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.
“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,