His Rebel Heart. Amber Leigh Williams

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