Page 22 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

Kane snorted.

“Maybe he lets me harness him because he knows I’m the one who walks him here,” Taylor suggested.

“I guess he must,” Kane agreed.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“No, not at all,” he assured her. “It’s nice seeing the two of you bond. Did you think it would bother me?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Maybe you wouldn’t want to see your dog getting close with someone else.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I’m not a monster, Taylor,” he said.

“What do you mean by that?” she asked. “I didn’t say you were a monster.”

“No, you didn’t, but… I get it. You think the worst of me. Because of how we left things all those years ago. I guess you’ve probably been building up some idea of me in your mind ever since then, right?”

She couldn’t honestly deny it. “I didn’t know what to think,” she admitted. “The way you just left…”

“Well, that’s what it is at this point,” he said, his tone rather brusque, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to talk about the past. “But I’m not some creep who doesn’t want his own dog to be happy. I might be a little bit of a jerk here and there, but I’m glad Toby has a friend.”

“Even if it’s me?” She smiled as she said it, hoping he wouldn’t take the comment overly seriously.

Fortunately, he laughed. “I don’t know what you think I have against you,” he said. “We haven’t spoken in years, and it’s not because I had some personal grudge against you.”

“Isn’t it?”

He looked at her oddly, as if surprised that she had even asked the question. But surely he remembered the conversation the two of them had had the day he had left town? Taylor had assumed it had stayed with him even more powerfully than it had with her.

Now, though, she thought… that was far from being the only thing that had happened to Kane that day. Maybe he had dwelled more on bigger things, like the fire and the fact that he had run away from home. In fact, now that she thought about it, it was crazy to imagine that she had been at the forefront of his mind during all of that. Of course she hadn’t. Of course he found it weird, now, that she would even suggest he had a personal issue with her.

To smooth over the awkward moment, she said, “I thought you might be upset because our father left me a share of the house, that’s all.”

“Oh, that,” Kane said. “Well, I guess it’s up to the old man what he wants to do. It means a hell of a lot of paperwork for us, but of course I don’t blame you for any of that. I know you didn’t ask him to leave you the house.”

“No,” she agreed.

“Did you know he was going to do it? Put your name on it?”

“I did,” she admitted. “He told me as much before he died. He said your name and mine would both be there. I didn’t try to talk him out of it because he was so ill then, and because… well, because talking about you was always a bit of a sore subject, and I didn’t want to upset him while he was weak. It felt to me like he was clinging to a fantasy that you would come back at the last minute, that he would get to see you one more time. I didn’t know how to tell him that it seemed almost impossibly unlikely that that would happen, so I just sort of pretended along with him.”

Kane’s face darkened, and he turned away. Was it grief? Or something else? Taylor couldn’t be sure.

“I would have done the same thing,” he said after a moment. “Of course you didn’t want to cause him any unnecessary pain. You did the right thing by letting it be our problem to deal with instead of making him make a decision. That shouldn’t have been the last task of his life, and I’m glad it wasn’t.”

Taylor nodded, glad to see that the two of them saw eye to eye on the matter — but a little surprised as well. It was the first time since Kane had walked back into her life that she’d felt as if the two of them were in full agreement about something. Even Toby felt like a point of conflict, since she had never been sure whether or not she was supposed to be taking him out for walks — but that was resolved now too, she supposed, since Kane had expressly given his permission for her to do it.

And today he was coming with her. There was something about that that felt like progress. As if she’d gotten more than just his permission to interact with the dog — she had gotten his blessing. It felt like he wanted to see her become friends with Toby, which wasn’t something she had anticipated at all.

They set off along Highway 9, making small talk. It was a two-lane highway, and might not have been the ideal place for a walk, but the speed limit here was low, and cars were incredibly rare. Even as teenagers, they had been safe to walk on this road. No one had ever heard of an accident happening to a pedestrian here.

Still, Taylor kept a tight grip on the leash as they walked. She didn’t think there was cause to worry. Toby was an obedient dog, and he was great on the leash. But she wouldn’t have wanted to find out the hard way that she was wrong about that.

As they walked, she and Kane fell into easy conversation. It was nothing too deep. They didn’t talk about the past, and they didn’t talk about what had happened to his father. But today, for the first time, it felt as if there was no tension and no bad history between the two of them. It felt as if they could just talk to one another like old friends.

He asked after their other friends, and she was able to tell him things he hadn’t known — that Maddie and Bradley had gotten married a few years back, that almost everyone they had once spent time with had been there, and his face had been the one that was noticeably missing. She didn’t tell him how they had all avoided saying his name, but how it had been clear by the tension in the air that everyone was thinking it. He didn’t need to hear that, and it would only make things more awkward if he did.

Still, by the time they made it back to the house, something had shifted between the two of them. Taylor could feel it. She was more comfortable with him now than she had been since he’d come back, and for the first time, sharing a house with him seemed like something that could be achieved without too much struggle.

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