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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.
