Page 7 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

“What do you mean?”

“Of course everything isn’t okay. I know you must have heard about what happened here,” she said. “There’s no other reason you would have come down.”

“Oh,” he said. “Is that why you’re crying?”

“Of course."

“Well… I mean, it’s sad, but they’ll be able to rebuild,” Kane said. “You know how people pitch in around here. We’ll all help, and we’ll have the barn back up in no time. It’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, thinking he would comfort her, but she shrugged him off, her eyes narrowing. Kane was startled, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he had ever seen Taylor angry before. He wasn’t sure he had.

“It’s not going to be okay,” she said. “It’s not just the barn, Kane. The fire took out their whole crop. And do you know what it does to the soil when that happens? It’s going to be years before they’re back to normal, if that’s even a possibility at all.”

“Oh,” Kane whispered.

Taylor looked up at him. “I have to ask you something.”

He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was.

“Come with me,” she said quietly, and she took him by the hand and led him away — away from the crowd, away from the police line.

He was torn. She was holding his hand, and he found that he was enjoying that more than he had ever thought he would. He had always thought of Taylor as pretty, but he had never imagined the stirring in the pit of his stomach that he felt now, walking hand in hand with her.

She’s going to be the one who turns things around for me, he thought. I know it.

And he believed it, too — right up until the moment they got away from the police line. At once, Taylor dropped his hand and wheeled around to face him.

The expression she wore was so different from the one she’d had when he had taken her out to the shed. There was no compassion for him there. She didn’t seem to care about him at all. And Kane felt a deep pit open in his gut. Without being able to put his finger on it, he sensed that something terrible and irreversible had happened — something from which he might never be able to recover.

“I know you liked to come out here when you wanted to be alone,” Taylor said quietly. “I know you’d come here to have a beer, or to smoke a cigarette.”

He felt very tired all of a sudden. “How did you know that?”

“Everyone knows that. Well, everyone who was paying attention,” she clarified. “You brought the rest of us out here for parties often enough. And you always had a stash of beer stored away somewhere. Anyone could see that it was a regular hangout spot for you.”

“All right,” Kane said. “So what if it was?”

“So were you here last night?”

“Taylor, what are you trying to get at with this?” He didn’t owe her an explanation. His father knew that he’d been involved, and so did Jeff Chesterfield, and there was an argument to be made that he needed to explain himself to both of them. But he didn’t have to tell Taylor anything.

Except…

Except that she had offered to help him when no one else had. She had, in a very real sense, been his only friend. And Kane understood suddenly that if he was going to ask Taylor to help him now, he needed to be honest with her. She deserved that much.

“All right,” he conceded. “I was here.”

“I told you not to come here.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“You didn’t tell me that. You told me we shouldn’t be partying.”

“And what were you doing here?”

“Not partying. No one else was even here.”

“Trespassing, though.”

“It’s just the Chesterfields’ farm!” But he knew as he said it what a flawed thing that was to say out loud now, after what had happened. That it was downright cruel of him to have said it. And Taylor must have thought so too, because she looked at him with something like disgust on her face.

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