She grabbed my arm. “Thank you,” she said.
“Don’t thank me. It was Hobbs. He knew what to do.”
She looked past me at Hobbs and I moved away to begin gathering all the stuff that scattered when I dumped out her bag.
Hobbs moved beside her and leaned down. “Please accept my sincere apologies. I feel awful knowing something I cooked caused such a reaction.”
“I should’ve asked,” Piper began, her voice shaky. “I usually do, I just… I didn’t think of it today.”
I paused and glanced over at her. She was watching me and I quickly looked away.
She’d been too busy trying to figure out what my connection was to the man who died. Her distraction had almost been my success.
I should’ve been disappointed that my plan didn’t work.
I wasn’t.
Chapter Sixteen
“Suspicious - Arousing or apt to arouse suspicion; questionable. Tending to suspect; distrustful.”
Piper
I felt as if someone wound a coarse length of rope around me and then yanked, cinching up my skin, squeezing my organs, and then tying it into a knot. Everything inside me was shaking; everything inside me still felt seized by panic.
I hadn’t felt this way in so long. Even still, this was a feeling I could go a hundred years without ever experiencing again and I would still be able to remember it; I would still fear it.
I was usually so careful about what I ate.
I let my guard down. I didn’t think. I was so busy trying to figure out the puzzle that Dexter Allen Roth was that it nearly cost me my life. If the butler hadn’t been there, I might be dead. And there would be no one to blame but myself.
Dexter hadn’t known what to do. If I closed my eyes I could still see the panic on his face and that alone was very telling because his panic was able to get through mine—and mine had been crippling. So I couldn’t blame him for not immediately taking action.
“You still with me over there?”
I turned my head and looked across the seat at Dexter. He was focused on the road, but then his eyes flicked to me and back. I cleared my throat. My tongue still felt thick and heavy in my mouth.
“Yeah. It’s up here on the left.” I directed him.
A moment later we were pulling into the clinic’s parking lot and I let out a sigh of relief. I knew I was going to be okay. I had known that the very second the adrenaline in that EpiPen coursed through my body, loosening my lungs to allow room for air.
Dexter slid into a spot and cut the engine. Before I could do anything, he opened my door and reached in to help me out. He wrapped his arm around my waist and accepted most of my weight as we made our way to the clinic doors. I hoped they weren’t busy. The last thing they needed was having to tend to one of their own.
When the front doors opened, Gladys looked up from the desk. Her eyes widened and she stood. The chair she sat in rolled away behind her.
“Ohmygoodness,” she said so quickly all her words ran together. Then she was yelling for Dr. Cooper and rushed toward us. “Piper, honey, what happened to you?”
“She had a reaction.” Dexter tried to explain.
Gladys shot him a look. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Dex,” he said.
My lips pulled up. Of course he called himself Dex.
“Anaphylactic shock,” I told her, drawing her attention away from him. “I used the EpiPen.”
They ushered me back to exam room one and then Gladys pinned Dex with a stare. “Out.”
