Did she have the flu? Food poisoning?
He had vomit all over him. She wasn’t quite as bad, but if she needed to rest, he should at least get her out of those clothes.
He reached down and gently nudged her shoulder. “Lexi, wake up a second, and let’s change your clothes. Then you can go back to sleep.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t so much as stir.
That didn’t seem right.
“Lexi.” He shook her shoulder with a little more force this time, then brushed a strand of blonde hair off her forehead. “Hey, come on, Green Eyes. Wake up for me.”
Nothing. She lay there, still as death.
For a second, panic pooled in his gut as he checked her pulse. Oh, Jesus, what if—
It was there. His breath leaked out in a hiss. Thank God. But it was way too fast for someone who was unconscious. Her heartbeat was thundering like she was running a sprint.
Shit. She was on something. That would explain so much—the big secret she was hiding. Why she’d stolen the two hundred dollars from him. Junkies did whatever they had to do.
He slid up her sleeves but found no sign of needle marks. That didn’t necessarily mean anything, only that she either knew how to hide her track marks or used something that didn’t require needles.
Damn it, was she overdosing? Should he take her to the hospital? He didn’t know enough about drug use to make that decision. But he knew somebody who did.
He had Zac on the phone a few seconds later.
“What’s wrong?” Zac skipped all pleasantries. The other man knew Gavin wouldn’t be calling at this time of night if there wasn’t something wrong.
“Is Anne sober enough to make a house call?”
“Are you injured?”
“It’s not for me, it’s for Lexi.”
“Two-hundred-and-eleven-dollars Lexi? What’s wrong with her? She seemed fine at the Eagle’s Nest earlier.”
“She’s passed out and completely unresponsive. I think she may be on drugs or something.”
Zac muttered a curse and a couple of moments later Anne’s voice came on the phone. He explained his suspicions to her.
“Check her heart rate.”
“It’s racing. That’s why I called. I thought maybe it was exhaustion, but this doesn’t seem right.”
“Okay, we’ll be right over. Just stick with her. If she’s having trouble breathing, call 911.”
Gavin checked Lexi’s pulse at least a dozen times before Zac and Anne arrived. It was stronger, and slower, but she still wouldn’t wake up no matter how many times he tried to rouse her.
He took off his gross shirt and looked around for a washing machine. She didn’t have one, so he thew his shirt in the sink.
She didn’t have as much vomit on her, but he wiped off the little bit, then decided to slide her shoes off too. If she was going to be unconscious, she might as well be comfortable.
He rushed down the stairs a few minutes later to let Zac and Anne in.
“Any change?” Anne asked, bag in hand.
“She’s still unconscious. Heart rate seems to be a little more normal.” He led them back up the stairs.
“I’m not going to ask why you don’t have a shirt on. I always figured you guys would eventually need me to help hide a body, but I never thought it would be straight-and-narrow Redwood first.”
“Please.” He forced a smile at Anne over his shoulder. “If we needed to hide a body, we could do that on our own. Your medical expertise would not be needed.”
And they would never put Anne in that position anyway. She was too kind and gentle and it would weigh on her. Zac wouldn’t allow that to happen.
As soon as they got upstairs, Anne walked to Lexi’s bedside. Gavin took guard on the other side. Zac stayed near the door.
“She hasn’t moved so much as a muscle since she passed out trying to get in the door and I carried her up here.”
Anne listened to Lexi’s heart with her stethoscope, then took her blood pressure. She pulled out a digital thermometer and took Lexi’s temperature, then held her eyes open and shined a light in them.
“Is there any particular reason you think this is drug induced? When you talked to her last, did she show any signs of being high? She certainly seemed coherent at the bar earlier.”
“I was waiting for her when she closed up the Eagle’s Nest. When she came out, she seemed almost drunk. Then she vomited all over me.”
Anne sat down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t think she’s high. Nothing about her resting state suggests that. Her pupils are responsive. Her blood pressure is normal. Her heart rate was elevated but it’s lowered into normal range now.”
“Then why won’t she wake up?”
“I don’t know her health history, so I can’t say definitively, but she’s young, and from what I’ve seen, relatively healthy. So unless I run some tests and they say differently, my first guess would be exhaustion.”
“But if she’s just tired, shouldn’t she wake up if only to tell us to leave her alone?”
Anne shrugged. “Her body shut down. It’s protecting itself. Did she give any indication that she knew what was coming?”
“She just kept saying that she needed to get home.”
Anne gave him a gentle smile. “We don’t know much about her, which Zac tells me causes you a great deal of irritation. But this could be somewhat normal for her. Or maybe not normal, but probably not due to illegal substances.”
“So what should we do?”
Anne let out a little sigh. “I could admit her into the hospital, but even with insurance, that would be an expensive bill for her, especially if there’s nothing wrong.”
“You know for a fact she doesn’t have a lot of money,” Zac said from the doorway. Gavin nodded. She definitely wouldn’t like spending the money.
But Gavin definitely didn’t like this. Did not like how still Lexi was. It seemed so unnatural. He’d been watching her for a month, and she was always running in high gear. She never sat around, never wasted time. She worked hard.
She’d handled the unexpected crowd tonight without complaint. And of course, there was no way she had been able to stop and take a break. Maybe it was exhaustion and nothing illegal. Exhaustion could certainly incapacitate someone, he knew that for a fact.
Part of the SERE—survival, evasion, resistance, escape—training they’d gone through to become Green Berets had included some sleep-deprivation exercises. They’d spent weeks out in the cold without full meals and taken turns being held “prisoner” by enemy combatants. Uncle Sam had wanted them to have a taste of what imprisonment might feel like. And it had been hell.
But the torture of sleep deprivation had caught them all a little off-guard. The way it tore at their minds, their emotions. Their sense of hope. Sleep was a necessity for the human body and mind.
He couldn’t stand the thought of Lexi going through something like that.
“I’ll stay with her.”
“That will probably be good in case anything changes. And get her some food and fluids as soon as she wakes up.”
“When will that be?”
“I’d be surprised if it’s any shorter than eight hours, to be honest. Sometimes I sleep twelve or more hours after a long shift in the ER,” Anne began packing up her bag. “I’ll run a toxicology report to be sure, investigate a couple of medical possibilities. I can’t share any of her private medical results, but we can at least know if we’re dealing with something outside of the norm. I’ll run it myself, so it will only take a couple hours. I can do it from her saliva.”