Tall, Dark & Furious (Pyte/Sentinel 6)

“Do I have a choice?” Nathan asked only to wince when she jabbed her finger into his side and turned it…hard.

“Brat,” he said with a long-suffering sigh as he settled more comfortably against the bed before admitting, “I don’t know where to start.”

She worried her bottom lip as she glanced at the door where Trace disappeared a little while ago and asked the one thing that she’d been wondering since this whole thing started. “Why was he in that wall?”

“You’d have to ask him that.”

“Fair enough,” Samantha said, biting back a wince when she shifted to get comfortable only to decide against it when her head started to hurt again. She should have asked for prescription-strength ibuprofen before they left, but she’d been unconscious at the time and hadn’t had a chance to ask for anything.

“Are you okay?” Nathan asked as she somehow managed to reach over and grab the extra-large bottle of Advil that wasn’t going to last the week with the way that her head was feeling.

“Fine,” she said, dumping three liquid gel pills in her hand and swallowed them with a sip of water before she leaned back against him.

“You want to tell me what happened?” Nathan asked, gesturing to the bruise that was finally starting to heal.

“You want to tell me why you disappeared at the hospital?” she countered, asking the question that she’d be wondering about since she woke up alone in that hospital bed.

“We miscalculated,” Nathan said, making her frown.

“Miscalculated what?”

“How much morphine it would take to bring down a Pyte,” he said, repeating that word that she’d been wondering about. Granted, there were so many things about this situation that she was wondering about, but she decided that she was going to start with the hospital first.

“Are you going to clear that up?”

“Do I have to?” he asked with a long-suffering sigh as he threw his arm back around her and pulled her closer.

“If you want to live,” she said, tempted to poke him again.

“Fine,” he said, making sure to sound put out as she laid her head against his chest and…couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t as comfortable as Trace.

“Trace is a Pyte,” he said only to roll his eyes when she tilted her head back so that she could shoot him a questioning look. “He’s a freak accident and an asshole.”

“Thank you. That really cleared everything up,” Samantha said, nodding only to shake her head in disgust as she laid her head back on his chest with a sigh.

“I’m not done yet,” he said, reaching up to give her hair a gentle tug. “He’s the product of a vampire and a human. His father is a vampire,” he said, while she laid there, absently nodding because she hadn’t known that part.

That was something else that she would most likely panic about later when this was all over, but for now…

“He can go out in the sunlight,” Samantha pointed out, even as she had to wonder if everything that she’d learned from movies and books about vampires, shifters, and all those other things that she probably didn’t want to know about was true.

“None of that shit affects him. He can’t die, doesn’t need to breathe, is fast, insanely strong, has enhanced senses, drinks blood, is dangerous, and is a fucking asshole that better keep his hands off my sister,” Nathan said, stressing the last part as she laid there unable to help but frown when something occurred to her.

“Then why did you give him morphine?”

“Because we didn’t think that it was a good idea to bring a Pyte, who appeared to have spent the last few centuries locked away in a tomb, into a hospital filled with unsuspecting humans. So, as soon as we got you into the wheelchair, we poisoned the bastard so that the other asshole could take him back to the house and lock him up. What we hadn’t anticipated was pissing off the bastard. We barely made it to the back of the parking lot when he tore one of the doors off. It took us over an hour, but we finally got

him to stop kicking our asses and convinced him to go back to the house and wait for you, but then he heard you say his name and rethought that plan.”

“He heard me say his name?” she asked, trying to wrap her mind around everything that he was saying.

“Enhanced senses,” Nathan murmured absently.

“Nathan?” she said, worrying her bottom lip as she debated whether or not she really wanted to know.

“Yeah?”

“How do you fit into all of this?”