Prologue
Hundreds of mourners swarmed the gravesite, descending on the blue canopy like ants at a picnic. Despite the numbers, silence tautened as an acoustic duo committed a folk song to the air.
From somewhere over his left shoulder, James Bracken heard someone recite the words to “Down to the River to Pray” in a tinny, fractured voice. He could feel the eyes of the mourners on him. He could feel them breathing down his neck.
Next to him, his mother sat, hands folded. Though her chin lay low near her collarbones, she looked impossibly serene.
How was she so still? Grief rolled like thunder over his chest.
The storm filled him to bursting. It came up against the hard edge of pain, injuries that had yet to heal from the accident.
James scanned the long line of the shiny black casket. The closed casket. No one would look upon Zachariah Bracken’s face again.
They’d remember him as the benevolent preacher, the man in the long robes that had spread the gospel every Sunday from the pulpit. They’d remember him smiling. Zachariah had smiled early and often after he’d found God following a long stint as an alcoholic and an even longer haul through AA and seminary school.
Did these people know why the casket had been nailed shut?
Did they know James had been the last person to see his father alive?
There had been no trace of his charismatic smile then. Only shock and pain.
The storm inside James started to spiral. He forced his eyes down to the hands clamped over his knees. There, he saw the cuts and scrapes from the shattered windshield.
He tried breathing through the constriction in his chest. There was no sorting the emotions apart. They were too big, too messy…
“Ashes to ashes,” Reverend Lockling chanted, “dust to dust…”
All at once, James’s mother’s serene façade crumbled. To his shock, she began to sob, shoulders quaking. Hands stretched forward to lay on her in unspoken support as her sounds carried.
James watched, blank. He regretted wishing she’d do something other than sit there, unmoving. He hadn’t seen her cry once in all of this. Not since receiving the news that it was too late to say goodbye to her husband of twenty-two years or caring for James’s injuries. She’d seen to the funeral arrangements without fail, receiving well-wishers with a numb kind of grace James hadn’t been able to fathom.
Watching her break… It was too much. He wanted to reach for her. However, he knew if he did the storm would reach its tipping point.
His lower lip quavered, and he bit down on the inside of it, tasting blood. He would not lose it in front of these people.
Where had they been when his father had fought his way out of the bottle? Where had they been when his mother had practically had to raise him alone while Zachariah was lost or trying to straighten himself out?
James stiffened when Reverend Lockling crossed to them, his hangdog eyes watery blue behind thick glasses. He kneeled in front of James’s mother, folding his hands around hers. She tilted her palms to his to receive the wooden cross with a simple leather cord Zachariah had worn around his neck since finding his faith.
The reverend spoke low. “Grief is not unending. It is but a tunnel.”
James frowned at the words. A tunnel? The pressure on his chest…the storm underneath… He didn’t feel like grief was something he was going to have to pass through. He felt buried by it. He’d heard of people falling into grain silos and dying as a result. Grief felt like that. James could feel it seeping into his nose, his eyes, his pores even. He gasped, and it filled his mouth, packing his throat until he felt as if he were choking…sinking further and further away from the light.
“The Lord will guide you,” Reverend Lockling murmured, petting her hands. He looked to James. “May He show you the power of His love and comfort you.”
He’s dead. James wanted to shout it. He ground his teeth until his jaw quaked. He’s dead and I’m the reason.
What would the good reverend have to say to that?
“For a spiritual life, death is just another part of a beautiful journey,” Reverend Lockling finished. He offered James an empathetic smile.
He wanted to leave. He had to leave. How much longer did he have to sit here with the seams of his chest about to split open?
His mother reached for his hand. She gripped his fingers, viselike, as the reverend stood and announced to those assembled that a wake would follow at the Bracken residence.
Her fingers were so cold.
James knew he should say something to her. But guilt clashed with the suffocating grief. It was a wonder one didn’t give way to the other. Neither budged and he couldn’t breathe.
Something hard pressed against his hand. He looked down to find the wooden cross his mother had given him.
James stared at the initials on it, ZB, scrawled on the underside in his father’s own hand.
He tried to swallow. His throat burned. It tasted bitter. His eyes stung as he folded his fingers around the wood until he couldn’t see the cross anymore. He gripped it until its points bit into his palm.
