up with trip nines. It had been his one well-played hand of the game. Ignoring Denning’s answering snort, James pushed the chip pile toward Ripley. “Go on. Count your spoils. I need some air.”

Ripley’s hand paused before it reached for the pot. “You’re gonna finish the game, right?”

James hid a smile by turning to the long line of windows and sliding doors that led out onto the wide deck. This was the reason he’d bought the house. Something about all that glass—smudged and dirty as all get-out at the moment—and that yawning view of the sunbaked deck and the pool and yard beyond it had called to him.

James had always been a sucker for a lost cause. The fact that he’d snatched up this dilapidated house only a short walk from Mobile Bay where he’d grown up was indisputable proof of that. “Sure, I’ll finish the game—after we’ve got all the furniture in.” As nice as the companionship he’d found in Ripley, Denning and the other movers was, James was eager to get a move on—to get started making things right here in Fairhope where he’d left his past and all the ghosts that had chased him away.

The past that had haunted him for eight long years. The past that he’d realized he was desperate to finally make right.

A knock on the door echoed from the entryway and James smoothed over the scowl he saw reflected in the dirty window. Turning back to the others, he said, “That’ll be the pizza. Let’s eat, boys.”

* * *

THEPIEWASCHERRY and it was still warm. With Kyle’s hope for a new neighborhood friend in mind, Adrian had procured it during that morning’s visit to Hanna’s Inn where her friend, innkeeper and adept cook and baker, Briar Savitt, lived and worked alongside her husband, Cole. It wasn’t out of Adrian’s way at all. She owned Flora, the flower shop on the street side of the building next door to Hanna’s, a building that also housed their mutual friend Roxie Levy’s bridal boutique, Belle Brides, and Briar’s cousin and Adrian’s high school friend, Olivia Leighton’s bar, Tavern of the Graces, on the bay side.

As luck would have it the midday lull at the flower shop allowed Adrian to slip back to her cottage a few blocks away. Kyle would need his soccer gear for his practice that afternoon anyway, so she’d be saving herself a trip later if she left her assistant, Penny, in charge of the shop and picked up the duffel bag now, in addition to dropping off the pie.

The day was downright gorgeous—it made the gloom of winter feel far away. As Adrian walked from Flora down the sidewalk along the bay toward home, she watched sunlight kiss the water’s small crests with golden light. The breeze lifted the bangs off her brow. Over the delicious aroma of cherry pie were strong currents of salt and magnolia leaves. Without sunglasses, she had to squint to see the shadow of silver spires and cranes on the western horizon that marked the opposite shore and the port city of Mobile.

She turned onto the street where she had lived since she left her ex-husband in a hurry years ago while Kyle was still a toddler. The trees on either side of the street grew thickly, merging overhead. Shade gathered around her, sunlight choked out by leaves and heavy waves of Spanish moss. She climbed the hill to the cottage, waving to the few neighbors who were out and about.

She hoped her son didn’t have too many memories of those disastrous years she’d spent with Radley Kennard. The man’s presence still lurked like a towering wraith at the edge of her consciousness. Run-ins with him had been fewer and farther between as the years passed, mostly thanks to the restraining order she’d filed against him and the fact that her friend Olivia and her husband, Gerald, had given him a non-too-friendly warning the last time Radley had come calling months ago.

Nevertheless, Adrian never forgot he was around. She’d spent many sleepless nights worrying he might show up, drunk and pounding at her door again. Or that he might realize the one thing that would be most devastating to her—losing Kyle.

Adrian shuddered and was thankful when she broke into a patch of warm sunlight again. Dodging around the big moving van and the sportster at the house next door, she slowed. Checking that no one was around, she did a quick perusal of the vehicle. North Carolina plates. As she rounded the car, she caught sight of a Van Halen CD in the passenger seat.

No sign of a car seat, toys, or anything that would denote the presence of children. It looked as if Kyle was going to be disappointed. The sportster was the only vehicle in sight—not exactly a parent-minded mode of transportation. In fact, it was the kind of car she would attribute to a single man. One more than likely going through a midlife crisis.

Add in the Van Halen CD and there wasn’t much hope for anything else.

Adrian found herself stopping in front of the run-down house just on the cusp of its overgrown yard, frowning. What kind of a midlife crisis called for a ramshackle house that looked to be far more trouble than the slashed real estate price could possibly have made it worth?

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.

Every so often, Kyle would ask a question about his father...questions Adrian didn’t know how to answer. Even though she’d remained ambiguous through the years, she knew that Kyle’s curiosity about his paternal heritage was a barely contained bud she didn’t have the heart to suppress completely.

Olivia trailed Adrian from the office into the hall as she headed for the back door that led out onto the inn’s lawn behind her greenhouse. “What’re you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Adrian said wearily. Damn it, she had enough to worry about on a day-to-day basis without a dilemma this size obstructing life in general. “I’ll...think of something. I have to.” She stopped, propping the door open with her shoulder and knee as she glanced back. She noted the way Olivia was leaning against the wall, the bags under her eyes. “Is Gerald home?”

“Yeah, writing. Why?”

“You should go. Have him take care of you. Seriously. You look like shit.”

Olivia frowned over the sentiment. “So long as we’re being honest...does it strike you as coincidence that James is moving in next door to you?”

“What do you mean?”

Olivia lifted a shoulder. “Maybe he already knows what you don’t want him to know. Maybe he’s trying to edge his way back into your life—to be a dad, a man. Not the screwup he was eight years ago.”

