“Adrian,” her father greeted her. The warm smile on his face faltered when he turned his attention to the other man in the room. “Bracken?” he asked, surprised.
James didn’t reply. His eyes were on Kyle, studying his face. He didn’t seem to be breathing.
He wasn’t the only one. Adrian felt her face heat and wondered how. She was so cold her bones ached with the chill. She tried to swallow, but her throat was as dry as dust. Instinct broke through and she walked to Kyle, putting herself between her child and the man she hadn’t ever wanted him to meet. “You need to go, hon.”
“But, Mom...”
“Take him home,” Adrian said, praying her father wouldn’t argue.
Her dad considered her for a moment. He glanced over her shoulder at James, then back at her and gave a short nod. “I’ll take care of it.”
Adrian watched Kyle and her father leave the shop, watched through the glass display window as her father’s truck, marked with the Carlton Nurseries logo, pulled out of the gravel parking lot. Only then did she turn back to face James and the secrets of the last eight years.
IF JAMESHADN’Tknown better, he would have thought he was in a submarine. The walls of the flower shop seemed to be pressing inward, bowing under some enormous pressure. The floor seemed to tilt. To keep his balance, he held his arms out slightly as Adrian turned back to face him in the absence of the man and the boy.
The man had been her father. James had recognized Van Carlton well enough despite the new sunspots and creases in the older man’s face. He’d worn the same, worn, black Dale Earnhardt cap years ago. But the boy—
The boy was another story entirely. For a split second, James had thought he was staring at a mirror image of his younger self. The mop of hair might have been a lighter shade of brown, but it was just as thick, just as untidy, and it fell over the boy’s brow in just the way James’s fell over his and always had. James knew instinctively that it grew at an unmanageable rate and had to be clipped every three weeks to keep it from covering the boy’s eyes.
His eyes—dear God. They had been the kicker. James knew those eyes, not just from his own reflection. His father had looked at him with the same eyes, in the same light. Considering. Amiable. Curious.
James’s stomach pitched. His throat closed. He reached up. The rafter above his head was close, close enough for a man of his height to wrap his hand around it and brace himself. He was afraid it was the only thing keeping him upright.
The boy had sported a face full of freckles. They’d been a curse of James’s early adolescence. He hadn’t missed them when they began to fade with time and maturity. There was still a dark scatter of them across his shoulders and upper back.
The boy had been tall for his age, too. Seven. James knew he was seven. Not because he was around children all that often. He just knew...he knew, damn it.
His gaze finally found Adrian’s. Her hands were at her sides, her back and shoulders straight, a posture that might have looked calm, composed if not for the fact that her fists were opening and closing into white-knuckled balls.
He had a good sense that her nails were scoring her palms. She’d done that whenever her mother, Edith, started in on her. After Edith walked away at long last, taking her dark, rumbling cloud of disapproval with her, James remembered taking Adrian’s hands in his, opening them to see the half-moon marks on her palms. Then he’d rub the pads of his thumbs over them, lifting them to his lips, soothing hurts he knew she felt outside and in.
Disappointed mothers had been one of their commonalities. James had deserved his. The eternally disappointed Edith was another thing, and for some reason, once James’s relationship with Adrian had heated and gained some tenderness over the weeks they grew to know each other—bodies, hearts, minds—he had been eager to make up for those undeserved hurts...
Now he couldn’t have crossed the room to her if he tried. Now he didn’t feel like soothing. He didn’t know what it was he felt. He’d suffered concussions. He’d been as drunk as ten sailors on a rainy night in Dublin. Still, he couldn’t remember ever feeling so off-kilter. So lost.
A maelstrom built inside him. Something burned the back of his throat. Anger. It was his old fallback, that knee-jerk emotion he’d turned to when Zachariah Bracken died—his chief coping mechanism. The one he’d worked so carefully to learn to curb as an adult.
The anger twisted and burned inside him. It grew and he didn’t do much to stop it. The boy’s appearance had stripped him, left him naked and raw. Suddenly anger was the only thing he had. The taste of it was bitter, but also familiar. And the familiarity was a comfort he couldn’t refuse.
James’s lips parted. He finally found his breath and sucked it in raggedly. His voice was rough when he spoke. It sounded dark, deadly even to his own ears. “Explain,” he said.
Adrian’s expression wavered for a moment—one moment of weakness before composure took over again. Practice. That kind of quick, strong composure only came with practice. When she spoke, her words were calm, too. Steady but low, so low he could barely hear them over the pounding in his ears. “I don’t think I have to.”
James’s brows lifted. “You don’t?” he asked, punching the words out. It was his turn to ball his hands into fists. The knuckles cracked from the strain. The maelstrom had turned into a hot, fiery vortex of anger he feared there was no escape from. It scared him just as much as the implications of that face, those eyes that were an exact match for his own.
“No,” Adrian answered. “I don’t.”
“He’s mine.” James wondered where the words had come from. They didn’t seek or question. They were just there.
Something flashed in the dark depths of her eyes. Emotion. He was as relieved to see the small puncture in the wall of her composure, as he was satisfied that he had caused it.
“No, he’s mine,” she said, not raising her voice. The words shook in ferocity. “You might be his father, but you didn’t bring him into this world. You didn’t raise him. So whatever say you think you have in any of this you can swallow. And you’ll forgive me, hot rocks, for not much caring if you choke on it.”
The breath washed out of him and he advanced on her as the fiery storm inside him began spitting hail. “What—”
“No!” she shrieked, her composure finally shattering. She was shaking. He wasn’t altogether sure if it was from weakness or fury. She jabbed a finger at him as her eyes fired. “You can threaten me, rail at me, curse me all you want, but when it comes to him, I will not budge!”
“For Christ’s sake, he’s my son, Adrian!” The words cracked, his voice shattered and he struggled to hold back a blistering oath. He said the words again. “He’s my son. He’s my blood. You just admitted it yourself and you expect me to stand here and not say one damned word about it?”
“No,” she said. Her eyes hardened to pebbles. Her arms crossed. “I expect you to walk away.”
“Walk away?”
“Yes.”
“And why would I do that?” he thundered.
Her gaze cleaved into his, but her words softened. Sure and sad at once. “Because that’s what you did. Remember, James? You walked.”
He faltered, struggled for argument, words, justification. “I didn’t know...”
The sadness spread quickly across her face. She blinked and it vanished, contained once more. “I didn’t know, either. Not when you left. It wasn’t for three or four weeks after that that I began to...” Her breath hitched, throwing