Page 18 of Property of Prowler (Kings of Anarchy MC: Nevada #1)

EIGHT

TAYLOR

Prowler said he loved her. Three words she never expected but wanted more than she’d realized. Well actually, it was just two—love you—but who needed the I? It was obvious the speaker was the I. Love you was efficient.

She giggled. Literally giggled to herself as she headed out of her half-open garage, barefoot.

“Nope.” She tiptoe-hopped back as soon as her feet practically caught fire. Her drive was paved in lava.

“Duh, Tay, it’s Vegas.” Once inside, she slipped her now decidedly cooler tootsies into some slides. She planned to just pop over really quick and tell Prowler …

What? What did she plan to tell him?

Love you too?

The whole wolf thing is …

“What the fuck?” she asked herself before she opened her front door.

Did he really admit to being a werewolf?

“That’s impossible. Shifters aren’t real.” Taylor paced back and forth, talking to herself. The clop and shuffle of her slides on the hardwood floor created a soothing rhythm.

“I mean, they’re hot as hell in books, but real? Nah. If shifters are real, someone would’ve seen them by now. Surely the government would … not tell us shit if they knew. But Booktok. Yeah, they would’ve definitely tracked them down, humped them silly, and posted all about it.”

She laughed again, but this time it was more hysterical, less giggle.

“Hysterical—that’s a sexist fucking word. Like only women get a little crazy now and then. Why not testiria? Men get crazy too.” Ugh, she was losing her ever-loving mind.

“Deep breath, you’re getting off topic, sister. Why not just look him in the eye and talk about it? Surely if it was even the most remote of possibilities, I’ll be able to tell face-to-face.”

Opening her front door, she saw Prowler hugging his ex. This time, he wasn’t an inactive victim, but the initiator.

Taylor closed the door before she jumped to conclusions. They share a child, for fuck’s sake. She refused to live in a perpetual state of jealousy. Not only would that destroy her soul, but it was also a relationship killer. If they were going to make a run at being a couple, there had to be trust.

That would start now. As much as it hurt, she had to try. “It’s not right to make Prowler pay for the trust another broke.”

Taylor repeated that to herself over and over until she felt it.

There was only one thing to do—make a list. Taylor couldn’t explain it, but she found comfort in lists.

She was sure her therapist would circle it back to her childhood and taking control now after the trauma she suffered then.

It seemed everything in therapy, up until recently, circled back to that.

“Ha, look at that. I just saved myself a two-hundred-dollar session, Dr. Fayne.”

When she heard Prowler’s bike roar to life and fade away, she texted Cass.

Taylor: Wanna come over and stuff our faces with vegan ice cream and watch Jay and Silent Bob?

Cass: Not tonight. My stomach doesn’t feel so hot. Raincheck?

Taylor didn’t like that Cass was sick. She worried.

Taylor: Are you running a fever?

Cass: No, just blah. I think I ate something bad … maybe carob. LOL

Taylor: Hardy har har. Anything I can do?

Cass: No, I’m just going to chug some pink stuff & sleep.

Taylor: Okay, chica. Feel better & if anything changes, let me know. Just a call away.

Cass: (puke emoji) (poop emoji) (bed emoji)

Cass: (heart emoji) U (smooch emoji)

Taylor couldn’t help but smile. Cass was the best. Definitely one of the best perks of being in a relationship with Prowler.

Taylor: Back atcha (heart eyes emoji)

Grabbing her laptop, Taylor opened a new Word document.

Setting it down, she snagged some wine and snacks from the kitchen and settled in for some deep soul searching.

She titled the document, To Prowl or Not to Prowl. She thought it was funny.

“Okay, Tay.” She took a healthy sip of wine, then cracked her knuckles. “Let’s start with facts.”

Fact - His eyes reflect light weird.

Fact - He does growl.

Fact - His teeth sometimes look longer.

Fact - He sees and smells things others can’t.

Fact - I love him.

Taylor paused after that sentence. Seeing it in writing made it feel that much more real. She kept going, but the list devolved from proving or disproving the wolf theory into something more akin to pros and cons.

But once the wine was in charge, red blend controlled the keyboard, not her.

Fact - He’s an animal in bed.

Fact - He has an ex who wants him back.

Fact - His daughter is awesome.

Fact - He is in an MC surrounded by women.

Fact - He said he loves me.

Fact - He has secrets, lots & lots of secrets.

