“She’s asleep. She’s been up since five this morning,” Woods said in a hard voice that meant he wasn’t calling her.
“I need to leave. Seeing me upsets her. I thought I could talk to her, but she’s not ready. Not yet,” Tripp said. The pain in his voice was so damn obvious it hurt. He was possibly the one person who was suffering from Jace’s death as much as Bethy. Why wouldn’t she accept his help?
“Upset? You think I’m upset? I was f**kin’ upset five years ago. Now I’m . . . lost.” She said the last word in almost a whisper. Then she crumpled to the floor and wrapped her arms around her legs as she began sobbing so hard her body shook violently.
“We gotta do something. Blaire will know what to say. I should have sent Blaire and you. I just made everything worse,” Rush said, looking back at me. Then he turned his attention to Tripp and stared at him a moment. “You know why she hates you, don’t you?” he said in his simple, to-the-point manner.
Tripp didn’t respond.
“Yes! He knows!” she wailed. “He knows. But Jace never knew.”
Bethy’s drunken ranting wasn’t making any sense to me.
I hated watching this. I hated knowing that months after Jace’s death, Bethy was still a broken, empty soul. Stepping around Rush, I bent down to Bethy’s eye level. “I’m gonna pick you up and take you to Rush’s car. He’s gonna take you to Blaire, and you’re gonna let her take care of you. She’ll be there to listen. You can trust her. She loves you. Now, put your arm around my shoulder.”
Her sad, red-rimmed eyes stared up at me for a few seconds before she put her arm around my neck. I braced one arm against her back and slid one arm under her legs and stood up with her.
“Where did you park?” I asked Rush.
“Just down there on the other side of Woods,” he replied.
I glanced one last time at Tripp, who was watching Bethy with the same hopeless look I understood all too well. What didn’t make sense was why Tripp was looking at Bethy like he’d move heaven and earth to take her pain away. Did they really even know each other?
Harlow
“You doing OK, sunshine?” Major asked as he took the seat beside me on the hay bale where I had sat to watch Mase work.
Glancing up at Major, I smiled, even though I didn’t really feel like it. “Yes, and you?” I replied because it was the polite thing to do. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him or anyone. Not today. I had been to my weekly doctor appointment. Watching all the pregnant women and their adoring husbands in the waiting room had been hard, and it was all I could do to keep from breaking down. I missed Grant.
“Don’t look like you’re doing good. In fact, you look like someone killed your puppy,” he said teasingly.
I knew that Maryann and Mase hadn’t told Major anything. I trusted Major because he loved his family, and I was an extension of that family, but I hated people knowing before Grant. Until Grant knew about our child, I didn’t want anyone else knowing. “Just having one of those days,” I replied, hoping that would shut him up.
“Huh,” he replied, then looked out at Mase, who was on one of the horses. “To hear the news tell it, you were hot and heavy with Grant Carter, Rush Finlay’s former stepbrother. But I’ve been here a couple weeks, and I haven’t seen the guy who shoved down three reporters to get you into Rush’s Range Rover and out of the public eye. You know, that clip has been played about a million times. The guy looked fierce and ready to slay dragons for you. Makes me curious about where he is now.”
I had watched that clip, too. I had watched it over and over again. It was on YouTube, and I played it often. Not because it was the moment I left Grant but because Major was right. Grant looked determined and fierce. He had yelled at reporters and basically torn a path through them, from his front door to Rush’s car, to get to me. But the part that I couldn’t forget was the look on his face, perfectly captured by the cameras, when I had driven away. He had regretted his last words to me. The pain in his eyes had been clear, and it broke my heart and healed it all at once every time I watched the clip. He hadn’t meant what he said. He had been scared.
“He doesn’t know where I am,” I admitted before I could stop myself.
“Really? And how is that? You hiding from him, too?”
Major was being nosy, and maybe I should have told him to mind his own business, but I didn’t do that. I wanted to talk about Grant with someone. Needed to. “We needed space. He was scared of my heart condition. He doesn’t want to lose me,” I explained vaguely.
Major didn’t respond. Instead, he reached for a piece of hay and stuck it in his mouth. With Mase’s cowboy hat perched on his head and his worn-out jeans, Major looked like he belonged in Texas. He didn’t look like a world traveler. I knew for a fact that he could speak three different languages fluently.
“He not trying to find you? Or call you?”
I had to delete voice mails every week so that they didn’t fill up my in-box. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to his voice, but I also didn’t want it to become impossible for him to leave messages. “No, he calls every night. He’s been trying to find me.”
Major pulled the hay out of his mouth and frowned at me. “Then why you sitting here looking so sad?”
Because I missed Grant. I wanted to answer his call. I was just too scared. “I have reasons,” I replied.
“You got reasons, huh? All right, then. I just hope those reasons are worth it,” he replied. “I don’t know if any girl could get me to leave her daily messages that go unanswered for two months. I would eventually give up and move on.”
If Grant gave up, what would I do? I didn’t want him to give up. But I wasn’t being fair to him. I hated this. I hated having to hurt him. But if he knew, he would only be hurt more.
“Stop flirting with my sister, and get your ass out here,” Mase called from the fence.