Page 39 of Inevitable
“Hey, Piper.” I smiled at the screen, though it was forced. “I was getting ready to go to bed. Is everything okay?”
“Hang on.” She fiddled with her hearing aid, then said, “Okay. Now I can hear you. I wanted to check in after the flight. I know you were anxious. Did everything go okay?”
“Oh, fine,” I sighed. “Apart from the fact that I flashed my boss and most of the passengers in first class.”
“What?” she shrieked, eyes going wide. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I wish I were.” I slumped. “But, yeah. Your ‘antianxiety’ pills,” I said, complete with air quotes. “Not so great.”
Her eyes went wide, and she leaned forward as if trying to come through the screen. “Oh shit. How many did you take?”
“One.” I held up a finger as if to underscore the point. “I tookone, and it was awful.”
She covered her mouth, but it didn’t muffle the sound of her laugh. “At least it sounds like you were distracted from your fear of flying.”
I glared at her through the screen. “Piper! That’s not the point!”
“I know. Iknow.” She held up her hands. “I’m sorry, okay? I’ve never had any issues with them. I never would’ve expected that you’d react that way.”
“Serves me right for taking meds not prescribed to me,” I muttered, mostly to myself.
“People do it all the time,” she said. “Hell, think of all the shit we did in high school.”
“Yeah, but still. This wasbad.”
“Are you okay now?”
I lifted a shoulder. “Yeah. I mean, apart from wanting to die of embarrassment. But I was lucky it wasn’t worse. If I worked for anyone else, I could’ve lost my job.”
“A job you didn’t even want.”
“Whatever,” I huffed.
“What did Wolfe do?”
I snort-laughed, remembering how wide his eyes had gotten when I’d started unbuttoning my shirt. “Threw his jacket over me as if I were on fire.” He hadn’t been able to cover me up fast enough.
She tilted her head to the side. “He didn’t even sneak a peek at the goods?”
I shook my head, both impressed and annoyed by his response. “Perfect gentleman.”
“I highly doubt that. You were probably too out of it to notice anyway. What happened after the flight? Did the rest of the evening go okay?”
“We went to dinner and then to seeHamilton.”
“Hamilton?” she squeaked. “How the hell did you score tickets?”
I lifted a shoulder. I hadn’t given it much thought until now; I’d just been so ecstatic about the whole thing. “I don’t know. Jonathan surprised me with them.”
“It wasn’t a client event?”
I shook my head. “No. Just the two of us.”
“Interesting.” She grinned.
“What?”
“That sounds a lot like a date.”
