Page 40 of Forty and Fighting Dirty
Then her other son came and wrapped an arm around her, and Piper gave in with a slump of her shoulders. “Okay,” she said.
Tension I hadn’t noticed eased within me. My chest loosened, and I gave her a curt nod before spinning on my heel and heading for the door. When I came level with David, who was still standing in the doorway of the community center office,I angled my head toward the tumble of chairs. “You mind if we leave these for you to clean up?”
“Go,” he said, agreeing.
“Thank you,” Piper said quietly to the other man, and the four of us headed down the hallway toward the exit. I could feel Piper’s tension radiating beside me, but she kept the pace and kept both her sons within touching distance. She opened the door for me to slide through, making sure I didn’t jostle Nate as I did, and then she waved me toward her car and opened the back door.
“Alec,” she said, “can you clip yourself into your seat?”
“Yeah,” he replied, circling to the other side where a booster seat was strapped to the back seat.
I slid the injured boy onto the free space beside the booster, then moved aside so Piper could clip him in. She touched him carefully, then finally stroked his cheek and pressed a kiss to his head, murmuring something I couldn’t hear.
But I did hear the tone—that comforting, nurturing tone of voice that had been so rare for me to hear in my own childhood. My chest tightened, and it took all my self-control to keep my expression neutral as Piper straightened and fished through the purse she’d taken back from Alec.
“Here,” she said, handing me her car keys, suddenly looking exhausted.
My fingers curled around the keys, and since I was beside the passenger door, I opened it up for Piper and closed it when she was inside. Then I circled around to the driver’s side, got in, adjusted the seat, and started the car.
The boys were quiet, and Piper’s tension radiated across the space toward me.
“There’s roadwork on the freeway every night this week. I’ll take some back roads through the valley. We should be there in twenty.”
Her chin dipped, the light from the community center’s streetlights glinting on her earrings and necklace. “Okay.” She spun around to look between the front seats to where her boys sat quietly. “Nate, honey, you okay?”
“My arm is sore.”
“I know, baby. We’ll get it checked out and the doctors will tell us what to do.”
“Okay.”
“Alec? Are you clipped in?”
He tugged on his seatbelt to show her.
“Mom?” the other boy said when Piper had turned forward again and I’d put the car in gear.
She spun around again. “Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was my fault,” Alec jumped in to say. “My idea to get on the chairs.”
“Let’s just get to the hospital, and we can talk about whose fault it was after, okay?”
Through the rearview mirror, I watched both boys nod. Then I backed out of the parking space and headed for the hospital. It was a tense, quiet twenty minutes, but we pulled up outside the regional hospital and Piper snapped into action. She unloaded her sons, putting Nate in a wheelchair and keeping Alec by her side. When she walked throughthe doors, I drove off, parked the car in one of the visitor lots, and then headed into the bright lights of the hospital lobby.
Piper was sitting on a hard plastic seat, one son on either side, her arms around both of them. She gave me a tight smile when I handed her the car keys.
“Thank you,” she said, then started rooting through her purse and pulled out her wallet. “I, um… I can’t leave the boys here to drive you home, but I can give you the cab fare to get back.”
“Piper,” I said, holding up a hand as my brows slammed down. “I’m not taking money from you. You don’t owe me anything for a ride to the hospital. Christ.”
Her jaw clenched as she hesitated, a twenty-dollar bill pinched between her thumb and forefinger, dangling between us. The woman wouldn’t even accept a ride. Were her principles that stringent? She didn’t believe in simple favors? Suddenly angry, I stomped across the lobby and mashed the buttons on the coffee-dispensing machine. With a little paper cup in either hand, I marched back to where Piper sat and thrust one of them at her.
“Take it,” I said when she hesitated. “It’s not filled with poison. Just bad coffee. You’ll need it—these things always take forever.”
“Thank you,” she said, fingers closing around the cup. She took a sip, grimaced, and then took another. Her eyes drifted to the big automatic swinging doors that led deeper into the hospital, clearly hoping to see someone emerge who would call her name.
