Amber Leigh Williams - His Rebel Heart

He was six feet five inches tall, easy. Her eyes were level with the wooden cross on his sternum that hung from a leather strap. The religious symbol was so at odds with his devil-may-care persona she frowned, extricating her gaze from his fine, muscled form and, more importantly, his naked hips.

She watched his gaze skim from the top of her head to the tips of her bare toes, and she frowned once more when she felt her red-painted toenails tingle under the smoldering assessment.

“Adrian Carlton,” he drawled, swaying a bit. “Damn. Was that an earthquake—or did you just rock my world?”

He was picking her up? Now? For heaven’s sake. She pursed her lips, ready to give him the what-for. “Listen, hot rocks, you can’t just—”

His eyes rolled into the back of his head and his legs folded beneath him. Cursing, she ducked under his shoulder to catch him but he was too tall. Too damn heavy. She shrieked as they both went crashing to earth. The breath whooshed out of her when his naked form landed on top of her in full supine position. She pushed against his shoulder, couldn’t budge him and cursed again.

“Damn you, James Bracken,” she murmured, teeth clenched as she yanked his head back with a fistful of his thick, tousled hair. Jaw slack, eyes closed, he greeted her with a gurgling snore. With a sigh, she dropped his head back to her shoulder and groaned. “You’re going to be more trouble than you’re worth.”

CHAPTER ONE

Eight years later

SPRINGHADGONE to the birds, and Adrian didn’t mind so much that it had. She encouraged them, setting up bird feeders and birdbaths all around the backyard of her Fairhope cottage. With the weather warming into late March, it allowed for her to open the windows of the house and let the spring breeze waft through the screens. The scents of fresh-cut grass, potting soil and early annuals, as well as the sound of birdsong drifted through the cottage with it.

The squirrels, however, thought the bird food was theirs for the taking.

“I don’t think so,” Adrian muttered as she watched one such offender—a big vermin with a beer belly—creep down to a bird feeder from one of the overlarge oak trees surrounding the yard. She stood up from the nook table and, using one of the chairs, grabbed her son’s BB gun from the top of the cabinets where she’d hidden it.

She crouched next to the half door that led out onto her small patio with the pretty terra-cotta tiles she’d laid herself. Leveling the gun on top of the half door, she closed one eye and sighted it. “I see you,” she said, and felt for the trigger.

“Mom!”

Adrian jumped a mile high and shrieked. The sound and movement startled Nutsy the Squirrel and he lit off up the tree, chattering angrily at the spoiled opportunity.

Adrian fought back a curse and stood, raking a hand through her short crop of red hair. “Kyle,” she said in as normal a voice as she could manage.

Kyle narrowed his eyes. They were a wild shade of Scandinavian blue. Right now they were scrutinizing her as they scanned the weapon and her long, white nightgown. “Were you shooting squirrels again?”

Adrian cleared her throat. “I was just going to pop one in the butt. Teach him a lesson.” When Kyle rolled his eyes, she drew her shoulders back, searching for some dignity. “He was stealing birdseed.” Then she waved a dismissive hand. She didn’t have to explain herself, no matter how ridiculous she felt in the face of his seven-year-old derision.

“Mom.” Kyle sighed. “Please stop doing that. It’s embarrassing.”

Adrian raised a brow and felt the corners of her mouth twitch. “Oh, is it, huh?”

“Yeah,” Kyle said, and scrubbed the backs of his first two fingers over his mouth. It was an endearing habit he’d had since his toddling years. “What’s for breakfast?”

“There’s some cereal in the pantry,” she told him, and waited until he went inside before crawling back up on the chair and replacing the gun on top of the cabinets, out of his reach. Then she got down, carried the chair back to the table and met him at the refrigerator. “Orange juice?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, and took a seat at the table, pouring Cap’n Crunch into a bowl. Adrian topped the cereal with milk, then fixed him a glass of juice.

“Did you know there’s a moving van next door?” Kyle asked.

Adrian stopped in the midst of pouring herself a second helping of coffee. “What?”

Kyle craned his neck to look out the bay window over the nook table. “Somebody must be moving in.”

The house next door had been for sale for well over six months. The previous owners had left it in a state of complete and utter disarray, so much so that everyone on the street had begun to resent the overgrown property. Adrian leaned over the table, placing a hand on Kyle’s dark, tousled head, and peered across her trim, perfectly kept yard into the next.

The grass of the adjacent property had grown as tall as reeds. The mailbox was hanging loose on its stand, the driveway was cracked and mottled and the detached garage was even beginning to fall in. The roof of the house was carpeted in dead leaves and strewn with naked oak branches. The screen door of the front porch had been torn. Adrian was surprised to see the For Sale sign gone and an oversize moving truck parked at the curb, butted up against a sleek, black sportster.

“Somebody finally bought it,” Adrian muttered with an unbelieving shake of her head. “I thought they were gonna have to tear it down, the state it’s in.”

“Maybe they’ve got kids,” Kyle said, eyes widening at the possibility. He watched more closely, nose nearly pressed to the glass now, as the movers milled from truck to house with boxes of varying sizes. “Do you see any toys, Mom?”

Adrian, too, watched for a moment, then frowned, dropping back to her heels and straightening. She wondered how many other neighbors were rubbernecking this morning to get a gander at the street’s newest addition. And while, for the most part, rubbernecking was a harmless sport, Adrian knew all too well what it felt like to be the victim of it. “Eat your breakfast,” she said with a pat on Kyle’s shoulder.

“It’d be really cool if there was a guy my age moving in.” Kyle considered as he pushed his cereal around with his spoon, no longer paying Cap’n Crunch much mind. “Then Blaze and I can play two-on-two when Gavin visits in a few weeks.”

“What if they have a girl?” Adrian asked coyly, glancing sideways from the counter just in time to see Kyle wrinkle his nose.

The kid positively moped at the idea. “I guess that would be all right, too.”

Adrian chuckled. Kyle was firmly entrenched in the cootie phase. “It wouldn’t be so bad. You like Harmony, don’t you?”

“Harmony’s a baby,” Kyle told her, referring to their family friends the Savitts’ little girl. “Real girls are mean.”

Adrian hid a snort in her coffee. “Just concentrate on eating. We’ve got to get you to school, mister.”

“Hey, maybe we could send them something to eat,” Kyle suggested, still gazing out at the movers.

“Something to eat?” she asked, brow creased.

“Yeah. Like how we sent the Millers one of Briar’s pies when they moved in. Blaze said it was real good. That’s how we got to be such good friends.”

Adrian smiled as she watched her son’s mind work. With a small business to run and being a single parent, her days were so full she had hardly a moment to stop and breathe. But sometimes when she looked at Kyle her heart ached with how much she loved him and at how fast he had grown. “Good idea. I’ll talk to Briar this afternoon.”

Kyle finally turned his head and grinned at her. In the light spilling in from the open windows around the room, those wild blue eyes shone like stars and the dark freckles across his nose contrasted with his cheeks. “Thanks, Mom.”