Tyler O'Neill's Redemption

“Tell me,” he said, leaning back against the passenger door, watching her. “What’s going to happen if I let it go?”

“The real question is what will happen if you don’t.” She pushed her sunglasses on top of her head, displacing her long black hair. Shorter than it had been, but still so bright and so dark it reflected blue in places. “DOC,” she said. “I’m just trying to keep him out of jail. You remember how that felt.”

Her level gaze sawed him in half, cut through all that bullshit he carried and laid him to waste. Reminding him, in a fractured heartbeat, of every noble and kind thing she’d ever done for him, and how he’d never done a single thing to deserve it.

“Juliette,” he breathed, regret a suffocating pain in his chest.

She shook her head. “This isn’t about us, Tyler. It’s about the kid. It’s about giving Miguel a chance.”

CHAPTER FOUR

JULIETTE HELD HER BREATH, waiting, praying that the guy she hoped existed, buried deep under Tyler’s selfish, childish nature, would speak up and tell her he wasn’t going to press charges.

It seemed like such a long shot.

Suddenly she was struck by a gut-wrenching fear that keeping Miguel out of the system wasn’t the right thing to do. Too many people knew what she was doing now—Dr. Roberts, who was putting himself and his career on the line for a kid he didn’t know and a woman who held him at arm’s length, and Tyler, who’d proven to be about as trustworthy as a toddler on a sugar high.

Maybe she needed to reassess this situation, but how? What other alternatives were there, for her or for Miguel? Juliette pulled in front of the gates at the impound yard behind the station and faced Tyler.

“So much for defending Suzy’s honor,” Tyler said and Juliette nearly collapsed with relief. “I won’t press charges, but what happens now?”

“Well, you get your car and go about your business.”

“What happens to the kid?” Tyler asked. “Some kind of public service? A community thing? Picking up trash on the highway?”

Juliette shook her head. “I…I don’t know yet.”

“Don’t know yet?” Tyler asked. “Aren’t you chief?”

“We don’t have any kind of program—”

“So he steals my car and you just let him go?” Tyler asked.

“Of course not, Tyler. I’m not saying he won’t be punished in some way, I just haven’t figured it out. But I will.”

“You could always ask your father,” Tyler said, something in his voice ugly and mean. “He had some creative ways for dealing with kids who broke the law.”

He was right. And frankly, he was right to be mad. But ten years after Tyler had left her without word or warning, she wasn’t about to apologize for her father’s mistakes.

“That wasn’t about the law,” Juliette said through her teeth.

“I know,” Tyler said. “Your father made it real clear why he and his goon were kicking the crap out of me.”

She felt him watching her, but she didn’t turn, didn’t engage in this fight with him. The past—their past—was dead and buried.

“You’ve gotten cold, Jules,” he said. “A few years ago you’d have torn my head off.”

She wanted to snap at him, to turn her head and scream every foul and hateful thing she’d ever thought about him. She wanted to punch him and scratch his face—hurt him like he hurt her.

But what would be the point?

“You have no idea, Tyler,” she said instead, wrapping herself around her icy-cold hate for Tyler O’Neill and the meager victory she’d won for Miguel.

TYLER SIGNED THE LAST of the papers and followed Juliette out into the impound yard. It broke his heart to see poor Suzy surrounded by junkers with wreaths of parking tickets under their wipers.

She deserved so much better.

He watched Juliette, the sun turning her hair to ebony. Her body, so tall and strong. Her grace had become something disciplined. Something controlled. Powerful.

It was making him nuts. It was why he’d tried to provoke her in the car, watching her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road. Queen of her kingdom.

He wanted to knock her down a few pegs, remind her of that totally different girl he’d left behind.

But not you. Some awful, righteous, pain-in-the-butt voice inside his head asked, You’re still the same, aren’t you?

“Here you go,” she said, unlocking the gate, swinging the chain link back. She stood back, her hand on her thin waist, her black pants tight across her thighs. Her hips.

He swallowed, tossing his keys in his palm. Trying to be casual. Pretending that something wasn’t shaken inside of him.

When he’d made the stupid decision to come back to Bonne Terre it had never occurred to him that Juliette would still be here. If he’d have thought he’d run into her, he never would have come. Because it hurt to look at her, it hurt to be reminded of what he’d felt that summer—of who, for three short months, he’d let himself believe he could be.

“Thank you,” Juliette said, brushing off her hands, “for being cool about—”

He put his hand up, shaking his head. The years behind them, the way he’d left, those nights in the bayou, what she’d done for him in the end.

“It’s the least I could do, Juliette.”

For a second her face softened, and she was the girl he’d known. The girl who had made his head spin and his heart thunder with stupid dreams, a million of them put right into her soft hands.

“It’s a good thing you’re trying to do,” he said. “With that boy.”

She opened her mouth as if to say something, but in the end thought better of it and just nodded.

He slid his key into the lock of Suzy’s door, every instinct fighting against the stupid impulse he had to touch her. Just once more. For all the years ahead.

Do not, he told himself, trying to be firm, trying to be reasonable, get yourself worked up over this woman again. Don’t do it.

“You know,” he said, turning to face her again, the sun behind her making him squint, his eye pound. “Your dad was right.”

“About what?” she asked on a tired little laugh that nearly broke his heart.

Don’t do it, you idiot.

Her eyes snapped, the air around them crackled. The impulse, the need to touch her was a thousand-pound weight he could not ignore or shake off.

She will take off your head and feed it to a dog, man. Do not be stupid.

But in the end he ignored the voice because she was a magnet to everything in him searching for a direction. He stepped close, close enough to breathe the breath she exhaled. Close enough to smell her skin, warm and spicy in the sunlight.