Tyler O'Neill's Redemption

“You haven’t,” she said, not sparing him a glance as she braked over the train tracks.

“You haven’t spent ten minutes with me, Jules,” he said. “How could you possibly know that?”

“It’s Juliette.”

He laughed and she glared at him hard.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s Juliette.”

“And you’re still the same Tyler O’Neill. Here you are, punched in the face and kicked out of the St. Pat’s game. Seems awfully familiar.”

“It does ring a bell, doesn’t it?” He touched his lip with his finger, probed it with his tongue, and she tried to convince herself it was disgusting. But it wasn’t. It was hot.

The air in the car was humid, thick. She cranked the fan a notch higher, hoping it would help.

It didn’t.

“Did you know I was back?”

“It’s Bonne Terre, Tyler. The second you stepped foot back inside the parish about twenty people called me.”

“Good old Bonne Terre,” he said, looking around the dimly lit town as though vampires lurked in doorways. Considering she loved this town, and her job was to take care of its citizens, his attitude rubbed her wrong all over. “But what I’m wondering is what you’re doing? Keeping up on what’s happening at The Manor, giving me a ride.” He tilted his head, his Paul Newman eyes practically glowing in the darkness of the car.

Sex oozed off him. And he was breathing all her damn air.

“Your sister is my best friend.”

“Right,” Tyler said, his voice ripe, his eyes way too warm. “My sister.”

She stomped on the brakes. “What are you saying?”

His eyes raked her, that lopsided grin that used to put her whole world on edge was back. “Nothing,” he drawled.

His arm stole across the top of the seats, not touching her, but too close anyway.

She leaned over him, ignoring the warmth of his body, the smell of him, all of it. Every memory, every old impulse come back to haunt her—she ignored it all and opened his door.

She’d done what she needed to do. He’d been warned. She could kick him out of her car and, if God was kind, never ever lay eyes on Tyler O’Neill again.

“Get out,” she said.

He watched her for a second and suddenly the charm vanished from his smile. All that smug sexuality was banked, put on ice for the moment. “Come on, Juliette—”

“Get the hell out of my car, Tyler.”

She met his eyes, unflinching, unblinking, nothing but anger and disgust over his betrayal, his absence, all those years spent ignoring not just her, but Savannah and Margot, too.

“You left without a word,” she said, the words burning her mouth, scorching the air. “You are no better than your parents.”

Perhaps it was the lights, the shadows, but his face changed. Melted. Just for a moment, as if he couldn’t quite keep the mask in place.

But then he eased out of her car into the dark night, taking his scent and his heat and those eyes with him.

“Why did they call you, Juliette?” he asked, slamming the door and leaning in the window. “All the good citizens of Bonne Terre—what made them think of you when I came into town?”

She knew what he thought, that it was their past that had made people call her. That people saw him and thought of her, that they were linked, forever, in everyone’s heads. In her head.

She smiled, so damn happy, thrilled actually, to prove him wrong. “Because it’s my job, Tyler.”

Slowly, she pushed back her light blazer, revealing her gun.

And her badge.

His jaw dropped and it was beautiful. Really, really a beautiful thing.

“What have you done, Jules?” he breathed.

“It’s Chief Tremblant now, Tyler,” she said.

Grinning, she popped the clutch and peeled out, emblazoning in her brain this moment—leaving Tyler O’Neill, in a delicious twist, in her dust.

CHAPTER TWO

THE MANOR LOOKED THE SAME.

Shabby but somehow noble. Elegant. A lot like the old lady who lived there, he thought, and suddenly it seemed too long since he’d seen his grandmother.

But just looking at the house, the dark windows, that bright red door, his feet got itchy. His collar tight.

It wasn’t home, not for him, and it proved another thing he’d known to be true about himself. If this place, with these women who had loved him with all their hearts, wasn’t home—no place was.

He sighed and scrubbed at the back of his neck.

Tired, sore and melancholy, he hoped that if there wasn’t sugar pie waiting for him, at least there’d be some of Margot’s fine bourbon.

