Hide Me Away: A Riveting New Thriller (The Bishop Smoky Mountain Thrillers Book 1) by Lauren Street

Author:Lauren Street [Street, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2023-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Rileigh opened her eyes and didn’t like how the world was spinning, so she closed them again.

“Miss Bishop, can you hear me?”

It was a man’s voice. What man would be in her bedroom first thing in the morning to wake her up?

She opened her eyes, still spinning. She shut them again.

“Miss Bishop, I need you to open your eyes. Can you talk to me?”

Rileigh opened her eyes, blinked, and the world settled. She was looking at the face of a young man in a white lab coat. She knew the face, but couldn’t place it.

“How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked and held up a finger.

“One finger, but not a particularly interesting one. If you’re going to display only one finger, the proper one—“

The man looked back over his shoulder and spoke to somebody standing behind him.

“She’s awake and clearly aware.”

Awake and aware. What the …

Then it came back to her, flooded back into Rileigh’s mind with a little wash of residual terror that put gooseflesh on her arms. Her brakes had failed and she’d gone barreling down the mountainside trying to figure out how to stop.

The last images played through her mind— the traffic light, on red, the white CRV pulling into the intersection in her path, slamming the shift handle into park and yanking the wheel hard to the left as it skidded. You were supposed to turn into a skid, not out of it, but getting out of the skid was less important than not center-punching the white CRV.

That’s when reality settled around her and she realized that she was in the hospital. She looked down at her body, didn’t see any spots where she was missing pieces.

The few times she’d been knocked unconscious in combat, she had always done a body-part check first thing when she woke up, couldn’t breathe until she was sure she was there — with some of her parts injured sometimes, but all of them still firmly attached to her body.

Pieces all accounted for, so where did she hurt? That was more an internal assessment than just what she could see. The systems all checked off: hands, arms, torso, legs, feet, head.

Ouch. She wrinkled her brow and felt a prickly feeling on her scalp. She’d obviously suffered a head wound — thus the how-many-fingers quiz — but it couldn’t have been a serious one. Head wounds alway looked worse than they really were anyway, the scalp bled like a faucet.

And her effort to move had revealed some kind of issue with the index finger of her right hand. She looked down at it, saw it was splinted, sticking straight out from her knuckle.

Okay, a lump and a broken finger. Could have been a whole lot worse.

She looked at the man in the white lab coat and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sitting all starched and perfect at her bedside was Alexander Dowling, the little red-headed kid she’d babysat for whose parents had decided he would only fulfill his potential in life if he were not restricted in any way.

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