The Gambler

by Molly O'Keefe

  I cleared my throat and stopped at the red light just outside of town. “The house hasn’t been broken into again,” I 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 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.

  I 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, my 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.” I dug into the pocket of my 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,” I said. “Here’s the code.” I set a piece of paper down on the seat between us. “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.”

  I took a deep breath, wondering whether I should tell him about the other stuff, whether it even mattered to him.

  Was it even my business to tell him?

  If not me, 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 me and I couldn’t deny that as much as I hated him, I’d never forgotten him.

  I thought I knew you, I thought mournfully.

  “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?” I breathed.

  He nodded. “How did Savannah take it?”

  “Not well,” I 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.”

  I took my eyes off the road and gaped at him.

  Don’t care. 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,” I said, pressing on the clutch and shifting into first when the light turned green. I sped up and shifted into second and then as the road opened up I drove it into third.

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

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

  “You haven’t,” I said, not sparing him a glance as I 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 I 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 I tried to convince myself it was disgusting. But it wasn’t. It was hot.

  The air in the car was humid, thick. I cranked the fan a notch higher, hoping it would help.

  It didn’t.

  “How 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 I loved this town, and my job was to take care of its citizens, his attitude rubbed me 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 Chris Evans eyes practically glowing in the darkness of the car.

  Sex oozed off him. And he was breathing all my damn air.

  “Your sister is my best friend.”

  “Right,” Tyler said, his voice ripe, his eyes way too warm. “My sister.”

  I stomped on the brakes. “What are you saying?”

  His eyes raked me, that lopsided grin that used to put my whole world on edge was back. “Nothing,” he drawled.

  His arm stole across the top of the seats, not touching me, but too close anyway.

  I 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 me—I ignored it all and opened his door.

  I’d done what I needed to do. He’d been warned. I could kick him out of my car and, if God was kind, never ever lay eyes on Tyler O’Neill again.

  “Get out,” I said.

  The charm vanished from his smile. All that smug sexuality was banked, put on ice for the moment. “Come on, Juliette—”

  “Get the hell out of my car, Tyler.”

  I met his eyes, unflinching, unblinking, nothing but anger and disgust over his betrayal, his absence, all those years spent ignoring not just me, but Savannah and Margot, too.

  “You left without a word,” I said, the words burning my mouth, scorching the air. “You are no better than your parents.”

  Perhaps it was the lights, the shadows, but his face changed. Melted. Just for a moment, as if he couldn’t quite keep the mask in place.

  But then he eased out of my car into the dark night, taking his scent and his heat and those eyes with him.

  “Why did they call you, Juliette?” he asked, slamming the door and leaning in the window. “All the good citizens of Bonne Terre—what made them think of you when I came into town?”

  I knew what he thought, that it was our past that had made people call me. That people saw him and thought of me, that we were linked, forever, in everyone’s heads. In my head.

  I smiled, so damn happy, thrilled actually, to prove him wrong. “Because it’s my job, Tyler.”

  Slowly, I pushed back my light blazer, revealing my gun.

  And my badge.

  His jaw dropped and it was beautiful. Really, really a beautiful thing.

  “What have you done, Jules?” he breathed.

  “It’s Chief Tremblant now, Tyler,” I said.

  Grinning, I popped the clutch and peeled out, leaving Tyler O’Neill, in a delicious twist, in my dust.

  3

  TYLER

  * * *

  The Manor looked the same.

  Shabby but somehow noble. Elegant. A lot like the old lady who lived there.

  But just looking at the house, the dark windows, that bright red door, my feet got itchy. My collar tight.

  It wasn’t home, not for me, and it proved another thing I’d know
n to be true about myself. If this place, with these women who had loved me with all their hearts, wasn’t home—no place was.

  I sighed and scrubbed at the back of my neck.

  Tired, sore and melancholy, I hoped that if there wasn’t sugar pie waiting for me, 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, I 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 I glanced inside the window and saw small red infrared dots around the room.

  Not your average alarm system.

  I 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, I thought. Big shot architect.

  A good guy, Juliette had said, but I doubted I could trust her opinion. She used to think I was good, after all.

  You’re the best, she’d said, her long strong legs wrapped around mine, her warm body, sticky with sweat and salt water, wedged between me and the backseat of my old Chevy.

  I smiled, remembering how I’d have to peel her off the vinyl while she yelped. I’d felt, that whole summer, as though I was in the middle of a dream. Juliette Tremblant, the sexiest, most untouchable girl I’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. I’d been more than happy to show her.

  Now she was the police chief, just like dear old dad. Man, I did not see that coming. The Juliette I’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.

  I’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 I’d assumed she’d become the most beautiful lawyer the state of Louisiana had ever seen.

  Not a police chief in pant suits.

  You don’t think running out in the middle of the night without a word to her might have something to do with that?

  That was a question I wasn’t even contemplating right now. Instead I eyed the fence. It was taller, stronger than it used to be, but I had no problem chinning myself up to the top.

