Delores Fossen - Branded as Trouble

“No. I’m fine. It’s not me. It’s my mom. She had some chest pains so I brought her in.” It sounded as if Sophie was crying. “Mila, they think she might have had a heart attack.”

Oh, mercy. “Just stay calm. I’ll be there in a few minutes. Who’s with you now?”

“Clay.”

Good. Clay was police chief Clay McKinnon, Sophie’s husband and a rock under pressure. He would help Sophie rein in her worst fears. Still, Mila needed to be there, too. She’d known Sophie’s mother, Belle, her entire life, and while Belle wasn’t exactly Miss Sunshine, she didn’t put curses on people.

“Garrett and Nicky are on the way, too,” Sophie added. Her brother and his fiancée. “Garrett was off buying some cattle, but he should be here soon. Anyway, I’ve tried to call Roman, but he’s not answering. I hate to ask you to do this, but could you try calling him again for me? If he still doesn’t answer, would you drive to his house in San Antonio and tell him what’s going on?”

“Of course,” Mila said without hesitation.

“I know Roman and Mom are at odds, but he’ll want to know. Convince him to come home.”

“I will.”

Mila wasn’t sure she could do that. Roman wasn’t an easy-to-convince sort of person. Plus, she always got a little tongue-tied around him. But surely once he heard about his mother, Mila wouldn’t need to do much convincing. He would hurry to be by her side.

She scrolled through her “favorites” contacts, found Roman’s number and pressed it. Since he hadn’t answered his sister’s call, Mila expected this to go to voice mail, but she was surprised when he immediately answered.

“Mila,” he said.

One word. Her name. There was nothing unusual about it, other than Roman had been the one to say it. And, like any other time she heard him speak, her stomach did a flip-flop. She so wished there was some way to make herself immune to him.

Mila gathered her breath, ready to tell him about his mom, but Roman continued first. “It’s Tate,” he said.

Her stomach did another flip-flop but for a different reason this time. That’s because she heard the concern in his voice. “What’s wrong?”

“He ran away again, and I’ve been looking all over for him. By any chance, did he go to your place?”

It wasn’t an out-there kind of question. Tate had run away before, nearly two years ago, and he’d gotten someone to drive him to her house. That’s because Tate’s mother, and therefore, Tate, were Mila’s cousins.

Once Valerie and she had been close, too, since Vita had raised Valerie as her own. But it didn’t matter that Mila had once thought of her as a sister because she hadn’t seen Valerie in years. That didn’t matter to Tate, either. He just seemed to want a connection with anyone who was blood kin with his mother.

Something Mila understood, because she missed having that with her father.

Plus, Tate knew that Mila kept a spare key in the verbena plant so he’d be able to get into her house. She checked, and it wasn’t there now.

“I’m going inside to see if he’s here,” she assured Roman.

Mila got the door unlocked as fast as she could, and her gaze fired all around. Her house wasn’t that large—two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and bath. So, it didn’t take her long to check out the place.

And spot him.

Tate was on the sofa, asleep on top of her Buttercup dress.

“He’s here,” she told Roman.

Roman said something she didn’t catch. Profanity mixed with a prayer, maybe. “Put him on the phone. I want to talk to him.” That didn’t sound like a prayer, though. More like the profanity tone.

Mila was about to tell him to take it easy on the boy, but she froze. “Oh, God.”

That’s because she spotted something else. Something in Tate’s hand.

A bottle of pills.

Tate didn’t have a firm grip on it. In fact, he didn’t have a firm grip on anything. His hand was limp, the bottle resting on its side in his palm, and he was as white as a sheet of paper.

“Call an ambulance,” she managed to say to Roman.

Mila dropped the phone and ran to Tate.

CHAPTER THREE

THAT WHOLE LIFE flashing before a dying person’s eyes applied to fathers, too. Roman now had firsthand proof of that.

In that moment when Mila had shouted for him to call an ambulance, Roman saw it all. His childhood on the ranch. His screw-ups. His arrest for underage drinking. Another arrest for reckless driving only a year after that. The arguments with his parents those things had caused.

He was probably being punished for all the crap he’d done, but Roman wished to hell that the powers that be had taken that punishment out on him instead of Tate.

In that life-flash, Roman had seen Valerie telling him that she was pregnant. They’d both been just eighteen and in their senior year of high school. He’d felt the sickening feeling of dread that this was yet something else he had screwed up. The feeling hadn’t lasted though, not after Tate had been born. The moment Roman held his boy in his arms, he knew he’d never love anything or anybody the way he did his son.

And now he might lose him.

Tate was breathing, that much he knew, and Mila had said something about Tate holding a bottle of medicine. Roman didn’t know what he’d taken or how much, but he knew what this meant.

His son had attempted suicide.

Hell.

Roman was damn perceptive when it came to his job, but he hadn’t seen that his own son was on the brink of doing something like this. It made the fight at school and being expelled fade way, way to the background.

“How far out are you now?” Mila asked from the other end of the phone line.

Roman wasn’t sure he could speak because his chest and throat were so tight. “About five miles. Anything from the doctor yet?”

Though he knew the answer to that. If there’d been something, anything, Mila would have told him. After he’d called the ambulance about thirty minutes ago, he had called her right back. She hadn’t gotten off the phone with him since then and had been updating him every step of the way.

The ambulance’s arrival.

The drive to the hospital, which thankfully was only a few minutes from her house.

And Tate and her going into the emergency room.

The medics had immediately whisked Tate away, but they hadn’t allowed Mila in there with him. Instead, she was outside the examining room.

“Nothing yet from the doctor, but I’m certain that Tate will be fine,” Mila said. It was hard to tell if she was BS-ing, but Roman decided to take her at her word. He just couldn’t wrap his mind around anything else right now. “Focus on your driving,” she added. “Make sure you get here in one piece because we don’t need another Granger in the hospital.”

That was for sure. One was more than enough.

He wanted to know if Mila had learned what meds Tate had taken. Or where he’d gotten them. But again, if she knew something she would have told him.

Unless it was bad, that is.

People kept all kinds of old meds in their bathrooms. Maybe Tate had even gotten into the Percocet that was left over from when Roman wrenched his knee. Or, hell, he could have gotten it from some kid at school or stolen something from the nurse who’d been cleaning his busted lip. Tate could have taken something that could kill him.

Roman heard his too-fast breath, felt himself losing focus, so he forced himself to keep talking to Mila. “Were you able to get in touch with Sophie and Garrett?”

Mila didn’t jump to answer that. Something that caused Roman’s chest to tighten even more. “Yes, Sophie’s here,” she finally said. Then Mila hesitated again. “You want me to put her on the phone?”