Free Infamous: (A Bad Boy Romantic Suspense) by Mila Noir Page B

Even his mother’s passing had happened near All Hallows’ Eve. Were they linked? Had the Rider been involved? Maybe; something about that time of year seemed to draw a kind of darkness around Sweethollow that invited loss. Many people got ill, though they always dismissed it as being “cold season.” Many of the elderly in town died around this time, though no one seemed to make the connection. Lost pets, accidents, all of them went up around Halloween. Some might call it coincidence. Others believed differently. No one knew for sure. And most didn’t want to.
    What most in town didn’t know was how long these kinds of events had been going on. There had been witch trials even before the Revolutionary War, strange happenings, and the legend of the Rider had begun. Many good people had been hanged in a panic of fear. That history had mostly been expunged, obliterated in a fire years after the deeds had been done. No records remained, none that anyone knew of, anyway, and the town had been called something quite different then.
    Neither Taylor nor Anton suspected that the Rider might really be real, because they wanted to believe that they were rational people and that ghosts were things that belonged in scary stories. But somewhere, deep inside both of them, they wondered.

***
    Taylor walked away from the diner toward her car, then decided to walk to the nursing home instead. It wasn’t that far, and she definitely needed the air after that little encounter with Anton. Might as well get this interview out of the way while she tried to make sense of what had just happened.
    She was still reeling. It might sound ridiculous to others, but for her, having him say he was sorry and invite her to dinner was maybe the biggest shock she’d had since her grams had passed. She’d been hanging on to her (justified) anger at him for a decade. To have him just come right out and apologize was like finding out the world was really flat. Reality as she knew it had taken a decided left turn into uncharted territory.
    In her world, Anton Quinn was an unrepentant shit who had hurt her and left her unable to trust anyone (including herself) again. That he was sorry, that he regretted what he’d done, that maybe he’d thought about her over all these years, had never occurred to her. She’d made him a villain and been comfortable with that view.
    But the truth was, Anton was human. She knew that. It didn’t make what he’d done okay, but maybe she had been allowed to indulge in her anger and resentment for a little too long. Painting him like some kind of inhuman monster in her mind, when really, he’d been a damaged teenage boy. And weren’t all teenagers monsters sometimes?
    None of this meant she forgave him or ever would. But she had to admit she was curious about what he was like now. If he’d changed. He didn’t really look much different, other than a tad older and possibly more beautiful, which figured. He was still cocky as hell, too.
    She sighed, pushing her windblown hair out of her face. Maybe she just wanted him to have changed. So she could feel better about the conflicting feelings she was having about him. Because it definitely felt like her old crush was resurfacing, which she found both embarrassing and infuriating. What was wrong with her?
    Probably better not to ask that existential a question at this juncture.
    Taylor rounded a corner and looked up at the Shaded Pines nursing home. It was a large gray building, with a front façade that looked homey. On a long porch that wrapped around the outside, there were plenty of chairs and even a few folks sitting in them with blankets piled high. It had once been the vacation home of a city developer, built sometime in the early 1900s. The family had lost their fortune eventually and it had been converted to a rest home in the eighties. Back when Taylor was a girl, it had been a lot less friendly looking, with weeds everywhere, cracked paint, and the lingering smell