Fact - I love him.

Fact - I typed that already.

Fact - He was cozy with his ex earlier.

Fact - I wanted to rip her hair out for touching him.

Fact - I wanted to rip his hair out for touching her.

Fact - You have to trust those you love.

She stared at the last sentence followed by the flashing cursor, taunting her to write another sentence. One she found almost impossible to write.

The people she’d loved and trusted most in her life had done their fucking best to destroy her. For a long time, they’d succeeded, or rather she’d let them succeed. Once she broke the cycle, she’d sworn to herself never again.

Never fucking again.

If she never trusted, then no one on God’s green earth could destroy her like that.

Never trusting meant never loving again.

It wasn’t like Dr. Fayne hadn’t told her that a thousand different times and a thousand different ways, but she just refused to take it to heart. Refused to make herself vulnerable to that kind of pain … until Prowler.

Letting him into her bed and her heart was the best and worst thing to ever happen to her.

Best because she had so much to gain, and worst because she could lose even more.

If Prowler broke that trust—not just her suspicions and jealousy, but truly broke it—she would lose herself. All that she’d rebuilt after every man in her life had tried, Prowler would most certainly succeed.

That thought put the whole shifter thing into perspective.

With the willing suspension of disbelief, the shifter thing didn’t bother her.

In fact, if it were true, and if they existed, that made everything better actually.

If the romance books and movies are to be believed, shifters are faithful.

In most cases she’d watched or read, they were physically incapable of hurting their mates.

No cheating, no beatings, no violence directed at their mates.

In one book she’d read, it made them physically ill to touch another or hurt their partner.

Successful relationships, at least the ones she’d read about because the good Lord knew she hadn’t seen one up close and personal, started with honesty.

Prowler had secrets, and he’d have to share them with her, but that meant she had to share hers too.

No one knew all of her story, not even Dr. Fayne. Sure, some people knew some, others knew more. Obviously, the perpetrators knew some, but no one knew it all.

Like how one of her acts as Mykayla Barton was trying to end her life, only to change her mind and voluntarily commit herself.

For some reason, she was ashamed of that. Mental health shouldn’t be taboo. Needing help shouldn’t be so secretive people go to such lengths to hide it that it disrupts their lives, but they do.

At first, she thought it was just a thing, and she told a coworker she thought was a friend.

It didn’t take long before no one on her shift would meet her eyes.

They avoided her. Quit inviting her out.

When she heard them laughing and calling her Cray-Cray Tay-Tay, she confronted them.

Her ex-friend ran crying from the break room, and the manager fired her, believing she went “postal” in the break room.

When in reality, all she’d done was call them catty bitches with crotch rot.

After that, she knew to keep that shit secret.

With shaky fingers, she typed

Fact – Tell Prowler everything.

Typing it gave her anxiety.

Everything was a lot.

A LOT.

It was from family members with boundary issues to using a man she didn’t love to get away from that.

It was picking the wrong men repeatedly and allowing them to lay hands on her.

It was him knowing she used to be Mykayla Barton, and that Taylor Norton found her way out of a cycle of abuse with legal prostitution.

Everything meant everything , and that scared the holy shit out of her.

Setting the open laptop on the coffee table, she grabbed the bottle of wine. Fuck the glass.

After polishing it off, she curled up on the couch, hugging her bookish throw pillow like it held her together … and cried.

She cried for all she’d lost and for the little girl who had to grow up too fast. After those tears were exhausted, she cried in sheer relief.

There was something calming about sharing her story with someone, someone she could trust. It was like a physical weight was being lifted from her. One she didn’t realize the weight of until she’d decided she would unburden herself.

Fuck, had she known that was what it would feel like, she would’ve found someone long ago to unload on. But she knew that wouldn’t have worked. Somewhere deep down she just knew that. It had to be Prowler.

I was always meant to be with Prowler.

That thought struck her. From the minute he’d moved in across the street, she felt a pull to him. He’d barely looked her way, but she didn’t suffer the same affliction.

She kept her distance because she didn’t want to get tangled up with another bad boy, but she looked.

He was a rebel, even with his fucking trash cans.

He repeatedly put them in the wrong place, and she knew from experience that they would skip his garbage, so every night before collection, she’d move his cans.

She thought he’d get the hint when his cans were moved the next day, but no. He kept doing it.

One time they’d been putting them out at the same time, and she kinda went a little feral on him about can location and collection.