Tyler O’Neill’s Redemption (2 page)

“Just out for a stroll,” he said, tossing the branch he’d been holding onto the dirt.

“Sure you are. What are you doing back in Bonne Terre?” she asked.

“Savannah said The Manor is sitting empty,” Tyler said and shrugged, as if his arrival out of the blue after ten years was perfectly natural. “Seems like someone should be watching over it.”

“You?” she asked, laughing at the very notion of Tyler being down here for any unselfish reason. “Please.”

He stared at her for a second and then smiled.

Her heart fluttered against her chest, a small mechanical bird powered by that smile.

He glanced out at the buildings lining the square, the hardware store and Jillian’s Jewelry Shop. The café and the bank. He watched those buildings as if they were watching him back. A threat to be monitored.

“You’re right,” he said, but that was all he said.

Juliette bit her lip against the other questions screaming to be heard.

Why did you go?

Why didn’t you write? Call?

What did I do?

But what would be the point? Ten years of silence were all the answer she really needed.

“Who’s been working on your face?” she asked.

“Old friends,” he said, touching his eye with careful fingers and wincing anyway.

Something dark and vicious inside of her really liked that he was in pain.

And she hated that she liked it since she’d sworn off feeling anything about this man years ago. But he was here, standing so close she could shoot him, and these feelings—all the old anger and hurt and rage—resurfaced as though they’d just been waiting for the chance.

She’d call him tomorrow, fill him in on what was happening out at The Manor over the phone. Then she’d hang up and never waste another minute thinking about Tyler O’Neill.

She put the car in gear. “Have a good night, Tyler,” she said, liking all the cool “go screw yourself” she managed to fit into those words.

“Wait.” His hand touched the open window of her car and she pressed her foot back on the brake.

“What?”

“I got an e-mail from Savannah. This guy she’s with—”

“Matt?”

“Right, is he—”

Juliette laughed. “You going to stand there and pretend to care, Tyler?”

“She’s my sister,” he snapped. “Of course I care.”

“Then you should show up once in a while.”

Tyler’s grin was gone and he was looking at her with cold blue eyes that, without a word, damned her straight to hell. Silent, he turned and walked away.

Juliette watched him go, the same long legs, the wide shoulders and narrow hips that looked so damn good in faded and torn blue jeans it made her want to bite something.

Ten years. Ten damn years and he comes back here as if nothing ever happened.

She rested her head against the steering wheel. Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, a broken heart didn’t mean anything. She’d been nineteen, after all, a couple of years of college under her belt, law school at Oklahoma State glimmering in the future—she should have known better than to get tangled with Tyler O’Neill. A high school drop-out who made his living winning Sunday-night poker games and playing piano out at Remy’s. He was so opposite from her, he was like a different animal, a force of nature she couldn’t ignore. At eighteen he’d been the only thing that could have distracted her from her plan. And he had. He totally derailed her plan.

And now he was back and Savannah was her best friend and things were strange around The Manor these days.

And it was her freaking job to deal with it.

She took her foot off the brake and rolled up next to him.

“Do you want a ride?” she asked, not looking at him. “You’ve still got another mile to go.”

“I know how far it is.”

“Then climb in and I’ll drive you.”

He stopped, sighed, and looked up at the stars as though he might feel a little of the garbage she felt. After a moment he circled the front of the car, stepping through her headlights, the low beams catching the bright red of his blood on his pale face. Gold-blond hair under his cap and those eyes. Oh, man, those eyes.

And then he was in the car with her and she could smell him, toothpaste and cigars and him. Tyler.

A million memories of hot days and cool nights flooded her. His hands under her skirt, those eyes memorizing every detail of her face, those lips telling her a hundred lies—it all exploded in her head, nearly blinding her.

“Thanks,” Tyler said as subdued as she’d heard him. “How have you—”

She cut him off. There would be no “how have you been’s?” She knew how he’d been, rich and dating a hot French model whose popularity had them all over every magazine in the grocery store. All month long she couldn’t buy a carrot without looking at Tyler holding hands with some stick-thin blonde.

“You should know a few things about what’s happening at The Manor,” she said, turning left around the square, past the Bonne Terre Inn and toward the road out of town.

“Savannah and Margot are both gone,” Tyler said. “And Mom was around a month ago. Savannah told me.”

“Not just around,” Juliette said, sparing him a glance only to find him watching her. Awareness like icy hot prickles ran down her spine. “She broke into the place twice, maybe three times. She scared the bejesus out of everyone, especially Kate.”

“Everyone okay?”