Adrian pressed her lips inward, rubbing them together as she thought back to their abrupt reunion. James had seemed as surprised to see her as she was him. Though, could Olivia be right? Did James know something about Kyle already? The thought made Adrian’s heart race like something preyed upon.

There was no way anyone was going to get to Kyle. There was no way anyone was edging their way into her life and taking her son from her.

Adrian raised her chin. “If that is the case, then he can kiss his chances goodbye. It’d take a heck of a lot more than a new house to convince me that James Bracken has become an honest man, much less daddy material.”

CHAPTER THREE

ADRIAN CARLTON. UNBELIEVABLE.

After the movers left him alone with the boxes and furniture, James went over to the little cottage next door. It was a charming yellow clapboard house with a well-tended yard and picket fence. He knocked on the red-painted door a few times, then returned home, disappointed, when no one answered.

She must have gotten home late that night. He hadn’t seen or heard a car pull in. And she must have left early the next morning, too, because after he rose, showered and had what he could find for breakfast in the nearly empty pantry, he’d gone over again to knock. No answer.

Put off by the fact that she had evaded him again, James got in his sportster and drove into town. The garage on Section Street was another work in progress. Still, it was in better shape than the house. It was an old service station in desperate need of a paint job and some TLC. James had wanted it from the moment he heard it was for sale.

He’d already had several of his old cars brought down from North Carolina, some favorites he had collected over the years of good fortune. He pulled in next to the cherry-red Shelby he had bought to replace the one his father owned—the one James had plowed hood first into the office of Carlton Nurseries. As he got out of the sportster and walked around the Shelby, his hand automatically reached out to graze the restored hood. He veered around the tow truck the previous garage owner had generously left him and, digging the keys from the pocket of his worn jeans, rounded the front of the building.

Bending over, he unlocked the latch at the bottom of the steel door and, grabbing it from the bottom, shoved it up over his head. The door rolled up and bright morning sunlight spilled into the garage, revealing the automotive and mechanic’s tools James had already started to arrange around the room. Taking off his sunglasses, he moved past rolling toolboxes, a couple of jacks, the electric car lift he’d recently spent a weekend installing and even a rough-hewn table covered in wrenches, wipe rags and the Corvette engine he had finally finished restoring after starting the project with his father in his early teens.

James had kept the engine around for luck, mostly. Over the years, it had served him well. He would need that luck to get his fledgling small business off the ground. And it also reminded him of why he had bought the run-down garage in the first place. Back in those early, simple days of adolescence when Zachariah Bracken had still been alive, father and son had talked about opening a garage together when James grew up.

His father might have given up alcoholism and tinkering with boats and automobiles to devote his life to God and join the ministry. James, however, had held on to that dream, and it had never really left him. Not even after his father passed away and James buried himself in seedy, reprehensible pursuits to get away from that reality.

His father was long gone. And those shady years after had left their mark. But James still had a love for cars and all things automotive. His passion and knack for mechanics had served him as well as the lucky Corvette engine through the years. He was to the point in his life where he didn’t need money or cars anymore—he had plenty of both. What he needed now was closure. Peace. He had a good sense that launching Bracken Mechanics in Fairhope, the place he began, would be a big step in that direction.

As he set the duffel he’d brought from the house on the work counter beside the dusty screen of his service computer, James caught himself scrubbing a hand over his sternum and the wooden cross that hung beneath his black T-shirt. A tinge of regret flared to life in his chest. He’d been meaning to visit his father’s grave since his return. He hadn’t yet found a moment to do it. Maybe some part of him was avoiding the painful errand. He hadn’t even ventured into the cemetery since the funeral—the funeral he hadn’t been man enough to sit all the way through...

He would do it, he thought, squaring his jaw. He just needed a bit more time.

Ghosts. The memory of Zach Bracken was just one of those lurking around Fairhope. His mother still lived here, though he hadn’t summoned the gall to show up at his old childhood home. There were too many hurts to make up for between the two of them, and he needed to mull a little longer on how best to approach that situation. Anyway, James had found yet another ghost staring him in the face yesterday afternoon in the form of Adrian Carlton.

No, he hadn’t been able to forget Adrian. The memory of their summer together was burned into his mind, into his skin. She looked a good deal different, undoubtedly a woman now. She’d cropped her hair short. Eight years ago, it had hung down her back. He remembered how he’d wrapped it in his hands, a thick, red silk rope.

The short hair suited her. It left the fascinating angles of her face to answer for themselves. And answer they did. It made her eyes look bigger, deeper—saucers of dark chocolate. That was exactly what he had thought the first time he’d lost himself in them.

As a seventeen-year-old, Adrian had been built like a waif. Not too thin but with more angles than curves. As James watched her retreat from him yesterday in puzzlement, his eyes had latched onto the line of her hips, more rounded now in womanhood. He’d wanted nothing more than to chase after her, place his hands on either side of her waist and soothe the stark, white panic he’d seen on her face.

Clearly, he hadn’t left things well between them, but James had known that before he encountered her on his front porch. The thought of Adrian had troubled him deeply as he skipped town all those years ago. It didn’t matter that he’d been doing the right thing at the time. The right thing for her, at least. But he couldn’t understand the sheer level of terror that confronting him again had obviously caused her. Anger would have been a great deal more justified and characteristic of the Adrian he’d known. But fear? James couldn’t make sense of that.

He needed to make sure she was okay. Hell, he needed to know how life had treated her. When he decided coming back to Fairhope was the right decision, he’d thought of her, of course. Though he’d figured there was little chance she’d still be living here. Fairhope had seemed far too small a town for both of their wild teenage selves. As they grew to know each other over the course of that summer, one of the commonalities that had struck a fast bond between them was the mutual desire to one day put as much distance as possible between their hometown—and the people in it—and themselves.