He sprung from his seat.
“James?” his mother called after him as he left the canopy.
The reverend did nothing to stop him, frozen as he was with his hands raised in closing.
James didn’t stop. His feet carried him through the throng.
None of them stopped him, either. They made a path for him.
Some touched him, murmured words he couldn’t hear. He didn’t look up, didn’t respond.
He fled his father’s funeral like a dog with its tail between its legs.
Chapter One
The night Adrian Carlton first saw James Bracken naked, he was bloodied and bruised. He’d gone several rounds with a bottle of Wild Turkey 101, then crawled behind the wheel of his father’s old Mustang convertible.
The joyride ended abruptly on a backcountry road when the speeding muscle car skated off the pavement, plowed through the entry sign in front of Carlton Nurseries and skinned the side of a giant oak tree before barreling into the glass front of the office building.
From the farmhouse behind the nursery, Adrian had heard the deafening crash and gone running—out the front door and through the rows of her parents’ shrubs and saplings, her bare feet sinking into the damp earth. A light drizzle was falling from the leaden night sky and the humidity had swelled at the onset of rain.
By the time she reached the nursery’s office and saw the cherry-red Shelby that had decimated it, sweat was crawling from her neck to her back.
“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 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.” She grunted, rolling the linebacker off her chest and trying to ignore the fact that he was sticky.
Why is he sticky?
She sat up slowly, wincing. The smell of liquor emanated off him. She reached for his wrist to check his pulse.
Was his heartbeat supposed to skip like that—or was that the effects of the alcohol?
How much had he had to drink? She glanced over at the convertible now residing in her parents’ office. The building and the car were totaled. How he’d made it out and walked the distance to her, she couldn’t fathom.
If rumors were true, James Bracken had nine lives. And he wasn’t afraid to use them.
Trouble didn’t begin to describe the path he’d forged since his father’s funeral last summer. When he’d returned to school in August, it wasn’t to fulfill those whispers of academic scholarship potential. He’d quit sports, avoiding his usual crowd.
Old friends and girlfriends fell by the wayside. The golden boy of Fairhope had shaved his head, slept through classes, and generally avoided everyone else.
Months went by before teachers had started to give up on him. He’d fallen into a pattern of demerits and detentions. He did eventually start talking to people, but only those who he found himself in detention with.
Adrian’s hands fumbled. What was she supposed to do? He was bleeding from the cuts on his arms and face. Nothing life-threatening, but what if there was internal damage? She studiously avoided looking any lower than his six-pack abs.
Nope. Not going there.
She’d seen naked men. Just not while they were unconscious.
He wasn’t waking up. Did he have a concussion?
She heard sirens in the distance and breathed a sigh of relief. “Okay, hot rocks,” she murmured. “Real help’s on the way.”
He mumbled something.
She lowered her head to hear. “What?”
“…pants…”
She raised a brow. “It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?”
“Hmph?” His eyelids flickered. They lifted. In the right light, his eyes were a wild, wicked blue. She’d seen him look at her in Spanish with curiosity. Maybe even heat. Now they looked glassy and unfocused. It scared her.
His lips parted. “Adrian?”
She winced. “Your breath could light the night on fire.”
His lazy gaze traced the points of her complexion, tracking her features glacially. “I’m…not wearin’ pants,” he said finally.
“I noticed.”
He closed his eyes, groaned.
“Are you in pain?” she asked, wishing the ambulance would hurry.
His hand fumbled for hers. He planted it against the wide wall of his chest next to the cross. “Fix it…?”
“I don’t think I’m qualified,” she told him. His hand stayed on hers to prevent her from lifting it. “James?” She waited until he pried his eyes open again. “Be okay. I need you to be okay. Okay?”
“Why?” he asked, genuinely perplexed.
She let out a breath, false laughter chasing it. The tragedy of him made her ache. “That’s all that anyone wants. For you to be okay.”
“Ah, baby…just give up…easier for you.”
Was that what he thought—that everyone had given up on him?
The ambulance wailed into the shell-lined drive of Carlton Nurseries. She edged back as paramedics piled out.
