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 smal
l 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.
His Rebel Heart Page 3