Thinking about the firebrand version of Adrian he’d known back then, James caught himself smiling. He scraped the back of his middle and index fingers over his mouth to chase it away and turned at the sound of an approaching vehicle.

Sunshine shot off the black hood of the car. James squinted as the light beamed into his eyes, raising a hand to his brow to shield them as he watched the 1969 Camaro Z28 with white racing stripes pull into the parking lot. He let out a low whistle. “Nice car,” he called as he walked from the garage to greet the man who unfolded himself from the driver’s seat.

“Thanks.” The visitor appeared to be in his midthirties with dark hair growing over the collar of his black business suit. As he approached James, he stood tall and straight. “That’s a nice Shelby GT350 over there. You wouldn’t by any chance mind a stranger taking her off your hands, would you?”

James cracked a smile. He looked over at the Shelby, reaching back to scratch his neck. “Sorry. She’s got sentimental value.”

“That’s a damn shame.” The man offered a hand and shook James’s in a firm grip. “Byron Strong. I heard someone bought ol’ Cy Witmore’s place and had to come by to see for myself.”

“James Bracken,” James greeted him. “I take it you were one of Witmore’s customers?”

“Since I moved over from Mobile several years ago.” Byron nodded. “Every once in a while, he’d let me help out around the place. Not that I’m a certified mechanic or anything.”

“No kidding,” James said. “My dad and I used to come up here when I was a kid and hang out with Witmore. But this was back when he kept glass bottles of Coca-Cola to sell to his customers and his old coon dog, Scout, was still loping around after him. You lookin’ for a job? I could use a tow truck driver.”

Byron lifted a shoulder. “My day job keeps me busy enough. I’m an accountant. The other reason I came by is because my sister, Priscilla Grimsby, is a reporter for the local newspaper. She has a business column. I thought you’d like to get in touch with her, see what kind of publicity the two of you can generate for this place. I’d sure like to see it do well again.”

James took the business card with Byron’s sister’s name and number on it. “I appreciate it.” He scanned Byron’s face. “You play any poker, Byron?”

A smile wore into the corners of Byron’s mouth as he relaxed his stance and crossed his arms over his chest. “When the occasion strikes.”

“I just got back into town,” James admitted. “When I get settled in, we should get a game together so that I can repay you for this...” he lifted the card, then gestured to the Camaro “...and for letting me take a peek under your hood.”

Byron considered for a moment before his smile widened. “Sounds fair.”

Byron even went a step further and let James fire the Camaro up. He revved the Z28 and listened to the ponies work, impressed. The two of them drooled over the engine for a while. Byron obviously knew his way around one. It was no wonder ol’ Witmore had let him hang around occasionally.

It wasn’t until Byron closed the hood and stepped back toward the open driver’s door of the Camaro that he said, “There’s already some talk about you in town, you know.”

“Huh.” James could imagine what residents were saying about him. Eventually talk would lead back to those ghosts of his who still lived and thrived. Not just Adrian, but also his mother. His stepfather. James fought off the shadow that thoughts of his relatives brought about. “Word of mouth’s as good promotion as any.”

“True,” Byron acknowledged. “Word is you were the town riot back in the day.”

“I’ll go out on a limb and say that everything you’ve heard is true.”

Byron leaned against the driver’s door and raised a brow. “Even the joyriding?”

“Maybe. Why?”

Byron grinned. “I’m just wondering if I need to be worried about my ride here.”

James laughed despite himself. “If I’m gonna take your Camaro, Strong, it’ll be in a hand of poker, along with most of your earnings.”

Byron chuckled. “For what’s it worth, welcome back to town. And call the number on the card. Let Priscilla fix you up.” He gazed over the hood of his car at the garage. “This place deserves a second chance.”

James stood back as Byron folded himself back into the driver’s seat of the Chevy.

“Anything else I can do, you’ll let me know,” Byron asserted, rolling down the driver’s window.

James frowned. “Actually...how long did you say you’ve been here?”

“In Fairhope?” Byron reached up to scratch his forehead. “Going on three years.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know the Carltons?” James ventured.

Byron thought for a moment. “You mean Van and Edith?”

James’s pulse jerked at the mention of Adrian’s parents. “That’s them. More to the point, it’s their daughter I’m wondering about.”

“Adrian,” Byron said and nodded. “Yeah. I know her. Pretty well, as a matter of fact.”

With a frown, James wondered what the man meant by pretty well. He cleared his throat. “I just moved in next door to her. Do you know where she works?”

“Oh, yeah,” Byron said. “She owns that little flower shop on the bay, a few blocks from where she lives. Next to Hanna’s Inn. You know it?”

Years ago the proprietor of Hanna’s Inn, Hanna Browning, had been close friends with James’s mother. “I do. So Adrian’s a florist now?”

“A good one, too,” Byron said. “She does damn good business, anyway. The apple didn’t fall too far from the tree as far as business interests go. Though I’d never say so to her face.” When James only frowned at him, Byron explained, “I do the books for Carlton Nurseries so I’ve come to know the Carltons pretty well. Adrian and Edith don’t exactly see eye to eye.”

“They never did,” James muttered.

“She’s a prickly one. Edith,” Byron added. “I’m assuming you and Adrian went to school together.”

James thought about that, brows coming together. “We knew each other,” he admitted.

Byron watched James chew over the words for a moment. “Well, give her my regards. It’s been a while.”

