Molly O'Keefe - Tyler O'Neill's Redemption

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.