She thought about what he’d said, desperately wanting to believe him, though she didn’t understand why. “Did you think you would have the wolves contained...or eliminated?” she finally asked, aching for her brother.
Holding her troubled gaze, he spoke in a low, gritty voice. “We didn’t plan on letting them walk away. And we still don’t. They’ll be questioned extensively before they’re put down.”
“What is it exactly that you and your brothers do? I’m assuming the P.I. job is just a cover for the town, right?”
He nodded, scrubbing a hand against the dark stubble on his jaw, before saying, “We...hunt.”
Lainey lifted her brows. “You hunt? That’s all you’re going to tell me?”
In that dry tone she’d already heard a few times, he said, “It’s more than enough, trust me.”
Wow, this guy was the king of cryptic responses. “Do you really live here? Not in this...bunker, but in Moonlight Bay?”
She noticed that he winced a little as he moved his hand to his arm, applying pressure to the bloody gauze on his biceps, a husky note in his voice as he told her that he did.
With a frown wedged between her brows, she asked, “Then isn’t it a little strange that a werewolf pack would start terrorizing your home ground?”
“That’s why they need to be questioned,” he murmured, a scowl on his face as he gave a hard squeeze to his injured arm, then wiped his bloody palm on his dark sweats.
“You didn’t try questioning anyone tonight.” Her head might have been spinning during the fight, but she sure as hell would have remembered the sound of Nick’s voice if he’d started talking to the bastards.
“No, I didn’t exactly get around to questioning them.” His tone was dry again as he flicked her a shuttered look from under his lashes. “I was too busy trying to save your little ass.”
Which was the only reason why she wasn’t currently having a complete and total breakdown. The guy had risked his life going into that cave to save her when he could have just as easily left her to suffer at the pack’s hands. To Lainey’s way of thinking, that meant she owed him more than she could ever repay, and that meant she had to keep her crap together until she was alone. Then she could fall apart and bawl like a raving lunatic. “Will you be in trouble for making the kills?”
“No,” he answered, sounding...distracted. He was standing in profile to her now, looking in the other direction, at the heavily fortified door on the other side of the room. She had the uncomfortable feeling that something out there in the tunnels had snagged his attention. But she hadn’t heard anything. Not even a howl.
“Santos?”
“Yeah?” he grunted, still staring at the door.
“Are you going to unchain me now?” she asked, tugging at the heavy manacles. If something was going to come through that monstrosity of a door, she wanted to be able to run. Not that there was anywhere to run to. A few interior doorways led out of the room, one a bit smaller than the other, but they were just going to lead to other rooms in the bunker, based on what Santos had said.
Pulling his focus away from the door, he walked to the side of the bed and stared down at her. With a slow shake of his head, he said, “No. The chains stay.”
“Come on, Santos. I’m human. You’re...not. It’s not like I could hurt you even if I tried.”
He let that statement go and simply said, “I told you to call me Nick.”
“Look. If you’re not going to unchain me, can you at least loosen them enough that I can have a little more movement? I’d like to be able to sit up and put my hands in my lap.”
He didn’t look happy about the request. Or maybe, she realized, as he braced one knee beside her on the mattress and lifted his arms, reaching for the hook on the wall behind the bed, he just didn’t like getting this close to her. He was careful not to touch her as he adjusted the chains, and it looked as if he was holding his breath. Humiliation burned like a flame under her skin. Did humans just smell crappy to him...or was she that rank after the fight with the wolves?
Feeling the need to fill the awkward silence, she asked, “How did you hurt your arm?”
He cast a disgusted look at the wound after he finished with the chains, moving back to his feet so quickly you would have thought she had some kind of contagious disease. “One of the bastards bit me.”
Oh, wow. Freaking ouch. “Does it hurt?” The second she heard herself saying the words, she winced. What kind of stupid question was that? Of course it hurt. The guy was a vampire, not dead!
She expected him to deny any pain, but he surprised her by saying, “Throbs like a bitch.”
“Can you take anything for it?”
“Painkillers don’t work on my kind,” he said, shaking his head.
“Speaking of your...kind—” She stopped for a moment as she finally managed to push herself up into a sitting position with her back against the wall, relieved to be able to lower her arms. “Exactly how old are you?”
He snorted, a crooked smile on those beautiful, sensual lips as he lifted his brows. “How old do I look?”
“I’d say...mid-thirties?” she murmured, trying not to think about her appearance. After everything she’d been through, she probably had some kind of funky Bride of Frankenstein look going on, while he managed to look extremely edible in nothing but a sweaty, blood-spattered pair of sweats and a T-shirt. If that wasn’t unfair, she didn’t know what was.
A low, gritty laugh shook his chest. “I’m nearly 240.”
“Wow. You’re, uh, holding together well,” she offered lamely. But what the hell did you say to a man who had just told you he was older than the Constitution?
He gave another quiet snort, the flare of heat in his eyes as he stared down at her face making her breath catch. “Thanks. It’s always good to hear that one’s...holding together.”
“And your brothers? How old are they?”