Again she squelched the urge to tell him that if he cared, he should have been there, but she knew it all boiled down in the O’Neill family dynamic with their mother. She’d left scars on her children that could be seen from space.

“Fine,” Juliette said. “But Savannah didn’t press charges, so Vanessa is out there somewhere.”

“Why did she come back?” he asked. “It’s been twenty years since she left us here. Why now?”

“She thinks there are gems hidden in the house,” she said.

“Gems?” Tyler asked, shaking his head. “The Notorious O’Neills just don’t know when to quit. How in the world would gems get hidden in The Manor?”

“Stolen gems from a casino seven years ago. Your mother was involved.”

“Of course.”

“But so was your dad.”

“My dad?” Tyler looked blank for a moment as if the word
dad
had no real connection to him, wasn’t even a word he understood. But then there was the shadow. His face changed, and Tyler became harder. Older. As if what his parents had done to him and his brother and sister was a weight he carried, a weight he’d grown used to. Sometimes, though, he got knocked back by how truly heavy it was and how long he’d been carrying it.

Not that she cared. She used to, of course. He’d put on that brooding, grieving, lost-little-boy thing with her ten years ago and her skirts had literally fallen off.

She cleared her throat and stopped at the red light just outside of town. “The house hasn’t been broken into again,” she said. “But there’s been some suspicious activity. Someone’s snooping.”

“It’s still a rite of passage around here to sneak into my grandmother’s back courtyard?”

“Not so much,” Juliette said. “Not since Matt came along. And what I’ve found, broken glass, footprints, trampled plants, they’re not in the back courtyard. Most of the activity is focused on the sides of the house, the first floor windows into the library.”

Tyler’s eyes were sharp as knives. “Your father watching my house?” he asked.

She bit back a smile, staring at the white lines on the street. “Dad’s not chief anymore, Tyler. But yes, police are watching your house.”

“Great,” he muttered, his long-standing disdain for local law enforcement, her father in particular, the stuff of legend in Bonne Terre. “So we’ve got my mother, missing gems and someone trying to break into the house. Anything else I should know about?”

“There’s an alarm.” She dug into the pocket of her red fitted blazer.

“At The Manor?” he asked. “When I lived there Margot rarely bothered to lock the doors.”

“That was a long time ago, Tyler,” she said. “Here’s the code.” She set a piece of paper down on the seat between them. “It’s right by the front door and there’s another keypad in the kitchen.”

“Well,” he sighed, picking up the piece of paper and lifting his hips slightly so he could push it into the front pocket of his worn jeans. “Can’t say I expected that.”

Juliette took a deep breath, wondering whether she should tell him about the other stuff, whether it even mattered to him. She glanced at him, his jaw clenched as he stared out at the darkness around her car.

Was it even her business to tell him?

If not her, then who? No one else was around, and if it could take some heat off his mother, should he see her, then maybe they could all avoid another incident like what happened last month with Savannah.

“Look, Tyler, I don’t want to—”

Those blue eyes swung toward her, and she couldn’t deny that as much as she disliked him, she’d never forgotten him.

I thought I knew you,
she thought mournfully.
I thought we were friends.

“Spit it out, Juliette.”

“Your grandmother paid your mother to stay away from you kids.” Tyler blinked. “Ten thousand a year.”

“You know that?”

“Savannah told me. Margot confessed last month when Vanessa broke in again. I’m sorry, Tyler—”

“I’ve known for years,” he said.

“You knew?” she breathed.

He nodded. “How did Savannah take it?”

“Not well,” Juliette said. An understatement, but luckily Matt was there to help.

“Carter and I found out and…” He sighed and took off his cap, pushing his fingers through his thick blond hair. “We didn’t tell her. We thought…I don’t know…we thought we were protecting her. It’s all we ever wanted to do.”

Juliette took her eyes off the road and gaped at him.

Don’t care,
she warned herself.
Don’t show that you’re even interested, because that man will do something awful with the information.

“Well, I guess that catches you up to speed,” she said, pressing on the clutch and shifting into first when the light turned green. She sped up and shifted into second and then as the road opened up she drove it into third.

Tyler’s chuckle stirred the hair on her neck. “Juliette Tremblant,” he murmured. “You still have a thing for speed.” She didn’t say anything. Refused to rise to his bait. The car filled with tension until it was all she could do not to unroll her window, just so she could breathe.

“You’ve changed,” he said, and she could feel his eyes on her hair, her body, the clothes she covered it with, and she knew what he wasn’t saying—she’d changed, and it wasn’t for the better.

“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—”