James grunted a protest, refusing to give up her hand. He turned away from the lights, his fingers curling over hers.
She stayed. Apparently, she was going to be here for a while.
* * *
“Sweet Jesus!”
Dr. Patrick Ferguson had informed James his injuries weren’t substantial. With a resigned expression, he’d clapped him on the shoulder and called him “Evel Knievel.”
James would have laughed if the morphine had kicked in.
Ferguson was one of his mother’s colleagues. If one wasn’t on call in the emergency room of Thomas Hospital, then the other most certainly was.
Which meant that any moment now, she’d be getting the phone call.
Another phone call. Would it be the police this time? Dispatch? Who would deliver the news that her son had messed up royally again?
He grimaced and turned his head toward the I.V. pole. Was the drip working? Pain coursed through him, over him. A river.
An avalanche. Was he swimming in it?
…grief is not unending. It is a tunnel…
He shut out the reverend’s voice, refusing to go back there.
Had he not drunk enough to silence it—to silence the grief?
He should’ve at least managed to shutter it by now.
There wasn’t enough Wild Turkey in the world to shut out everything he needed to.
Grinding his back teeth together, he tipped his head back into the coarse pillow at the head of his gurney and called, “Hey, Fergie! Got any Jack Daniels back there?”
The curtain swished, revealing not Ferguson but his mother.
“Fuck a duck,” James groaned, deflecting his gaze on reflex.
“I’ll pass,” she remarked. Her painted mouth refused to move at the corners. She spared him a clinical look as she shrugged into her white coat. The name DR. MAVIS BRACKEN was printed on the lanyard security credentials that hung from her neck. Raising his chart, she perused it. “Minor cuts and abrasions to the arms and hands. Mild concussion. No broken bones this time. Miraculous. Patrick’s ordered a scan to be sure there’s no intercranial damage.”
“How ‘bout no?” James drawled.
“I saw Officer Melendez outside.”
James closed his eyes. Victor Melendez had been a close friend of his father even before Zachariah Bracken had cleaned up and made something of himself. James had spent the last twelve months dodging Melendez’s well-meaning attempts to steer him onto the straight and narrow, too.
“He says you blew a 0.10,” she said, clicking her pen and noting something on his chart.
It wasn’t news. James had seen the disappointment written all over Melendez’s face, just as he’d clocked it on Ferguson’s. He lifted his eyes to his mother.
She was unreadable. Her lips were pressed in a thin, red line, eyes flat, sensible brown hair knotted cleverly. He frowned, noting other details of her appearance.
Under the white coat, she wore a black dress. The hem stopped above her knees. He stared at her knees, dumbfounded. “What are you wearing?”
“I just told you your blood alcohol content is well above the legal limit,” she told him in that crisp, level voice she used with all her patients, “and you want to talk about my appearance?”
He squinted. She was wearing eyeliner. Normally, her lip color was a subtle shade of pink. This one was red as poppies. His stomach dropped. “You were with him.”
Her face didn’t change. She only sighed at him. “I was at dinner.”
With a glance at the clock on the wall, he muttered, “The restaurants around here close before eleven.”
Pink bloomed on her cheeks. “It was a private dinner.”
“With him,” he said once more.
“With Stephen. Yes.”
James refused to call the man his mother was seeing by his given name. The Wild Turkey roiled inside him, mutinying. He was going to hurl.
Dr. Stephen Irvington, PhD, the sweater-vested psychologist, clearly had no qualms about putting the moves on a widow before the grass had grown over her husband’s grave.
Heat swamped James, sheeting him in a thin veil of sweat.
“Where?” he wanted to know.
His mother hesitated.
James wanted to bare his teeth. He heard the blip of the heart monitor quicken. “You need to calm down.”
“At our house?”
“What does it matter where we were?” she asked carefully.
“What does it matter?” he repeated. “Have you even changed the sheets since Dad slept next to you?”
“James.”
It was a low warning. He chose not to heed it. “Have you taken his clothes from the closet? I know you haven’t taken his pictures down off the walls. How the hell could you bring another man there?”
“I don’t expect you to understand—”
“You’re right,” he argued. “I don’t understand. I can’t even look at you right now.”
