Amber Williams - His Rebel Heart

“Oh, my...” She trailed off as she took in the scene. Her hands lifted to her mouth as she shook her head. “What in God’s name...”

She trailed off at the sound of a grunt and tinkling glass. Her feet unstuck and she took several steps forward. Surely no one had survived this carnage.

The grimacing man unfolding himself from the driver’s seat as he struggled to push the car door open suggested otherwise. Swearing under his breath, he grabbed the top of the car for balance. He hissed, lifting his arms away from the glass shards that were littered there, tilting his wrists to the dim light from the street to reveal fresh cuts on the undersides.

“Somabitch,” she heard him mutter, the foul words tripping over each other.

Adrian scoffed. The guy was drunk. Her lips peeled back from her teeth in a sneer as she hissed, “You stupid moron! You could have killed someone!”

He started at the sound of her voice. His head turned. Through the blood leaking from a large gash close to his dark hairline and the thin cut below his left eye, recognition struck her. Adrian’s eyes rounded in surprise. “James?” she said, her voice laden with dread. “James Bracken, is that you?”

He stared at her face for a moment, his eyes moving slowly, sluggishly over her features. Then he staggered forward, his mouth warming into a devilish grin. “Adrian.”

As he loped around the trunk of the car, it wasn’t just his towering height and lean, muscled form that struck her. Her heart rapped against her chest. He was bloody. He was bruised. He was grinning like a fool. And he was naked as a jaybird. She took a long step back and swallowed. “James, are you all right?”

He laughed, stumbled a bit. When she dove for him, he pulled himself up to his full height, his blue eyes winking with laughter and not a hint of remorse. She couldn’t be altogether sure that he wasn’t suffering from a concussion or worse, much less that he was completely aware of his surroundings.

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?”