Tyler O'Neill's Redemption

Tyler watched her, sensing something else at work. Her aggression was banked, and she wasn’t just being civil. No, she was apprehensive. And mad about it. And the longer he stared at her, the worse it got, until finally her hazel eyes were shooting out sparks.

“Please,” she said through clenched teeth and Tyler smiled.

A supplicant Juliette. The fire ants went home and his day just got a whole lot better.

“Well.” He grinned and he could hear her grinding her teeth. “Since you asked so nice, Chief Tremblant, I would be delighted to head on down to the station to get my car and press charges against the juvenile delinquent who had the balls to try and steal Suzy.”

“Fine,” she snapped. “Get dressed.”

Tyler ducked back inside to grab a shirt.

“Who’s the girl?” Dad asked, standing at the living room window, lifting the curtains an inch so he could stare at the porch.

“No one,” Tyler said, grabbing his shirt from the counter where he’d thrown it last night. It stank of blood and dirt and smoke and there was no way he was putting it back on and getting in a car with Juliette Tremblant. Bad enough his face looked like hamburger.

But all of his clothes were in Suzy.

“Give me a shirt,” he said, stepping into the living room.

Dad pointed to his open duffel on the couch, still looking through the window. “She looks like police.”

“She is,” Tyler said, slinging through Dad’s shirts. There were a bunch of them, which made Tyler nervous about his father’s travel plans. Or lack thereof. “Do you even play golf?” he asked, finally picking a gray shirt from the golf-themed collection.

“What are police doing here?” Dad asked, tight-faced and still.

“Calm down,” Tyler said. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Dad cocked his head and pursed his lips, his eyes getting a little too speculative. “I’d almost say too bad. Shame for a woman like that to be wasted on a badge.”

Something red and boiling bubbled through him, making his hands twitch. His eye pound.

“Well, don’t worry about it. I’ll handle her.”

Dad whistled low through his teeth and Tyler wanted to put his fist through something.

“Later,” Tyler said, shoving his feet into his worn down boots. “Try and stay out of trouble.”

“No guarantees, son,” Dad said, a big grin across his face. “No guarantees.”

“So,” Tyler said as they approached the sedan and the passed-out would-be car thief in the backseat. “How much trouble will this kid be in?”

Juliette stopped at the curb. “You didn’t have any luggage last night. Where’d you get that shirt?”

Crap. Didn’t think that through. Chief Tremblant was no dummy, clearly.

Tyler shrugged. “It was in The Manor,” he said, pushing at the too-big gray golf shirt. “That Matt guy must have left it.”

Juliette nodded, her jaw tight under the aviator sunglasses she wore. “You see anything strange around the house?”

“Strange?” Tyler asked, painfully aware that he was lying to police already, much less Juliette.

I’m back in town less than a day, he thought, bitter and tired. And I’m already down this road with her.

Thanks, Dad.

“Broken windows?” Juliette asked. “Any sign of entry at all?”

Nothing except a sixty-year-old thief looking for a fortune in gems.

He shook his head. “Nothing as far as I could see,” he lied, the words uncommonly thick in his mouth. Part of being a Notorious O’Neill was the ability to lie like it was poetry, and he’d forgotten Juliette’s effect on that particular family trait. She made him sound as practiced as a choir boy lying to the Holy Father.

Something about her eyes, the way she looked at him as if she expected the worst but hoped for better—it was like static electricity. It made him want, so badly, to be a different man. And so the lies—they just curled up and quivered in his mouth.

Complicated. Complicated. Complicated.

“So,” he said, easing into the passenger seat, turning to look in the backseat. “About the kid—”

Bright sunlight splashed across the mess that was the boy’s face. Burns. Bruises. Stitches at his lip and eye. Somebody had gone to town on the boy, with fury. Hate, even.

Made his stomach turn just looking at it.

Juliette started the car, the sound of the engine ripping through his head.

“What happened to him?” Tyler asked through a dry throat. He turned back around to stare out the windshield at the trees and sunlight, birds and foxes at the side of the road, everything normal and right in the world.

But the boy’s face stuck in Tyler’s head.

Juliette glanced at him, her hands white-knuckled on the steering wheel. “His father,” she said. “Did that?”

Juliette nodded and he swore. Something dark and slimy twisted in his stomach. Richard was no prize, and frankly neither was his mother—but to do that? To a kid?

“He tried to steal your car to get away. He was going to pick up his ten-year-old sister and leave town.”

“In a 1972 Porsche? The clutch is pretty tricky. I doubt the kid would have been able to get it out of the parking lot.”

“I’m guessing he wasn’t thinking too clearly,” she said, her voice that sweet sad drawl he remembered and it curled through him like smoke. Made him want to touch her, feel her skin.

Lord, this whole situation sucked. His car. This tragic beat-up kid in the back. Juliette. It was enough to bring the fire ants back.

No way he could send that kid off to jail.

“Tyler, I need you—” she said, and that voice and those words were a sledgehammer against his head. His whole body shook. “I need you to not press charges. Just pick up your car. Let this go.”

“Let this go?” he asked, incredulous. He wasn’t going to send the kid off to jail, but he didn’t think the boy should go running off to freedom quite so easily, either. “Juliette, I’m not one for letting things go—”

“Really?” she asked. “Could have fooled me.”

He wasn’t about to get into this right now. Not with this kid’s beat-up face stuck in his head and Suzy having been violated outside a church of all places.