“Val is my older brother by ten years,” he said, turning and walking over to the table and chairs that were pushed against one of the walls, his big, masculine body moving with a breathtaking predatory grace despite his height and powerful build. “Seb is the youngest at only 220.”
“Only 220?” She quietly laughed, thinking this must have been close to how Alice felt after slipping down into that blasted hole. “Still in his prime, eh?”
He turned and looked at her as he grabbed the back of one of the wooden chairs one-handed, his dark gaze a sexy cross between perplexed and impressed. “You’re taking this all very well, Lainey.”
With a philosophical shrug, she said, “It’s kinda hard to be disbelieving after what I saw tonight. And you did save my life. You could have just left me, but you didn’t. Based on what I could hear, you must have come charging into that cave like some kind of avenging angel.”
“I’m no damn angel,” he snapped, any softening edges she might have glimpsed in his expression going razor sharp again. “You’d do well to remember that.”
“Just tell me more about your family,” she prompted, unfazed by his anger.
A scowl formed between his dark brows. “Why?”
Gathering her tangled hair and pulling it over her shoulder, she said, “Because it’s helping me stay calm, and I’m too tired to freak out.”
For the first time since she’d met him, Nick Santos looked a little lost. “I...don’t know what you want to know.”
“Well, after you bring that chair over here and sit down—that is what you were doing, right?—you can start by telling me about your parents.”
He was quiet as he carried the chair across the room, setting it on the floor about five feet from the side of the bed. He turned it so that he was straddling the seat, his powerful arms crossed over the top rung at the back as he settled his curious, slightly uncertain gaze back on her face. In that deliciously low, rugged voice, he said, “My father is Spanish, but he settled in the colonies not long after meeting my mother. She was born and raised in Britain.”
“Yeah, they’re both vamps, which means my brothers and I are born vampires and not made ones. There’s not much difference between the two once a made vampire has reached full maturity.”
“And how long does that take?”
With a shrug of those massive shoulders, he said, “Fifty years or so.”
Oh, sure. Just a drop in the bucket for a guy who was going to live forever. Or would he? “Are you immortal?”
His chest shook with a breathless laugh. “Unless someone decides to kill me I am. More or less.”
“I know you have a heartbeat because I can see the pulse at the base of your throat.” A strong, dark, corded throat that looked good enough to nibble, even if she wasn’t a vampire. “You, um, also look like you’re breathing.”
Brushing his bottom lip with his thumb, he said, “That’s because I am. But unlike a human, going without oxygen won’t kill me. It just gives me a hell of a headache.”
“I can imagine,” she murmured, thinking her own head wasn’t feeling too great at the moment. But considering how lucky she was to have come out of the violent battle without anything more than a few bumps and bruises, she wasn’t going to complain. “And what do your parents do?” she asked, determined to keep the conversation going. Of course, she was also curious as hell about his life and everything else that had to do with him.
“My mother is an artist,” he explained, the look on his face making her feel as if she, quirky little ol’ Lainey Maxwell, were some kind of mystifying puzzle he was still trying to figure out. “My father now holds a place of authority on the council that oversees our kind. Before that, he worked for many years as an Enforcer.”
“An Enforcer?” It sounded like some kind of ancient military term to her.
His voice was rough and deep. “It’s a vampire who hunts.”
“Hunts what?” she asked, remembering him say that he and his brothers were hunters.
He held her stare with his piercing gaze, then looked down at his hands as he rubbed the thumb of one hand into the palm of the other. “Whatever we need to.”
For a moment, Lainey was chilled by the coldness in his expression and in his tone, but then she realized what he was doing. Like so many other things in life, there was clearly a hell of a lot more to Nick Santos than met the eye. He might have been built like the perfect predator, long and lean and impossibly powerful, but the killing took its toll on him. When he went cold like this, she would have been willing to bet it was his means of coping with what he had to do, encasing his emotions in ice so that they couldn’t interfere with his work.
Did anything, or anyone, ever crack through that ice deeply enough to actually touch him? Or did he use it as a shield to keep the rest of the world at a comfortable distance?
Uneasy with how important the answers to those questions were to her, she forced her attention back on the conversation. “Would werewolves be something that needs to be hunted?”
“Not all of them,” he told her, bringing that compelling gaze back to hers. “Just the ones who feed on humans rather than other animals.” He waited a moment, then added, “It’s the role of an Enforcer to cull any preternatural creature that threatens the life of a human or a vampire.”
“And you and your brothers? You’ve followed in your father’s footsteps?”
When he nodded, she asked, “Are you any good at it?”
His jaw went hard and he gave her a sharp look as if she’d just insulted him by questioning his ability. Prickly vampire. “We’ve all reached the level of Prime.”
“Is that high?”
“It’s the highest,” he said with obvious pride.
“And how does one become a Prime Enforcer?”
A grim smile twisted his lips. “With a hell of a lot of work,” he supplied with a tired laugh.
“And a lot of smarts, too, I’d be willing to wager.”
Shrugging, he said, “When you’ve been around as long as I have, you learn or you die.”
“So you can be killed?”