A drink or twelve and some ice on this eye were in order.

But instead of going in the front door, he walked around the side of the house, past the low windows into the library. Trampled grass, broken glass. The window sill had been messed with, but he glanced inside the window and saw small red infrared dots around the room.

Not your average alarm system.

He wondered how a librarian and a retired mistress paying out ten grand in stay-away money a year managed to afford this kind of system.

Must be that Matt guy, he thought. Big shot architect.

A good guy, Juliette had said, but he doubted he could trust her opinion. She used to think Tyler was good, after all.

You’re the best, she’d said, her long strong legs wrapped around his, her warm body, sticky with sweat and salt water, wedged between him and the backseat of his old Chevy.

He smiled, remembering how he’d have to peel her off the vinyl while she yelped. He’d felt, that whole summer, as though he was in the middle of a dream. Juliette Tremblant, the sexiest, most untouchable girl he’d ever met, had come home from college a woman. A woman ready to spit in the eye of her police-chief dad. A woman who was tired of the good-girl routine and was ready to see how the other half lived. He’d been more than happy to show her.

Now she was the police chief, just like dear old dad. Man, he did not see that coming. The Juliette he’d known, that feminine creature with the skirts and the lip gloss and the adoring eyes, was so far from the woman sitting in that car with a gun on her hip and a look on her face like she knew how to use it.

What the hell happened? he wondered, walking toward the stone fence that surrounded the back courtyard. He’d thought Jules could become a model, she’d been that beautiful. Her piercing eyes set against that mocha skin she’d inherited from her father had been a lethal combination.

But her heart had been set on law school since she’d been a kid, and he’d assumed she’d become the most beautiful lawyer the state of Louisiana had ever seen.

Not a pseudomasculine police chief.

He sighed and eyed the fence. It was taller, stronger than it used to be, but Tyler had no problem chinning himself up to the top.

Whoa. The back courtyard, which had been a mess when he’d left, was amazing. Manicured, with a fountain and the trees in the middle and was that a maze?

The greenhouse was different and the porch had been extended. Two chairs sat side by side on fresh wooden planks.

A bottle of Jack between them.

The dark bearded man sitting in one of the chairs raised his glass toward Tyler.

“You’re late,” he said.

Tyler sighed, hanging his aching head for just a moment to wonder why he wasn’t surprised before leaping down onto the lush green grass inside the fence.

“Hi, Dad.”

JULIETTE PUSHED HER SUNGLASSES up onto her head as she stepped into the station Monday morning.

“Hey, Lisa,” she said, walking by the reception and dispatch desk.

“Morning, Jules…ah…Chief.”

She and Lisa had gone to school together, and while the Bonne Terre police force didn’t operate on formalities, not calling the police chief by her old nickname was one thing Juliette insisted on.

Six months as chief and Lisa was just catching on.

She stepped through the glass doors that led to the squad room and her office. Just like every morning, as soon as she stepped into the common room, all the chatter stopped as if it had been cut off by a knife.

The squeak of her shoes across the linoleum was the only sound in the room until she came to a stop at the night-shift desk, where the men were changing shifts and shooting the shit.

“Morning, guys,” she said, taking a sip from her coffee.

“Chief,” they chorused. Of the four men sitting there, only two of them managed to say it without the word clogging in their throats. The two she hired from out of town. The other two—Officers Jones and Owens, who had worked with her father and grown up in Bonne Terre—found the word a little sticky.

But she wasn’t here to be their friends. She was focused on busting their asses, pushing and shoving them into the twenty-first century, getting them new equipment, and forcing them to change the way things were done in this office.

And she was damn good at her job.

They didn’t have to like her, but they sure as hell had to listen to her.

“You’ve got reports on my desk?” she asked Weber and Kavanaugh, her two new hires who’d pulled the night shift. They nodded and chorused, “Yes, sir.”

“Great,” she said. “Go on home.”

They stood and she stepped into her office, shutting the door behind her. Conversations resumed as she set down her mug and dropped into her chair like a rock.

