AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“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 I remembered and it curled through me like smoke. Made me want to touch her, feel her skin.
Lord, this whole situation sucked. My car. This tragic beat-up kid in the back. Juliette. It was enough to bring the fire ants back.
No way I could send that kid off to jail.
“Tyler, I need you—” she said, and that voice and those words were a sledgehammer against my head. “I need you to not press charges. Just pick up your car. Let this go.”
“Let this go?” I asked, incredulous. I wasn’t going to send the kid off to jail, but I 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.”
I wasn’t about to get into this right now. Not with this kid’s beat-up face stuck in my head and Suzy having been violated outside a church of all places.
“Tell me,” I 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 me in half, cut through all that bullshit I carried and laid me to waste. Reminding me, in a fractured heartbeat, of every noble and kind thing she’d ever done for me, and how I’d never done a single thing to deserve it.
“Juliette,” I breathed, regret a suffocating pain in my chest.
She shook her head. “This isn’t about us, Tyler. It’s about the kid. It’s about giving Miguel a chance.”
5
JULIETTE
I held my breath, waiting, praying that the guy I hoped existed, buried deep under Tyler’s selfish, childish nature, would speak up and tell me he wasn’t going to press charges.
It seemed like such a long shot.
Suddenly I 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 I 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 I needed to reassess this situation, but how? What other alternatives were there, for me or for Miguel? I 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 I 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?”
I shook my 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 me without word or warning, I wasn’t about to apologize for my father’s mistakes.
“That wasn’t about the law,” I said through my teeth.
“That’s where I think you’re wrong. I think with you Tremblants it’s always about the law.”
I wanted to snap at him, to turn my head and scream every foul and hateful thing I’d ever thought about him. I wanted to punch him and scratch his face—hurt him like he hurt me.
But what would be the point?
“You have no idea, Tyler,” I said instead, wrapping myself around the meager victory I’d won for Miguel.
TYLER
I signed the last of the papers and followed Juliette out into the impound yard. It broke my heart to see poor Suzy surrounded by junkers with wreaths of parking tickets under their wipers.
She deserved so much better.
I watched Juliette, the sun turning her hair to ebony. Her body, so tall and strong. Her grace had become something disciplined. Something controlled. Powerful.
It was making me nuts. It was why I’d tried to provoke her in the car, watching her hands on the wheel, her eyes on the road. Queen of her kingdom.