“I’ll do that,” James agreed. If she’ll let me. He shut Byron’s door for him as he cranked the Camaro and the engine’s horses purred to life. Through the open window, James said, “Thanks for stopping by.”

Byron slipped his sunglasses into place and gave James a salute. “See you around.”

* * *

“ADRIAN?”

“Back here,” Adrian called from the cooler as she moved several wedding and funeral arrangements around to make room for today’s pièce de résistance—a bouquet ordered by one of the local churches for the altar on Easter Sunday.

Penny peered around the jamb of the open steel door. “Hey, you got a minute?”

“Yeah,” Adrian said with a grunt as she hefted the large vase onto the second shelf at the back of the cooler. Wiping her hands on the front of her apron, she turned to her shop assistant with raised brows. “What’s up?”

Penny pressed her lips inward as if hiding a smile. Her eyes were a tad overbright. She was nineteen and friendly with customers—the attractive men in particular. Adrian knew by the look on Penny’s face that she’d recently encountered one such appealing male specimen.

“There’s a man here to see you,” Penny answered, confirming Adrian’s suspicions.

“What kind of man?” Adrian asked. Then she paused, frowning as her heart rapped hard against her ribs. “Wait,” she said, holding her hands up before Penny could explain. “Does he have a beard?”

“Mmm-hmm,” Penny said. “And tattoos all down his arm. Very James Dean.”

Adrian shook her head. “James Dean didn’t have tattoos, Penny,” she muttered in automatic response. “Or facial hair.”

“I meant he has that vibe,” Penny said. She opened her mouth, then stopped and stared at Adrian as the latter began to scrub her hands over her face. “What’s wrong?” Penny’s face fell. “Oh, my God. Is he Radley, your ex? Should I call the police—or Mr. Savitt?”

“No,” Adrian said carefully. “He’s not Radley. And there’s no need for the police or Cole.” She took a deep breath, hoping it would calm her—or at least make her legs stop quaking. “I’ve got this.”

“Are you sure?” Penny asked doubtfully.

Adrian rolled her eyes as Penny’s voice mirrored all the uncertain voices in her head. She shouldered past the shop assistant into the prep room of Flora. “Tell him to come on back. Then you can go home.”

“All right,” Penny said hesitantly. “You’re sure you don’t need me?”

“Just do it, please,” Adrian told her. When Penny returned to the front of the shop, Adrian ran her fingers through her hair, feeling frazzled already. She planted her hands on her hips when she heard heavy footsteps coming toward her and turned to face James as he entered.

By God. With his height and massive shoulders, he filled the room. Hell, he filled the air, stealing it from her. Her alarm and resentment for him rose by twin notches. Crossing her arms over her chest in a shielding stance, she jerked her chin high and met his gaze with a cold look. “James.”

He stopped just inside the door, not even bothering to glance around. Those blue eyes latched onto her and seized. “Adrian,” he said, his tone a great deal softer and gentler than hers.

There was kindness behind those eyes. And longing. Adrian blinked, frowned and forced herself not to look away. Instead, she scanned his features. She’d always thought he had the face of a Roman warrior—manhood had affirmed that. The bones of his face were long and broad. Beneath his beard, his jaw was perfectly etched. Someone could break a knuckle or two against that jawline and probably already had. The rise and hollows of his cheeks were artfully hewn.

There were three buttons at the top of his black T-shirt and, damn it, every single one was open, giving her a better look at the tattoos underneath. The one most visible was a bit faded, but she could still clearly see a black and red nautical star. Fitting. He’d spent a great deal of his childhood on the water. His father had been a boat captain at one point before becoming a preacher. James had inherited Zachariah Bracken’s recreational daysailer after he passed away.

Just below his collarbone was more ink, Latin letters. She couldn’t make out what they said. Neither could she discern what shape the darker ink below took. It was lost under the cotton and what looked to be a thick growth of chest hair.

Adrian took a gulp of air and hated when it trembled out on an exhale. “What are you doing here?”

One of James’s dark brows arched, but his eyes lost none of their softness nor, unfortunately, did they stray from hers. “I guess I figured we should talk.”

“About?” Adrian prompted, trying not to sound defensive and failing miserably.

“About how we left things yesterday...or how you left things yesterday,” James told her. “I need to know that you’re okay.”

“You want to talk about how I left things yesterday,” Adrian repeated, incredulity honing the words to a fine point. She felt anger brewing and latched onto it like a lifeline. “That’s all you came here for?”

“Yeah,” James said with a small nod. “And to make sure you’re okay.”

“Huh,” Adrian said, punching the word out as she walked to the other side of her prep counter. With the raised surface between them, she felt better. Half to herself, she muttered, “I haven’t seen or heard from the man in eight years and he’s as blind and self-centered as ever.”

“Excuse me?”

“You, James Bracken,” she said, turning to face him and slowing the explanation to mocking speed, “are a self-centered jackass.”

James stared at her for a shocked moment, jaw slackened. Then his features shifted into an unexpected and equally devastating smile. He took a step toward her, then another. “And you, Adrian Carlton, are the same crazy, beautiful firebrand.”

When he continued advancing on her, Adrian found herself retreating backward. Damn it, this was her turf. “Stop flattering me, for God’s sake,” she said, flustered. “I’m trying to insult you.”

James chuckled. The deep, rich laughter flowed over her like warm waves. Her heart trembled. “Christ, I’ve missed you.”

“No,” she said, as she found herself backed into a corner, his big, rangy body closing in on hers. His friendly gaze locked her into place, cutting off all means of escape. Raising her hands, she planted them on his chest and pushed against the hot, strong line of his torso. “Stop, James. You have to stop.” Panic closed up her throat and she could breathe no longer. “Please.” Damn it, she hadn’t meant to beg. But there it was. Please. That weak, useless word she’d grown to hate over her years with Radley.

