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I bit my lip against the other questions screaming to be heard.
Why did you go?
Why didn’t you write? Call?
What did I do?
But what would be the point? Ten years of silence were all the answer I really needed.
“Who’s been working on your face?” I asked.
“Old friends,” he said, touching his eye with careful fingers and wincing anyway.
Something dark and vicious inside of me really liked that he was in pain.
And I hated that I liked it since I’d sworn off feeling anything about this man years ago. But he was here, standing so close I could shoot him, and these feelings—all the old anger and hurt and rage—resurfaced as though they’d just been waiting for the chance.
I’d call him tomorrow, fill him in on what was happening out at The Manor over the phone. Then I’d hang up and never waste another minute thinking about Tyler O’Neill.
I put the car in gear. “Have a good night, Tyler,” I said, liking all the cool “go screw yourself” I managed to fit into those words.
“Wait.” His hand touched the open window of my car and I pressed my foot back on the brake.
“What?”
“I got an e-mail from Savannah. This guy she’s with—”
“Matt?”
“Right, is he—”
I laughed. “You going to stand there and pretend to care, Tyler?”
“She’s my sister,” he snapped. “Of course I care.”
“Then you should show up once in a while.”
Tyler’s grin was gone and he was looking at me with cold blue eyes that, without a word, damned me straight to hell. Silent, he turned and walked away.
I 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 me want to bite something.
Ten years. Ten damn years and he comes back here as if nothing ever happened.
I rested my head against the steering wheel. Maybe nothing had happened. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, a broken heart didn’t mean anything. I’d been twenty, after all, a couple of years of college under my belt, law school at Oklahoma State glimmering in the future—I 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 me, he was like a different animal, a force of nature I couldn’t ignore. At twenty-one he’d been the only thing that could have distracted me from my plan. And he had. He totally derailed my plan.
And now he was back and Savannah was my best friend and things were strange around The Manor these days.
And it was my freaking job to deal with it.
I took my foot off the brake and rolled up next to him.
“Do you want a ride?” I 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 circled the front of the car, stepping through my 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 me and I could smell him, toothpaste and cigars and him. Tyler.
A million memories of hot days and cool nights flooded me. His hands under my skirt, those eyes memorizing every detail of my face, those lips telling me a hundred lies.
“Thanks,” Tyler said as subdued as I’d heard ever him. “How have you—”
I cut him off. There would be no “how have you been’s?” I 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 I 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,” I 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,” I said, sparing him a glance only to find him watching me. Awareness like icy hot prickles ran down my spine. “She broke into the place twice, maybe three times. Scared the bejesus out of everyone, especially Kate.”
“Everyone okay?”
Again I squelched the urge to tell him that if he cared, he should have been there, but I 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,” I 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,” I said.
