There was nothing I could say to that. Because, despite the proof he’d offered me to sway me toward belief on one side of the scale, all I had was the cynical proof he couldn’t change—proof that took the shape of heartbreak.
“You don’t believe me?” he asked.
“Do you blame me?” I asked, my throat and mouth a desert. “I’ll never forgive my Dad for doing what he did, but… a phone call? An email? A god damn Facebook message? Something?”
“I was…” he blew out a breath. “Trying to make it simple. I think. Easier.”
“Was it easy for you?” I asked.
“Fuck no.”
That at least gave me comfort, bitter as it might be.
I am not asking what if. I’m not doing that.
“You have every reason to hate me,” he said. “But hating me doesn’t explain why you’re here. Why you care. Sure as hell doesn’t explain last night.”
“Where’s your girlfriend?” I finally managed to ask. “The French model in all the magazines?”
“Theresa Guerriere,” he said. “She dumped me.”
I didn’t even bother to try and keep my mouth closed. He smiled at my expression. “I’m not kidding,” he insisted, and then suddenly the sparkle drained away and Tyler suddenly looked older. Tired. I was able to see Margot in him, and even Savannah. And not just the eyes and the hair, but the careful side of the O’Neills. The wary side that curled up around their hurts so other people couldn’t see.
It was human. Real. Devastating.
“I thought she was pregnant,” he said, and the air emptied out of me, and I was just a sack of skin and incredulity. “And I…I was so damn happy. So…” He blew out a big breath. “Ready to be a person. A real person. A human with family and a home. I proposed.”
“Marriage?” I squeaked. The concept of marriage and Tyler sharing space in the same sentence made jealousy gnaw at my bones.
“I proposed—” he glanced at me sideways, his grin a stab at my heart “—marriage. And she said no because she got her period. And she had no intention of being a person with a family and a home. Not with me.”
So much pain. It just radiated off of him, soaking into my skin by osmosis. “Did you love her?” I whispered.
“No,” he said slowly. “I loved the idea of a baby. But Theresa and I were really more of an arrangement than a couple. In the end, we were lucky she wasn’t pregnant. It would have been a disaster between us.”
I didn’t know what to say, how to process this new man beside me. I twisted a cookie in my hands, tearing it apart and then putting it back together.
“What about you?” he asked.
“What about me?”
“Any proposals?” he teased. The glitter was back, but not completely. I’d seen behind the curtain and the mighty and powerful Oz was just a man with hurts and pains, like the rest of the world.
It was a sickness on my part that it made him even more attractive to me.
“No,” I said. “No proposals.”
“You happy being chief?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What happened to law school?”
“I got impatient,” I said. I pressed my finger down on a black cookie crumb on my pants and touched it to the tip of my tongue. “I wanted to get on with my life, get to work, and law school was going to take forever. I got my masters at night while working.”
He chuckled and looked at his hands. “Patience was never your strong suit.”
“No.” I smiled. “It still isn’t. But it’s something I’m working on.”
“Have you always worked in Bonne Terre?”
“No, I’ve only been here six months,” I said. “I was a lieutenant in Baton Rouge for a long time. I had gotten my masters in Municipal Administration and was thinking about a change when Dad retired and the interim chief they’d hired didn’t work out.”
“So you decided to come home and fill your father’s shoes?” There was a world of sarcasm behind his words, but instead of getting angry, I understood where it came from.
I looked at him, the softness and magic of him. And it suddenly occurred to me that Tyler had taken beatings before. He was a fighter at school and my father never really scared him. The past ten years I’d convinced myself that what we felt hadn’t been real, but last night and now in this truck, I couldn’t believe it. It had been real.
We were real.
“What else did my Dad do to you?”
Tyler quickly shook his head, and that he understood exactly what I was talking about damned my father with guilt. “Nothing, Juliette. I was a kid and I was scared.” His eyes were dead serious. “Leaving you was my mistake.”
“Mistake?” I asked on a weak breath of air.
He stared at his hands for a long time and I held my breath, waiting. When he finally looked up at me, his eyes were as blue and bright as if they were made out of the hottest part of flame.