For some ridiculous reason, she still hadn’t redecorated this office. She’d modernized every other part of this force, but not these four walls. And so, it remained exactly the same as when her father had been chief. Dark walls, dress-blues portraits of every police chief Bonne Terre had ever seen, and a big desk upon which she could safely float down the Mississippi.

I should redecorate, she thought. When she’d taken the job she’d been so focused on getting updated computers and fresh blood in the squad room that she hadn’t given her office a second thought.

But now, sitting under her father’s stern visage reminded her—especially on the heels of a night haunted by thoughts of Tyler O’Neill—of how much Dad had hated Tyler.

There was a word stronger than hated, though. Despised.

Loathed.

Dad had loathed Tyler.

All the O’Neills, to be honest. He’d hated anything, anyone, who rebelled, who embraced disobedience the way the O’Neills did.

Which, of course, had been part of Tyler’s appeal. That forbidden fruit thing was no joke.

Dad’s attitude toward Tyler had been the same attitude he’d brought to the job, the same attitude he’d rubbed in the face of every juvenile delinquent and small-time crook in Bonne Terre.

His job had been to punish. To control. Dad was a hammer, a blunt instrument wielded without thought to circumstances.

Juliette didn’t share his attitude. She thought being police chief was about something else, something kinder.

She wanted to help, not control.

This job isn’t for you, he’d told her when she’d applied for the position. You’re too soft. Too willing to forgive when you need to punish.

She aimed a giant raspberry at her dad’s portrait and rolled her chair up to the desk and the small set of reports sitting on her blotter.

A domestic over at the Marones’. Again.

Shirley Stewart escaped from the retirement home. Again. She’d been found on the steps of the Methodist church, unharmed.

Attempted grand theft over at the—

“What?”

She snapped the report open, scanned the perp sheet.

“No, no, no, no,” she moaned. She leaped up from her chair and busted into the squad room. “Where is he?” she asked.

“Holding four,” Owens said, leaning back in his chair. He jerked his thumb back toward the holding cells as if she didn’t know where they were.

“I was supposed to be called if anything happened with this kid,” she said.

“What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”

“Where’s the car?”

“Impound.”

“Do we know whose it is?”

“It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”

“Do that,” she said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.

The metal door opened up with a bang under both her hands and she stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.

Four was back in the corner, and as she got closer she saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

“Miguel?” she said and his head snapped up.

“Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”

“Sorry?” She asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” She glanced down at the report.

“A Porsche,” he muttered.

“A Porsche!” She flung her hands up. “I’m trying to help you, Miguel. And you steal a Porsche?”

“I didn’t get nowhere. Barely got the door open.”

Juliette unlocked the lockbox with the cell keys in it and opened Miguel’s cell, the bars slamming back. The sound echoed in the big empty room. “I suppose you were just gonna sit in it?”

“Hell, no,” Miguel said. “I was gonna steal it, but Mayor Bourdage found me.”

She sat down on the bench next to where Miguel sat on the floor. She was running out of options with this kid, already skirting the line between leniency and not doing her job.

And now he goes and tries to steal a Porsche. It’s like he doesn’t want my help.

“Miguel, tell me what you think I should do.”

His knees came back up and he shrugged. “I don’t care.”

Maybe her father was right, maybe she was too soft. Maybe this kid, whom she liked, whom she bent every damn rule for, didn’t just need a break.

Maybe this kid needed to be punished.

“Look at me, Miguel,” she said, biting out the words.

He shook his head and her temper flared. “Stop being so damn predictable.” Furious, she reached out and jerked his hood back, revealing his face. The bruises and swelling. The blood.

“My God—” she breathed.

“You think I care what you do to me?” he asked, jerking away, the left side of his face immobile, his eye shut tight from the swelling. He was black and purple from his lips to his hairline, the skin along his cheek seemed to have been burned. She knew things with Miguel’s father, Ramon, were bad, but she never dreamed it was this bad. “You think you can do something worse than this?”

