Roping the Cowboy Billionaire - Emmy Eugene Page 0,45

okay?”

“Okay,” TJ said.

“Okay.” Trey smiled at him and ruffled his hair. “I’ll walk you home where you’ll get shoes and I’ll ask your momma if you can tag along with me for an hour.”

“One hour,” TJ said.

“One hour,” Trey repeated. He stood again and headed for the steps. He’d taken TJ home plenty of times, and they both knew the path well. Trey’s heart pounded when he stepped from Bluegrass to Dixon Dreams, because he had two questions he wanted to ask Beth.

TJ ran ahead of him up the steps to the deck and through the back door, calling for his mother. Trey couldn’t hear him after a moment, and he muttered to himself as he went up the steps.

The back door had been left open, and Trey touched it with two fingers. “Beth?”

Everything inside the house was deathly silent and still. Trey smelled something off, and his heart crashed against his ribs. “Beth,” he called. “It’s Trey Chappell from next door.”

He hurried past the kitchen table and around the island, thinking she’d be on the other side, perhaps passed out on the floor. She wasn’t there, but Trey could definitely smell blood.

“TJ?” he called next, and he heard the little boy’s footsteps running toward him. “Where’s your mom?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I got shoes.”

“We need to find your mom.” Trey hadn’t been anywhere else in the house but the kitchen, and Beth wasn’t there. “Where’s her room?” He scanned the front of the farmhouse, where Beth had couches and chairs, a TV and a beanbag for TJ. She wasn’t there either.

“This way.” TJ skipped back the way he’d come, detouring down a hall that curved around to the side of the kitchen.

Trey followed right behind him, reaching out and grabbing TJ’s shoulders before he could go inside his mother’s bedroom. “You wait out here, okay?”

“Okay,” TJ said, not picking up on the anxiety flowing from Trey like water through a sieve.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the bedroom. “Beth?” he called again. “It’s Trey from next door.” If she didn’t know who he was by now, Trey would be equally surprised and devastated.

He heard sniffling from the bathroom, and light spilled onto the wood floor in the bedroom from that direction too. “Are you okay? I’m coming in. It’s just me. I left TJ in the hall.”

Trey’s heart pounded as he approached, his desperation for Beth to say something making his vision blur for a moment. Every time he’d offered to help her, she’d refused him. Once, he’d said he’d bring a crew and come help put up her wheat, and she’d argued with him for ten minutes.

Beth really didn’t like accepting help, though it was Trey’s opinion that she desperately needed it. He’d tried to tell her that getting help wasn’t a sign of weakness, but she’d just kept shaking her head until he’d stopped talking.

Trey had the distinct impression she was going to have to accept his help this afternoon whether she liked it or not.

He arrived in the bathroom doorway and took in the scene in front of him as quickly as he could.

Beth stood at the bathroom sink, blood dripping from her hand. Tears ran down her face, and when she looked at Trey, it was if all of the strength she’d been using to keep herself together fled.

“Okay,” he said, stepping over to her as her face crumpled and she swayed on her feet. “I got you. It’s okay.”

She sobbed, a horrible, gut-wrenching sound that chilled Trey’s blood and made his whole heart hurt. “I cut myself,” she said, her voice stuttering and tinny. “It was an accident, and I can’t get the bleeding to stop.”

Trey didn’t dare move too far from her, and he kept one leg behind her completely in case she passed out. “Can I see?”

She nodded, gaining some semblance of control over her emotions. “It’s across my palm. I was out in the stupid barn trying to get down another length of sprinkler pipe that Danny had lashed to the wall.” She held out her hand slightly and lifted the one pressing a blue cloth over her palm.

“I was on the ladder, and I just kept swiping at it, and—” She cut off, her breathing labored as she struggled to talk and inhale at the same time.

“How long ago did this happen?” he asked, taking over the job of removing the cloth from the wound. The blue was soaked with blood, and he wasn’t sure why he