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.
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