“Have you been to the doctor?” she asked.

He sneered and yanked the hood back up.

She leaned back against the brick wall and sighed heavily. Punish him? How? How could she look at what he’d been through and put him in the system? The system would only make him harder. He’d go in there an angry victim and come out a criminal.

It had happened with the last two teenagers she’d sent to the Department of Corrections.

“Where’s your father?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care.”

“How about you tell me what happened?”

Miguel shook his head. “He was drinking and he went after Louisa.” He shrugged, his thin shoulders so small. So young to have to carry so much. “I said something and he picked up this frying pan off the stove.”

She winced. That explained the bruises and burns.

“I’ve got to call community services—”

“I’ll tell them I fell down the stairs.” Miguel shook his head, emphatic.

“Miguel, you can’t be serious. You want to stay with your dad?”

“No, I just don’t want to go to no foster home. Louisa and me will get split up and I ain’t having that.”

“You were going to leave last night, Miguel,” she reminded him. “You would have been split up anyway.”

“I was going to take her,” he said. “I wouldn’t ever leave her behind.”

Great. Kidnapping on top of grand theft. “I can arrest him, bring him—”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “How long this time? Overnight? A week? Last time you did that he came out more pissed off than ever, and me and Louisa had to stay with Patricia.”

“But, Miguel, he hit you.”

“You think this is the first time?”

“Why haven’t your teachers reported this?” she asked.

“I skip if it’s bad. But it’s not usually bad.”

“It’s my job to report this, Miguel.”

“You do what you gotta do, but no social worker is taking me nowhere.”

Rock. Hard place. The kid didn’t trust the system and frankly, she didn’t blame him. Bonne Terre, much less the parish, had no place for a kid like Miguel. It was the streets, holding cell four, or DOC over in Calcasieu Parish. Bonne Terre didn’t have a whole lot of crime, but what they did have was largely juvenile-perpetrated and they just weren’t equipped to help.

Punish, yes. Help, no.

And this was one of those situations that defined the differences between her and her father. These circumstances dictated that she help this kid.

“We need to get you to the doctor,” she said, deciding to put off the question of community services until she had a better answer.

“Am I going to jail?” he asked, and for the first time, something scared colored his voice.

Not if I can help it, she thought.

“Well, it’s not up to me. It’s up to the guy whose car you tried to steal.” He sniffed, the big man, as if it didn’t matter, as if jail would be no problem. And maybe, when push came to shove, it was better than home.

But, man, she wanted to give him another option. He was bright. Smart. Compassionate. He loved his sister, laid down his body for her.

The boy deserved a choice. A chance.

A safe home.

You’re soft, her father’s voice whispered. You’re way too soft.

The door to the holding cells opened and Owens walked in, his tall frame casting a long shadow down the hallway. “Got a name on that Porsche,” he said, coming to stop in the open door of cell four.

“Yeah?” she asked, her stomach tight. If she could just convince the owner not to press charges, to give the kid a pass, then she’d think of something. A way to give the kid a real opportunity, maybe get him out of that house.

But it all depended on the owner of that Porsche.

“You’re not going to believe it.”

“Who does the Porsche belong to, Owens?”

“Tyler O’Neill.”

CHAPTER THREE

JULIETTE TOOK MIGUEL to the clinic before heading out to Tyler’s. She bypassed urgent care altogether and headed straight to the new family doctor who had an office in the clinic.

Dr. Greg Roberts was a good guy. He’d keep his mouth shut, unlike the nurses in the urgent care who lived for cases like this. Bonne Terre was a small town and the most exciting thing the clinic had seen in the past month was when Mrs. Paterson had gotten a little overzealous with her weed whacker and had taken a chunk out of her husband’s ankle.

The gossips had turned it into a domestic abuse case before Mr. Paterson’s bandages were on.

“Boy said he fell down the stairs,” Dr. Roberts said, his voice indicating he didn’t believe it for a moment.

“That’s what he told me, too.” Juliette looked him right in the face and lied, knowing that if she told Dr. Roberts, he’d have no choice but to call in the social workers. Hell, she was supposed to be calling them in herself.

