His Rebel Heart

by Amber Leigh Williams

  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.”

  * * *

  THE PIE WAS CHERRY 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.

&
nbsp; 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’S MAD DASH back 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.