He slowly arched one of those dark brows. “You planning to off me, little human?”
“No, of course not. I’m just curious...about your abilities. I mean, I met you this afternoon, in the sunlight. Isn’t that meant to kill a vampire?”
His mouth twitched, as if he was trying not to smile. “In folklore, yes. But we’re more resistant to the sun’s rays the older we get. I can go out into the daylight for small intervals of time as long as I wear sunglasses. My eyes are more sensitive than my skin.”
“What else?”
Without arrogance, he said, “I’m faster, stronger and harder to kill than a human.”
“And you have fangs and claws,” she pointed out, remembering the way he’d looked when he’d rescued her.
“That’s right,” he murmured, watching her closely, as if he was trying to figure out why she wasn’t sobbing hysterically at this point. “But we call them talons.”
“Can you—?”
“I think it’s my turn to ask the questions,” he cut in. “Let’s start with what you do for a living.”
“Great,” she muttered, feeling her face go warm. “This’ll be the part of our night that goes from fascinating to frightfully dull. Are you sure you want to go through with it? Wouldn’t you rather just answer my questions? I mean, I’ve got, like, thousands of them.”
“So do I,” he returned with a quiet but firm force. “And something tells me you’re anything but dull, Lainey.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s sweet but far from the truth.”
“Just answer the question,” he ground out, probably irritated by the “sweet” comment.
“Fine!” she huffed, deciding just to get it over and done with. “I run a bookstore in San Diego. We also sell local arts and crafts and have a great little café, so we still get a lot of business even with the e-book boom.”
Watching her carefully, he asked, “Are you married?”
“What? No!”
He lifted his brows. “Boyfriend? Girlfriend?”
“Uh, no. If there was, you can bet I’d have had them here with me, helping me search for Ryan.” She paused for a moment, then added, “And I’m hetero, by the way. Not that I would have a problem being a lesbian. One of my closest friends is gay and she’s gorgeous. It’s just not the way I...swing. If it was, I’d have begged her to marry me years ago.”
His mouth twitched with one of those sexy, crooked smiles. “How old are you?”
“I turn twenty-seven next month.”
Surprise shone in that deep, dark blue. “You look even younger.”
“It’s the hair,” she said, ignoring the rattle of the chain as she lifted one of the long, curly locks.
“And what’s with all the black?” he asked, his voice a little huskier than before as he ran his intense gaze over her dark clothing before lifting it back to her face.
She slowly arched a brow as she stretched out her legs, thinking that she just might kick him if he said something unkind. “What do you mean?”
“It doesn’t really seem your kind of color scheme,” he offered with a cocky smirk, as if she was too fluffy to pull it off. What an ass!
Lainey narrowed her eyes. “You have no idea what my color scheme is. For all you know, I wear black all the damn time. I might be the freaking Goth queen of black clothing.”
He gave a masculine snort, looking too mouthwatering to be real. “Doubt it.”
“Just because I wasn’t wearing it earlier today doesn’t mean anything. That outfit you saw me in could have just been a way to fit in around here.”
“Whatever it was,” he said in a low, husky rumble, “I thought it was cute as hell on you.”
She blinked, those unexpected words taking the oomph right out of
her pique. “Oh. You...uh, did?”
“Any man would have,” he muttered, his gaze starting to glow a little as he rubbed his jaw. “Hell, you looked like a pink ice cream cone.”
She gave a soft, startled laugh. “Well, if it makes you feel better, I didn’t opt for all black tonight. My thong is pink.”
As if drawn by a magnet, his gaze shot straight to her crotch. She shivered, feeling as if he was actually seeing her in nothing but the skimpy panties, and her entire body went hot.
What on earth was she doing? Was she actually...flirting with him?
Considering the look he was giving her, Lainey thought it might be a good time to finally ask, “What exactly is the plan? You know...for the two of us?”
He moved to his feet so quickly he was little more than a blur, turning his back to her as he carried the chair back over to the table. Apparently question time was over.
“Nick, seriously. Please just answer the question.”
“I’m hoping my brothers will find us,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest as he turned to face her. “If they return to town tomorrow and realize I’m missing and not answering my phone, they’ll start searching the area. This should be one of the first places they look.”
“And if they don’t make it back to town tomorrow? What then?”
Everything about him, from his stance to his tone, said he didn’t want to be having this conversation. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow night.”
“Tomorrow night? Why? What’s happening tomorrow night?”
His voice became dangerously low. “Take my word for it, Lainey. You don’t want to know.”
Feeling a little sick inside, she said, “I do, actually.”
“Christ,” he grunted, shoving one of those big hands back through his hair, his blue eyes beginning to burn with a hot, glittering glow. “You just can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”
“Just answer the damn question, Nick. What’s the big deal about tomorrow night?”
Narrowing his gaze, he took two steps toward her, then checked himself, his voice erupting in a guttural snarl of words as he roared, “That’s when we’re going to have a serious fucking problem!”
Darkest Desire of the Vampire: Wicked in MoonlightVampire Island (Harlequin Nocturne) Page 4