“Chief Tremblant,” he whispered, and she knew he was on to her. “What are you doing with this kid?”

His brown eyes were soft and sympathetic and for a moment she was tempted to tell him the jam she was in. They were friends. Sort of. And Greg was smart. Maybe he had an idea, something. Because right now, she had zip.

But Miguel, nearly passed out in the chair outside Greg’s office, shifted and moaned slightly in his doze and Juliette shook her head.

“My job,” she told Greg. “I’m doing my job.”

“He’s what, sixteen? The boy should be in foster care.”

“You want to call Office of Community Services? Do it.”

“I don’t want to fight with you,” he said. He stepped closer, the warmth from his body making her slightly claustrophobic. He was a young guy, and occasionally she got the vibe that he was interested. Why she couldn’t relax and just go with it was a mystery. “If this kid needs help, I’m on your side.”

The man was handsome, and sincere, she had to give him that. But she still wasn’t about to let him in.

“I appreciate that, Greg. I do. But I know what I’m doing. There are…circumstances,” she whispered.

Greg watched her for a long moment and then held up his hands, indicating he’d back off.

He took a small handful of packaged pills out of his lab coat. “I’ve given him two. He’ll need another two in six hours.”

He dumped the samples in her hands, his fingers brushing hers.

Feel something, she willed her nerve endings, come on, just a little zing.

But there was nothing.

Of course, because she was an idiot, Tyler O’Neill and his broken-down face and heartless grin popped into her mind, and just the thought of him electrified her, put the hair on her arms on end.

That’s what you want? she asked herself ruthlessly. The answer, of course, was no, the by-product of all that fire had been third-degree burns, a life-altering pain.

“Come on, Miguel,” she murmured, giving the boy’s shoulder a shake. Miguel flinched, then came to, clearly disoriented and drowsy, and she helped him to his feet.

Fifteen minutes later, Juliette stopped in front of The Manor, stared through her window at the red door and took a few deep breaths.

“Hey, Ty,” she whispered, practicing her cheerful approach. “You’ll never guess, it’s funny really, but your car almost got stolen last night.”

She pressed her fist to her forehead. “Okay—” she tried straightforward “—look, Ty, we’ve got a situation. Your car is fine and I need you to work with me. I need you—”

I need you.

Her stomach rolled and her skull pounded. Ten years later and she needed him. Frankly, she’d rather take out her gun and blow off her left toe than face Tyler, but Miguel needed her.

She glanced in the rearview mirror to where Miguel slept, his head pressed to the backseat window, his black hair flat against the glass.

“Please, you son of a bitch,” she whispered, “please be reasonable.”

FIRE ANTS WERE EATING Tyler’s brain and it was making him acutely, painfully unreasonable.

Or maybe it was just his father.

“I’m telling you,” Dad said, scrambling eggs without his shirt on. Sunlight coming in through the kitchen window hit his chest hair and put a halo around him.

Ironic. So. Ironic.

“I was staying in Malibu and I grew this beard and everyone thought I was George Clooney. I didn’t pay for a meal for three whole weeks.”

Tyler listened with half an ear, distracted by the fire ants.

“You listening to me, Tyler?”

“Can’t you put on a shirt?” Tyler asked, more concerned about those eggs and his father’s copious chest hair.

Richard dropped the spatula. “What is with you? Ty? You didn’t say two words to me last night.”

“I let you in, didn’t I?”

“Yes, and then you slammed the door to your room like a teenager. What happened to your face?”

“It got punched.”

“Don’t be cute.”

“Fine, then you don’t pretend that arriving here, of all places, is just business as usual.”

Richard crossed his arms over his big chest. Pushing sixty and he still looked good. He could pass for Clooney.

One more scam to add to his repertoire.

“That’s what’s bothering you?”

“I haven’t seen you in eight months! One minute you’re living on my couch the next you’re gone without a word. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead, Dad.”

“I told you I was going to L.A.—”