Page 26 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

“But partly?”

“I should have been nicer to you,” she said. “I should have been more understanding about what you were going through. I should have been kinder to you when you came to me the day after the fire, when you asked me if I would still help you get into college. I was awful to you that day. I’ve never really stopped thinking about that.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” he told her. “What happened with me. What happened between me and my father. None of that was your fault.”

“How could it not have been? You came to me for help and I rejected you.”

“You didn’t have any responsibility to help me,” he said. “You were a friend of mine, not a teacher. Not a parent. Those are the people who I consider to have let me down, when I let myself think in those terms. Those are the people who had some obligation to me, when I went looking for help. Not a teenage girl, no matter how much we cared about each other.”

“Well, even if that’s true,” Taylor said, “I could have done better, couldn’t I? I mean, if that conversation had been a good one instead of a negative one, maybe you would have felt like you had some sort of a life raft. Maybe you would have felt like you could stay.”

“Maybe,” Kane said. “But I don’t think so. I don’t think anything could have persuaded me to stay. Not with the way I was feeling that day. And certainly not anything you could have said, Taylor. You’re not the reason I left. Don’t let yourself think that.”

She turned away from him. For a moment, he thought she was angry, but then he saw her wipe a tear away. “All those years your father spent wishing you would come back,” she said. “I never knew how to tell him that I thought it was my fault you were gone in the first place.”

“It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Everyone in town hated me, Taylor. You might not have wanted to help me fix my life, but I never felt like you hated me. You seemed more sad than angry when we talked that last time.”

“That’s exactly right,” she said quietly. “I was sad because of what had happened. I would have given anything to undo it, not just for the Chesterfields, but for you. I wished more than I could tell you that there was something I could do to make it right.”

“That wasn’t your job, though,” Kane said. “Even the fact that you wanted to means a lot to me. More than I can say. I just wish… I wish you hadn’t spent ten years thinking that I left because of anything to do with you, because that’s not the case.”

“And what about your father?” Taylor asked. “You really didn’t leave because of him either?”

“Not at all,” Kane said. “It was more the fact that I didn’t feel like there was any way for Miller Creek to be my home anymore. I thought I couldn’t possibly belong here. And I still think that’s true.”

“Well, what you need to know is that your dad didn’t feel that way,” Taylor said. “If he was ever angry with you over what happened, that anger faded away a long time ago. All he felt for you in the time I worked with him was love and regret. All he ever said was how much he wished you would come home so that he could let you know how he really felt about you.”

“This is a lot to take in,” Kane admitted. He felt shaky, almost on the verge of tears. All this time he had stayed away, thinking he wasn’t wanted, and now Taylor was telling him it hadn’t been true. That he could have come home.

Of course, Miller Creek still wouldn’t have wanted him. Miller Creek almost certainly hated him. He didn’t need to look any further than the first conversation he’d had with Thomas Greely to feel sure of that — all these years later, a man with whom he’d never interacted as a child knew who he was and what he had done. It must be common knowledge around here. No one would welcome him back, nor should they.

But his father would have welcomed him back. Genuinely and with open arms.

Kane had stayed away all this time thinking he had no other option, but that wasn’t true.

It was a bittersweet thing to learn now, a punch in the gut. On one hand, it meant that his dad hadn’t died angry at him, and that was certainly a good thing. But on the other hand, it meant that Kane had stayed away all those years for no reason at all. That he could have come back years ago, before it was too late for them to mend their relationship.

Maybe Taylor noticed that he was struggling with his emotions, because she turned away. “Do you want to prep the meat?” she suggested. “And I’ll season the beans.”

“Sure.” He reached for the package of hamburger meat on the counter. “I just cut this into cubes, right?”

“Or you can even pinch it apart. It’ll separate easily enough. Whatever you want to do,” she said. She pulled out a mixing bowl and began to combine spices.

Making the chili didn’t require a lot of conversation, so the two of them were able to work in silence for the next twenty minutes or so. Kane kept his eyes on what he was doing, not wanting to look up at Taylor.

Somehow, whether she was aware of it or not, she had said the exact thing he had needed to hear.

He wondered if it was possible that she could have known that. If she could understand how powerfully the past few minutes had affected him. He wondered if she had done it on purpose, or if was just the bare truth, spoken without any agenda.

He couldn’t be sure, but one thing he did know — for the first time since he had arrived in Miller Creek, he felt a genuine desire to prolong his stay.

If he had been wrong about Taylor hating him — if he had been wrong about his father hating him — it was just possible that he had been wrong about everything.

CHAPTER 14

TAYLOR

“Ialways loved Dad’s chili,” Kane said as they cleared the table that night after dinner. “It was my favorite meal when I was a kid. I would have eaten it every night if I could. It was only his insistence that I get some actual nutrition on occasion that stopped me.”

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