Page 19 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

“Dog sitting?”

“Well, kind of dog sitting. I don’t know whether I’m in charge of this dog or not. But I feel like I shouldn’t leave it alone.”

“Taylor, what the hell is going on?”

Taylor took a deep breath. “You have to promise you won’t tell anybody.”

“You know I won’t.”

“Not even Bradley.”

“Okay… You’re starting to scare me, though.”

“It’s Kane.”

There was silence on the other end of the line. For a moment, she thought Maddie might be trying to place the name, but then Maddie said, “Kane McCormick?”

“Yeah, him. He’s back in town.”

“You mean, because his father just died?”

“I guess he was contacted about the will. Which I kind of knew would happen.”

Maddie snorted. “It figures that that would be the thing to bring him back after all this time,” she said. “The promise of money.”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell if that’s why he came back or not.”

“Sure seems like it. He never came back while Jason was alive, and the moment he’s dead, Kane’s back in town? Of course it’s about money. He wants to see if his father left him anything. Do you know if he did or not?”

“You know I can’t really talk about that,” Taylor said. “It’s a legal document. I’m not going to gossip about what was included in it before Kane even knows himself.”

“You’re being a lot nicer than I’m sure he’s being,” Maddie said. “How did he respond when he found out that you had been left a share of the house?”

“Oh, he didn’t like that much,” Taylor said. “But there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He’s going to be staying in town for the duration, though, so that’s going to be pretty complicated.”

“I can’t believe all this,” Maddie said. “Did you find out anything about where he went when he disappeared?”

“He says he’s been in Detroit,” Taylor reported.

“Detroit?” She could almost hear her friend frowning. “I wonder what would take him there.”

“I have no idea. He hasn’t said much about it.”

“Try to find out more,” Maddie urged. “I’d love to find out what’s been going on with him all this time.”

Taylor couldn’t help smiling. She knew Maddie was a gossip — she always had been. Sometimes it was an irritating quality, but it felt good to gossip right now. It felt good to know that there was someone else who was reacting to Kane’s return in the same way she herself was — wanting to know what was going on and what had kept him away for so long. “I’ll see what I can find out,” she promised.

“What’s he like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… is he the same as he used to be? Is he the same person we knew when we were kids? Thinking only of himself, always looking for a good time and not really caring who he hurts?”

“Oh,” Taylor said. She felt a twinge of discomfort. She knew she had used similar words to describe Kane before, but hearing them out of someone else’s mouth made her question the wisdom of that. She remembered the way he had looked the last time she had seen him in high school — as if he had really believed that she was still going to help him after the Chesterfield fire. How many times had she grappled with that, wondering whether or not she had made the right decision when she had turned away from him that day? In her heart of hearts, she still didn’t know the answer.

And she didn’t know whether it was true that Kane didn’t care who he hurt. He had come back because of his father’s death. That might have been just to see whether he had inherited anything, it was true. But it might have been something more than that. Maybe he actually did care about Jason. Maybe he had found it too difficult to return before now. She couldn’t presume to know what was going on inside his head.

“He hasn’t changed much,” she told Maddie, because she knew her friend was waiting on an answer.

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