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.