  Whoa. The back courtyard, which had been a mess when I’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 me.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  I hung my aching head for just a moment to wonder why I wasn’t surprised before leaping down onto the lush green grass inside the fence.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  JULIETTE

  * * *

  I pushed my sunglasses up onto my head as I stepped into the station Monday morning.

  “Hey, Lisa,” I said, walking by the reception and dispatch desk.

  “Morning, Jules…ah…Chief.”

  Lisa and I 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 I insisted on.

  Six months as chief and Lisa was just catching on.

  I stepped through the glass doors that led to the squad room and my office. Just like every morning, as soon as I stepped into the common room, all the chatter stopped as if it had been cut off by a knife.

  The squeak of my shoes across the linoleum was the only sound in the room until I came to a stop at the night-shift desk, where the men were changing shifts and shooting the shit.

  “Morning, guys,” I said, taking a sip from my 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 I hired from out of town. The other two—Officers Jones and Owens, who had worked with my father and grown up in Bonne Terre—found the word a little sticky.

  They were bullies. And I knew it. And I was trying so hard to change it.

  I 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 I was damn good at my job.

  They didn’t have to like me, but they sure as hell had to listen to me.

  “You’ve got reports on my desk?” I asked Weber and Kavanaugh, my two new hires who’d pulled the night shift. They nodded and chorused, “Yes, sir.”

  “Great,” I said. “Go on home.”

  They stood and I stepped into my office, shutting the door behind me. Conversations resumed as I set down my mug and dropped into my chair like a rock.

  For some ridiculous reason, I still hadn’t redecorated this office. I’d modernized every other part of this force, but not these four walls. And so, it remained exactly the same as when my father had been chief. Dark walls, dress-blues portraits of every police chief Bonne Terre had ever seen, and a big desk upon which I could safely float down the Mississippi.

  I should redecorate.

  When I’d taken the job I’d been so focused on getting updated computers and fresh blood in the squad room that I hadn’t given my office a second thought.

  But now, sitting under my father’s stern visage reminded me—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 for me. 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.

  I didn’t share his attitude. I thought being police chief was about something else, something kinder.

  I wanted to help, not control.

  This job isn’t for you, he’d told me when I’d applied for the position. You’re too soft. Too willing to forgive when you need to punish.

  I aimed a giant raspberry at my dad’s portrait and rolled my chair up to the desk and the small set of reports sitting on my 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?”

  I snapped the report open, scanned the perp sheet.

  “No, no, no, no,” I moaned. I leaped up from my chair and busted into the squad room. “Where is he?” I asked.

  “Holding four,” Owens said, leaning back in his chair. He jerked his thumb back toward the holding cells as if I didn’t know where they were. Owens was round and pink and slick. And so smug it was hard not to smack his face on principle.

  “I was supposed to be called if anything happened with this kid,” I said.

  “What were we supposed to do?” Owens asked, his eyes wide in false and infuriating innocence. “The mayor caught him breaking into the car.”

  “Where’s the car?”

  “Impou
nd.”

  “Do we know whose it is?”

  “It’s not in the report?” Officer Owens asked. “Your night-shift boys caught it. I can go check it—”

  “Do that,” I said, so fed up with Owens’s laziness and Jones’s excuses.

  The metal door opened up with a bang under both my hands and I stalked down the small hallway between cells. It was hot and still, the high windows letting in bright bars of sunlight across the gray concrete walls.

  Four was back in the corner, and as I got closer I saw him on the floor. His wrists were propped up on his bent knees, the hood of his ragged gray sweatshirt pulled up over his head.

  “Miguel?” I said and his head snapped up.

  “Chief!” He jerked upright, his legs hitting the cement floor, but his face was still buried in the shadows under his hood. “Chief, I’m so—”

  “Sorry?” I asked. “Let me guess, you didn’t mean to attempt to steal a—” I glanced down at the report.

  “A Porsche,” he muttered.

  “A Porsche!” I flung my hands up. “I’m trying to help you, Miguel. And you steal a Porsche?”

  “I didn’t get nowhere. Barely got the door open.”

  I unlocked the lockbox with the cell keys in it and opened Miguel’s cell, the bars slamming back. The sound echoed in the big empty room. “I suppose you were just gonna sit in it?”

  “Hell, no,” Miguel said. “I was gonna steal it, but Mayor Bourdage found me.”

  I sat down on the bench next to where Miguel sat on the floor. I was running out of options with this kid, already skirting the line between leniency and not doing my job.

  And now he goes and tries to steal a Porsche. It’s like he doesn’t want my help.

  “Miguel, tell me what you think I should do.”

  His knees came back up and he shrugged. “I don’t care.”

  Maybe my father was right, maybe I was too soft. Maybe this kid, whom I liked, whom I bent every damn rule for, didn’t just need a break.

  Maybe this kid needed to be punished.

  “Look at me, Miguel,” I said, biting out the words.

  He shook his head and my temper flared. “Stop being so damn predictable.” Furious, I reached out and jerked his hood back, revealing his face. The bruises and swelling. The blood.