Page 30 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

Taylor knew he didn’t mean that. She understood the power of the desire for forgiveness. And she felt a rush of affection for him. After their kiss last night, and everything that had followed, what she wanted more than anything was to be the one to help him find the peace he craved.

“I’ll see you tonight,” she told him softly, and stood on her toes to kiss him.

The nurses at Katie’s brunch were quiet for several moments after Taylor had dropped the bomb, to the extent that she looked around at the assembled group and wondered whether she had spoken out loud. Or perhaps they had misunderstood her?

It was Hannah who spoke up first. That was no surprise. Hannah was the most opinionated and the most outspoken of the group. It was a great quality when it came to patient advocacy — Hannah could be an absolute bulldog when one of her patients needed something and a doctor was being difficult about it. But in social settings, sometimes it was a bit grating.

“Well, I thought he would come back,” she said. “He almost had to, didn’t he, with his father so recently dead?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Isabel said. “He never came back when his father was alive, so I am a little surprised to hear that he’s back now.”

“Use your head, Isabel,” Hannah said dismissively. “He’s back to find out what he’s been left in the will.”

That was the truth, of course, but the picture it painted was uglier than the reality of the situation, and Taylor rushed to defend Kane. “It isn’t like it sounds,” she said.

“No?” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “He’s always been like that, hasn’t he?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, even when we were in high school together, he was the kind of guy who was always looking out for himself. Always so selfish.” Hannah and Taylor had attended high school at the same time, as part of the same class, but they had belonged to different cliques. “I know you two were friends when you were teenagers,” Hannah said. “And I’m not trying to insult you, Taylor. But everyone knew what he was like. I mean if you had asked me to guess who would commit a huge crime and then skip town, Kane’s name would have been the first on my lips.”

“What happened to the Chesterfield farm was an accident,” Taylor said. “It was a cigarette that caught in some straw.”

“Trespassing is still a crime, Taylor,” Katie said. Her tone was more gentle, less accusatory, but it was clear that she still thought it was important to put blame where it was due. “And the fact that he skipped town right after the fact — I mean, you know that doesn’t look good. I don’t think Hannah’s wrong to think he just came back to see if he had been left any money in the will. If he had any other reason for coming back, he would have done it a long time ago. Don’t you think?”

“He only found out about Jason’s death because the solicitor tracked him down and told him that he had to come back,” Taylor said. “He’s not after money. He’s taking care of his responsibilities.”

Hannah snorted. “That doesn’t sound like the Kane I know at all,” she said. “He’s never cared about responsibility.”

“Well, maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” Taylor said evenly.

“You know, maybe Taylor’s right,” Isabel said. “It’s been a long time since any of us saw or spoke to Kane. Ten years. People can change a lot in that time. Aren’t we all different from the people we were ten years ago? What if someone judged you by who you had been as a teenager? You’d start to look really bad really fast, Hannah. We all would.”

“It’s different,” Hannah said. “We were just kids. Of course we were a little messy. But we never burned down any farms. We never ran away and left our parents in the dark about what had happened to us for years on end. You can’t act like there’s any similarity between the kinds of teenage mischief we all got up to back then and what Kane did. It’s not the same thing.”

“How long does he have to pay the price?” Taylor asked, feeling deeply motivated to make a difference in the way people perceived Kane. “I mean, think about it. If Jeff Chesterfield had pressed charges against him, what would the sentence have been? Don’t you think we would have all forgotten about it by now? It would be ancient history. We remember what happened because it’s such a hot topic, and because the community never got any closure. We wanted Kane punished, I think. And the problem people have with him running away is that they didn’t get to watch that punishment be carried out.

“Well, he wasn’t punished, was he?” Hannah asked. “Running away meant that he got to go on with his life as if nothing happened.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Taylor said. “But trust me when I say that isn’t what happened. He hasn’t been going on with life as though nothing happened. He has punished himself far more than any of us ever could have.”

The room was quiet for a moment as everyone took that in. Taylor couldn’t tell whether or not they believed what she was saying, but at the very least, she knew that she had given them something to think about. It was a start, if nothing else. Maybe they would ponder the things she’d said, and maybe eventually Kane’s reputation here in Miller Creek would be restored.

For a moment, she allowed herself a fantasy. What if the whole town could be brought around? What if everyone could be made to realize that he hadn’t done anything worth the ostracizing that he had received?

What if he chose to stay here in Miller Creek?

It was a laughable fantasy. They had only known one another as adults for a couple of weeks. There had been a few nice moments — one spectacular moment, though Taylor hadn’t told her nurse friends about what had happened between herself and Kane last night. They would have lost their minds over that piece of gossip, and besides, she wasn’t ready to share it with anybody — not even Maddie. She wanted to keep it to herself for now.

And Kane wasn’t going to stay. She knew that. Even if everything was fixed, even if the town put up a monument in his honor, he had a life in Detroit that he would want to get back to. He had a job there, and friends, and he wasn’t going to let those things go and move back to a place that had caused him nothing but pain. Not even if, by some miracle, he was feeling the same things for her as she was beginning to feel for him. It wasn’t going to happen. It was an impossibility.

That didn’t stop the fantasies from coming, though, and for the rest of the brunch, Taylor was miles away, imagining the feeling of Kane McCormick’s arms around her.

CHAPTER 16

KANE

“How’d they take it?” Kane asked.

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