James’s body stiffened and his smile dropped away. He frowned, scanning her face. When he spoke, his words were low, surprised. “You’re afraid of me.”

Adrian swallowed, unable to deny it with her voice trapped at the back of her throat. Her heart banged away at her ribs like a wild, caged thing. She stared at those Latin letters on his collarbone, very aware of the rise and fall of his chest as the moment between them stretched, the silence deep. Don’t let him see.

James’s hand lifted and she braced not for a blow but a touch she knew would be just as crippling. She drew back against the wall, every muscle in her body tightening. The rough pad of his thumb grazed the knob of her chin just below her lips before his fingers spread and cupped her cheek.

Adrian closed her eyes to keep from looking at his face and all the things she might see there. Possibility. Light.

Nope, she refused to look at him and let her heart leap at him in the reckless, kamikaze way it had all those years ago.

His words were low again but edged in need that made her bite the inside of her lip. “The past eight years have been a crazy blur,” he began. “I’ve had some amazing highs and some pretty terrible lows. There’s been triumph and pain, light and shade. But no matter where I was, or what was going on around me, sometimes I would close my eyes and, in my mind, quiet would take over. For a moment, everything around me would be still and I could breathe. I could think. And then you’d be there. I’d see your face in front of me as clear as it was the last time I saw it. And there with you in the calm, I’d feel at peace again.”

Adrian opened her eyes as her lips parted. She gaped up at him and the emotions clashing in his eyes. She had expected pretty, empty words of apology from him. But this was a surprise—and the only thing that could have shattered her defenses. Suddenly, they were standing together and he looked as vulnerable as she felt.

She scanned his face, unable to look elsewhere. His expression, his eyes, all the silent words he communicated to her...they were like an eclipse—too dangerous to look at without some sort of shield but too irresistible not to. Adrian firmed her mouth in a tight line before she whispered, “You can’t...” Faltering, she reached up, took his hand, dropped it away and tried to form words again. “You can’t just come back into my life, say all the right things and expect me to fall at your feet again.”

A flicker of mirth crossed James’s face. A corner of his mouth twitched. “Well, the last time you didn’t exactly fall at my feet. Women like you, Adrian, don’t fall.” He moved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “You’re much more resourceful and purposeful than that.”

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.”

Adrian pursed her lips. Briar would know all about grief, as her mother, Hanna, had died of cancer when Briar was fresh out of cooking school. “Be that as it may. It’s been eight years since he left. Longer since his father died. He’s a grown-ass man and I’d be a moron to buy that as an excuse for his behavior anymore. And besides, he didn’t leave me in the lurch because he was grieving.”

“I know,” Briar acknowledged. “I’m not trying to make excuses for him. And I do agree that caution is your best plan of action as far as he’s concerned—particularly for Kyle’s sake. However, I have a hard time believing he’d come back to Fairhope unless he really did think he had something to prove, something to fix. It takes a great deal of courage to come back or to redeem yourself. Especially in a place where you experienced or were the cause of as much upheaval as he was eight years ago.”

Adrian shook her head. “I don’t have it in me to feel sorry for him. I spent two months as his coping mechanism because his arrest cut off his other means of dealing with his problems, those of the substance variety. It took me a long time to accept the fact that that’s all I was to him.”

Briar frowned, glancing toward the living room where they could both see the baby crawling haltingly across the rug, encouraged by the dark-haired man and the enthusiastic boy. She sighed and lowered her voice. “That’s justifiable. But after seeing Cole cut off from his son the way he was for so long, knowing what it did to him...I’m sorry, I have a hard time agreeing that you shouldn’t at least let James try to earn a place in Kyle’s life, even just a small one.”

“This is different,” Adrian told her. “Cole didn’t deserve to be apart from Gavin the way he was. Nothing in James’s past tells me that I should trust him.”

Briar took a sip of tea and added, “So what are you going to do? You aren’t really going to send Kyle to The Farm to live with your parents, are you?”

“No,” Adrian agreed.

“You can’t keep them from seeing each other,” Briar pointed out.

“I realize that,” Adrian said darkly. “And I’ll deal with that, too. Even if I have to set up an electric fence on the property line to zap James if he gets within five feet.” She felt too tired now to contemplate that particular quandary. “Is Liv still sick?”

“She was here this morning,” Briar said. A small smile pulled at her mouth. “Asking about ginger. For nausea.”

“So she is still sick.”

“Yes, but...” Briar let out a laugh as she set down her mug with a clack. “Come on, Adrian. You and I have both been there. The first trimester is hardly a walk in the park.”

“First tri...” The words trailed off as Adrian finally put the pieces together. She gasped and sat up straighter. “No! Olivia’s pregnant? I can’t believe this.”

“Neither can she, bless her heart,” Briar admitted. “But she and Gerald are married. They’re happy. They just bought all of her grandmother’s land in Silverhill. It’s not like they don’t have the room, the heart or the capacity for a baby...”

“Sure,” Adrian said. “But it’s Liv.” She shook her head when Briar raised a brow. “I guess I just never thought of her as a mother. Especially not so soon.”

Briar tilted her head. “Did you think of yourself as one?”

Adrian blew out a breath. “No. Not until I was.” Glancing toward the living room again, she felt the knots in her shoulders loosen. “Not until I felt the first flutters, those first kicks. And then not completely until I held him the first time, until he looked at me...”