Hurt struck her, the first blip of emotion he’d seen since she’d stepped into the room. “Stephen is a good man.”
The man was one bare step up from a home wrecker. James had never hated a man like he hated Livingston.
“James,” his mother said cautiously, no longer distracted by his vitals. “As soon as Dr. Ferguson clears you for transfer, Officer Melendez will be taking you into his custody.”
James frowned. He’d known this was coming. Still, his head spiraled.
“You’ll be taken to the city jail and processed,” his mother continued. “Your license will be revoked.”
“They’re going to lock me up,” he said dully.
She was quiet for a long, weighty moment. “It’s fortunate you’ve already finished your senior year, but I think you’ll be lucky if your probationary period doesn’t impede college orientation or the start of classes in August.”
He scoffed. “We both know college is a pipe dream at this point.” How he’d managed to scrape through this senior year with a GPA that qualified him for a diploma, he had no idea.
Her voice wavered. “It’s what he wanted—for you to go to college. To make something of yourself.”
“Do you think he’d want another man sleeping in his bed, too?”
Silence cast about the room, thick enough to boil. It went past the point of caramelizing. It started to burn. James could all but smell the stink of it.
Finally, she pulled a steadying breath in through the sharp blade of her nose. Her shoulders straightened, though her mouth remained fixed in that thin, red line.
For a precarious second, he thought he saw it quaver at the edges. “You’re lucky you’re still seventeen and won’t be tried as an adult.”
Images from last summer flooded his senses before he could stop them. A darkened roadside. His father’s horn blaring out into the night as the vehicle lay at the bottom of the verge, tires skyward.
The acrid wash of oil and fuel and, underneath, the copper tang of blood. “Maybe I deserve it,” James muttered. “Maybe they should lock me away.”
She stared at him. Her voice was a whisper when she spoke again. “I can’t help you. Not if you won’t help yourself. Stephen… He knows grief counselors. People who can—”
“I want him to stay away from you.” Christ, his head hurt. He closed his eyes, raising his hands to his face. “I don’t want him in our house. The man’s an operator.”
“The man’s brought me more comfort and clarity than I’ve been able to find anywhere else,” she argued.
The fact that she’d had to seek comfort elsewhere…that was another blow to his conscience. James hadn’t been there for her. So lost was he in the shit storm of his grief, he’d turned a blind eye on his mother long enough for her to seek the arms of a man who wasn’t his father.
James wanted to put his fist through the wall. Closing his eyes, he turned his face away from her.
“I won’t protect you from the consequences of your actions. Not this time.”
About time she gave up on him, he thought bitterly. “Then go. What are you even doing here?”
“You’re my son,” she told him. “I know how much you’re hurting.”
“You don’t know anything.” It was true. He hadn’t told her the truth of what had happened the night his father was killed—that it was his fault she’d been left without a husband.
“If you’d just tell me—”
“I said go,” he muttered. “I don’t need you.” The words hurt, but he couldn’t stop seeing the roadside…his father…the desperate pain in his eyes… In the last twelve months, he hadn’t been able to look his mother in the eye without seeing the husband she’d lost.
She lingered long enough for sweat to bead on his brow – for the heart monitor to pick up on his agitation.
Finally, she turned toward the curtain. He held his breath until she was gone.
She paused, however, before departing. “By the way,” she said in a resigned tone, “Officer Melendez informed me that the Carltons will be pressing charges.”
“Who?”
“The people whose property you destroyed.”
The girl’s face flashed before him, her dark eyes cavernous and searching. She’d held his hand…asked him to be okay…
For one blind, desperate moment, he’d reached for her like a lifeline. He’d reached for Adrian Carlton and wished for salvation.
He blinked away the image. “Fine,” he muttered.
Without another parting word, his mother left him to grapple with the mess he’d made of his life.
How the Bracken Legacy began…
Everyone warns Adrian Carlton to stay away from James Bracken. But after the preacher’s son turned bad boy wrecks her parents’ landscaping office in his latest spree of wrongdoing, he is forced to spend the hot summer months toiling away at Carlton Nurseries. As she works alongside him, Adrian begins to sense that this rebel isn’t at all what he seems.
Little does she know, their forbidden romance will change the course of their lives – and those around them – forever.
