Читать книгу His Rebel Heart - Amber Leigh Williams - Страница 12

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.”