Briar smiled warmly. “And look at you now. The best mother any little boy could ask for.”

“Thanks for that.” She’d needed the vote of confidence, Adrian realized.

“Bring Kyle for breakfast tomorrow,” Briar said. “There will be quiche and beignets. Olivia and Gerald will be here, as well. You can avoid James for a bit longer and we can tell Liv she has another shoulder to lean on.”

Adrian nodded. The promise of breakfast at Hanna’s surrounded by friends who were as close as family cheered her immensely. “We’ll be here.”

“Hey, ladies!” Cole called from the living room. “Come see this.”

Briar and Adrian walked into the living room in time to see Harmony standing on chubby bowlegs, her tiny hands clasped tightly in Kyle’s. The boy’s eyes were wide and bright on hers as he called out words of encouragement. Cole, grinning like a fiend, hovered close at Harmony’s back. When she took a halting step toward Kyle with little assistance, Briar shrieked and clapped her hands.

Cole looked to her and they exchanged proud, bittersweet smiles before his eyes found Adrian’s. “She did it for Kyle.”

They made a picture, the two giggling children. Adrian’s heart gave a little squeeze.

“She loves him,” Briar said when her daughter held her arms up insistently for Kyle and he obliged by picking her up with a “Hoorah!” for her efforts. “Every time she sees Kyle, she lights up. And no wonder. He’ll be a bona fide heartbreaker before long.”

“I know,” Adrian muttered sadly. “What the heck am I going to do?”

“I’m still trying to get over the fact that my baby’s eating solid foods,” Briar said woefully. “I can’t imagine her growing up, dating, getting married...”

“Liv’s right. Denial works wonders sometimes,” Adrian told her. “I’ll be sticking to it.”

Cole walked to her, the proud papa smile not quite worn off. “Everything all right?” he asked, seeming to read past the nostalgic gleam to Adrian’s troubles.

Adrian patted him on the arm. He was a damn good man. It hadn’t taken long for her to grow to love him, too. “Nothing a trip to Olivia’s tavern won’t cure.”

His expression sobered as he narrowed his eyes on her face, a glimmer of doubt flickering in his dark eyes. “What do you say we all meet there tomorrow night? Liv mentioned it’s Monica’s night off, so Briar’s helping out behind the bar and her dad’s coming by to spend a few hours with Harmony.” He wrapped an arm around his wife’s shoulders, bringing her in close to his side. “I know we could both use a night out.”

Adrian could, too. “I’ll talk to my parents, see if one or both of them can watch Kyle for a few hours. Anyway, it’s getting late. I know you’ve got to put Harmony down for the night and bedtime is fast approaching for her knight in shining armor, too.”

“I’ll walk you out,” Cole offered. He followed them to the door of the inn. When Kyle bounded ahead down the front steps of the porch, Cole grabbed Adrian’s arm. “You sure you’re okay?”

She hitched the strap of her purse higher on her shoulder, avoiding his gaze. The man could spot turmoil from a mile away. Probably because he’d been through the worst of it. Adrian had a fair sense that if she told him not just what was bothering her but who, he’d go storming off to take care of her business for her. “I’m fine, Cole. I promise.”

Unconvinced, he searched her face. “You know if you need anything...”

“I know,” she said with a small smile and patted his hand. “Good night.”

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCENTRATINGONANYTHINGbut his son proved to be problematic for James, even with the grand opening of Bracken Mechanics right around the corner. The morning following the bombshell at Flora, James met Priscilla Grimsby at the offices of the local newspaper to talk about Fairhope’s newest business venture.

Fortunately, the reporter skimmed the more sordid details of his past, even after she learned that he had been born and raised there. Though she did seem interested in the fact that his father had once been the town preacher.

James frowned as he drove back to the garage, wondering just how many of those gritty details about his past would end up in Priscilla’s business column. Like her brother, Byron, she’d seemed quite interested in generating as much positive press as possible for Bracken Mechanics. He hoped for the best and put it out of his mind.

The latter part proved easier than the first with Adrian and the blue-eyed child they had made together lurking at the forefront. He hadn’t the first clue how to prove to Adrian that he could be a good father, much less that he deserved her respect and trust.

Regret was a barb he’d come to know all too well—regret over his father’s death, over how badly he had let things get between him and his father before the accident, over how far James had gone to avoid the resulting grief and loss...

However, none of it compared to the regret he felt now knowing that Adrian had had to raise their son alone while also dealing with the heartbreak and humiliation she’d spoken of the day before. She’d faced it all on her own. Suddenly, his leaving looked an awful lot less like doing what was right and a lot more like the coward’s way out...

Hell, if only he had known. Things could have been different. He would have made things different.

His thoughts circled and spiraled, then circled again until the sun was hanging low in the west and he’d done all he could at the garage for the day. Scowling, he took one last look around. It was coming together, no mistake. Still, there were things that needed to be done, including hiring a couple of guys to help out. A fellow mechanic. A tow truck driver. Maybe somebody to man the phone and handle administrative tasks.

As he locked the doors and pulled the grate over them, a mud-caked Dodge pulled into the parking lot and parked next to the tow truck. James noted the gun rack in the truck bed and the two nuts hanging by a silver chain loop off the back exhaust pipe. He crossed his arms as the driver door opened and a familiar figure jumped to the ground from the raised cab. James scanned the faded jeans, the plaid shirt and the red-bearded face and shook his head. “I’ll be damned,” he said as a smile stretched across the man’s mouth.

Dustin Harbuck took off his sunglasses as he approached James in dirty work boots. “Jim Bracken,” he greeted James. Dustin wore a battered camouflage baseball cap with a shiny, silver fishing hook clipped onto the front of the bill. Stretching out a large hand, he pumped James’s fist. “Been gone long enough, brother?”

They weren’t brothers. In fact, they’d only been friends for a brief stretch of time. All the Harbuck boys were more than a little rough around the edges and daredevils to boot. A few of them had even served time behind bars, but over the months between the fateful wreck that had changed James’s life and his departure from Fairhope, James had grown to rely on Dusty and his bad influence to cope with life as it was then. Through their shared antics, they had grown as close as two small-town rebels could.

In fact, it was Dusty James had gone to at the end of that fateful summer. Dusty hadn’t hesitated to give James enough money to get him as far away from Fairhope as he could manage on a limited budget. He hadn’t asked questions, either.

James looked at Dusty and saw the first friendly face of all those ghosts he had left behind. Without a word, he embraced him hard. “It’s good to see you, buddy,” he said, and meant it.

Dusty thumped him on the shoulder. He stepped back and surveyed the beard and tattoos that covered James and laughed. “The big, wide world’s left its mark on you.”

“Seems so,” James muttered, turning his tattooed left hand until the art on the underside was revealed. “How’s life been treating you?”

“Decent enough,” Dusty said with a nod. He glanced over James’s shoulder at the locked garage. “Clint told me he’d heard a rumor you were back in town. As shocked as I was to hear that, it wasn’t anything compared to how I felt when I heard you’re trying to throw together a new business.”

James looked at the garage. “I heard Witmore was retiring. I couldn’t let the old place go to waste.”

Narrowing his eyes, Dusty pushed the bill of his cap up with his knuckles, then used them to scratch the spot where the hat had been rubbing just below his red hairline. “And, just like that, after eight years, you come flying back into town to rescue it?”

James lifted his shoulders. “Why not?”

“I ain’t buyin’ it,” Dusty said, pinning an inquisitive gaze on James’s face. “I figure you’ve either gone nuts or we’ve got ourselves a new underground gaming establishment here.”

James chuckled. “Nah. All my gaming’s above ground these days.”

Dusty’s head tipped back suddenly, as if he’d been hit. A brief wince crossed his face. “So you’re telling me not only are you a legitimate business owner now...you’re also on the straight and narrow?”

Smiling, James watched his friend’s face as the crystal-blue eyes roved his for flaws. “Believe it, Harbuck.”

Dusty bolted out a loud laugh. “You are nuts.”

“Maybe,” James acknowledged. He clapped Dusty on the shoulder. “We all gotta grow up at some point.”

“Hmm.” Looking unconvinced, Dusty jerked his chin at the tow truck. “Heard you were looking for a tow driver.”

“Yep,” James said as they strode over to Witmore’s tow truck. “You interested?”

“Clint’s done with the big rigs. Dad gave him the tow I was using around town so I’m in the market. What kind of pay would you be offering on a part-time basis?”

They haggled for a few minutes over commission, hourly rates, benefits and so on. In the end, they shook on an agreement and James handed over the keys.

Watching Dusty flip the key chain from one hand to the other, James leaned back against the tow truck’s grille and frowned. “You’ve been working for your old man since high school?”

“Here and there,” Dusty said with a scowl. “He trusts Clint and Hawk more than me, ever since that little incident involving you, me, a bottle of Johnny Walker and his tractor a few months before that fiasco with the Carltons.”

The Carltons. James’s heart did a little roll and his shoulders straightened. “So you’ve been around since then?”

“For the most part.”

“You ever cross paths with Adrian and her little boy?” James asked.

“Not so much anymore,” Dusty considered. “Not since she and Radley ended things.”

James’s pulse and jaw dropped simultaneously. “Radley Kennard?”

“One and the same.” Dusty nodded. “They divorced about six years back. It ruined him. She told everyone who’d listen that he took a swing at her a couple times. He was a cop. Lost his badge and everything. She slapped him with a restraining order. Poor guy hasn’t been the same since.”

James took a moment to close his mouth, pressing his lips together hard as he digested this new nugget of information. Adrian had been...married? And how in God’s name had she gotten involved with a creep like Radley Kennard? Radley’s younger brother, Scotty, had been one of the guys that ran in Dusty’s hell-raising crew...though even James had been wary around him and his family. Word then was the brothers had run cock-and dog-fighting rings in the woods—though James had never seen as much for himself. Even in his eagerness to fly headlong into the abyss, he’d known to steer clear of the likes of Radley Kennard.

As to the allegations of abuse...James’s blood ran cold at the thought. However life had treated her, she had never been the kind of person to point fingers falsely. She’d worked and fought for what she was and what she wanted. James couldn’t dismiss Adrian’s claims of abuse as Dusty had. And the thought of anyone hurting her like that made James’s fists clench until the knuckles cracked under the strain.

“Why are you interested in Adrian again?” Dusty questioned. “You should know better than that.”

James pursed his lips and took in a long breath—long enough to clear away the fog of rage that the thought of a man like Radley Kennard so much as touching Adrian had stirred. Slowly, his fists unclenched and he relaxed the fingers one by one, lifting one hand and using it to massage the knuckles on the other. “Why do you say that?”

Dusty gave him an incredulous look. “You’re kidding, right? The Carltons got you arrested twice. They practically ran you out of town. If I were you, the last thing I’d be thinking about is getting involved with Adrian. That can only lead to trouble.” He pushed off the tow to walk back to his truck. “Just ask Radley.”

It was more complicated than that. Though, since Dusty hadn’t mentioned the kid, James doubted he knew that Kyle was his son. “How do you feel about starting the week after next? I told a reporter over at the Courier this morning I was planning on opening shop then. She’s doing a feature in next week’s paper.”

“Sounds good to me,” Dusty said and smiled, tipping the bill of his hat to James. “And, hey, for the record, welcome back.”

“Thanks,” James said.

Dusty climbed up into his Dodge. “I’ll see you Monday after next.”

* * *

ADRIANHADNOCHOICE. It had to be done. Just after lunch the following afternoon, Adrian reluctantly asked Penny if she could manage the shop for an hour or two while she went home to work in her kitchen.

Her spring line of homemade candles was selling like hotcakes this year. If she didn’t find time to work on a new batch, she would sell out by the end of the week.

It was the slowest day of the workweek. Flora had only received a trickle of calls that morning. Penny could easily handle a fruit basket, a couple of baby arrangements and a spring wreath. Adrian figured it was her only chance to get away from the shop before the weekend Easter rush.

As she pulled into her driveway, she chanced a glance over into James’s neighboring one. Yep. There was that black sportster sitting on the cracked pavement. She fumbled her keys as she walked briskly to her front door. Even in her hurry, she avoided the grass she tended so carefully, sticking to the footpath that skirted her front beds. There were the annuals and perennials she and Kyle had planted together. The hydrangeas were blooming like crazy and she was pleased to see Kyle’s favorites, the citrus trees, coming back from the harsh winter.

If James saw her come home, he didn’t hail her in time to stop her from escaping inside the cottage and bolting the three locks she’d installed on the door when she and Kyle had first moved in. She couldn’t avoid him forever. She knew that. But she could damn well try...

Breathing a sigh, she walked back to the kitchen and shed the light crocheted sweater she’d left the house in that morning. Opening the window over the sink to let in the scent of Kyle’s sweet olives, she took a moment to indulge in the light, cool breeze that blew through the screens and over her bare arms. She opened the half door to the back porch and smiled at the sound of birdsong. Feeling close to relaxed, she covered her shorts and tank top with a red apron and got to work.

Any mother of an seven-year-old boy knew that silence was a rare thing. So she worked without music, unless the birdsong and the jangle and ting of wind chimes counted. Humming to herself, she melted wax and cut wicks. She dyed the wax, except what she set aside to use with one of her bestselling scents, gardenia. She’d discovered over the years that gardenia had its own hue, turning the wax a lovely shade of green.

Carefully, she measured out her various essential oils. Each reacted differently with the wax and some could even eat through plastic or remove paint so here the process became a bit intricate.

Just as she was beginning to measure and stir, a deep, bass note rent the quiet, making her flinch. The scent, wax and dye mixture she was currently working on tipped over and spilled across the hardwood floor of the kitchen. She shrieked in alarm, then again in anger when the clash of drums and guitars of Audioslave followed.

James was, indeed, home. After doing what she could about the mess, Adrian threw the ruined bits into the sink and glared out the window above it, raising herself onto her tiptoes to look over the fence line. But her honeysuckle vines prevented her from seeing anything. The whine of a power saw joined the musical blast. Her teeth ground together as she fought back a growl.

She had half a mind to go pound on his door. She was a few steps from her door when she realized what she was doing...

No. No way in hell was she facing the embodiment of her problems. Balling her hands on her hips, she glared again through the window at the fence and the small bit of James’s house that was visible through glossy green leaves.

Muttering, she walked back to the sink and salvaged what she could of the wax. One of the other neighbors would surely be as offended as she was. They’d go over, put an end to it...

But it was early afternoon. Most of the neighbors were at the office. The kids were in school.

She was on her own.

Cursing, she went back to making her candles. As the hour stretched into another and the sounds of Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” followed closely on the heels of Van Halen’s “Eruption,” her movements became jerky. She broke two mason jars, spilled more wax on the floor, cursed up a storm...

Adrian figured he was baiting her. She’d avoided coming into contact with him since his visit to Flora days ago—when he’d promised to prove his worth as a man, a father. This had to be his way of getting her over there, face-to-face so they could hash it out again....

“Moron,” she muttered, mopping up another mess. If this was his way of showing her he was a changed man, he was failing miserably. Just as her gardenia mixture failed... She thought seriously about murdering him.

Another half hour. Zeppelin was replaced by Sublime, Guns N’ Roses and finally Red Hot Chili Peppers. She scowled as she affixed her labels to the fronts of the finished mason jars. Yep. He knew all he had to do was play a little Chili Peppers for her to remember...

It took her back instantly to that night she’d driven him home. Or, rather, when she drove him to the harbor where his father’s boat was moored. He’d invited her aboard for a drink. There had been something different about him that night. All that day, in fact. Where friendship had smoothed the rough edges between them with ease, and even jokes and laughter, there had been something amiss that night, a shift back to the haunted shell she’d found in the barn nearly a week before. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to just leave him, so she followed him onto the deck of the Free Bird, the daysailer that looked as if it had seen better days. There was a tattered pirate flag flying off the stern and more than a little rust to be seen, but all in all, she was a clean boat, one James took pride in. She could see it in the way he ran his hand over the mast and helm.

She’d followed him belowdecks where he admitted to sleeping most nights. He’d told her how he couldn’t bring himself to go home—to his mother, his stepfather, the disappointment and feelings of hopelessness they generally cast in his direction. She’d taken his hand because she understood, at least to some degree. It didn’t take a genius to see that her mother felt the same way about her—and she told him as much. His hand had squeezed hers a moment or two before he released it and got up to grab them both a beer.

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