I closed my eyes tightly and prayed that Tyson and Linnie would be okay.
Hopefully they would. Their house in town was nowhere near this part of the city for obvious reasons. It was also as far away from my dad’s place as it could get while still being in the same town.
“Time to take cover, then,” I heard said from the man at my other side.
It was one of the orderlies. A large black male that had arms the size of my waist. His name was Tyrel, and he had a voice like sin.
He was also hot as hell and had lips that just begged to be kissed.
He was in college to become a mathematician and had about two years left before he graduated.
So not only was he hot, but he was smart as hell, too.
“Where? We won’t be able to handle getting all of the patients out of their rooms. They will be fine where they are at, won’t they?” the nurse that I didn’t like, Sharona, asked.
I stared at her with anger plain on my face.
“They’re in exterior rooms. What, would you just like them to die? Then you’d be out of a job,” I snapped.
Sharona’s eyes were on me.
“I could lock you back in your room,” she suggested sweetly.
“Sharona,” Dr. Benjamin said. “Now’s not the time, and of course we let them out of their rooms. We need to take cover in the hallway. That’s the most interior place that we have in this facility, and it’s on the protocol in case of emergency. Please, start unlocking the rooms and rousing the patients.”
Of course, the tornado would happen at night.
Of freaking course.
That was usually how it went, correct?
But it didn’t matter what time it was.
I’d been up for hours and hours thinking about the man that was in this storm.
I’d never really given it much thought before, but I could see how his job would be dangerous.
During my computer time this morning, right before the storm had hit, I’d done a Google search on ‘lineman’ and hadn’t really liked what I’d found.
It was ranked one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the world, and fifty out of every one hundred thousand people died while doing it. And that was just the fatal parts of the job. You could also be injured by the actual electricity or fall off of the electrical pole. Many opportunities to maim and hurt yourself and be forced to go on living with that pain for the rest of your life.
Needless to say, after my Google search, I hadn’t been too comfortable about his job title.
Moreover, I didn’t know why I cared…but I did.
A lot.
The wind started to shake the building we were standing in, and I went ahead and grabbed my blanket, pillow, and book and walked to the hallway where we’d be for the foreseeable future.
Maddyn followed in my wake, unlocking the two closest doors that were near to where I was sitting. Once she had both patients out of their rooms—and luckily seated away from me seeing as they really were crazy—she came to sit next to me.
“If this place gets hit with that tornado, and I die, I want to make sure that I do it sitting next to him,” Maddyn whispered.
Maddyn had a crush on Tyrel. And when I say crush, I mean a crush that would make one of my romance novels proud.
“I’m sure he’s going to make his way over here,” I assured her. “But, you may want to move away from me so he’s not thinking he has to sit next to a crazy person.”
Maddyn looked at me like I was nuts. Which was funny since I was ‘supposed’ to be.
But Maddyn was a different kind of person. Despite knowing what I’d ‘supposedly’ done, she’d never treated me as anything less than a worthwhile human being.
She also knew that, at this point, I was in here on my own volition.
See, my mandatory ‘time’ that I needed to serve was up last August. Now I was just here because here was safer than there.
Plus, I had a feeling Maddyn saw more than she was letting on, and her eyes always narrowed when Tara showed. I was fairly sure Maddyn wasn’t fooled even a little bit.
“He’s so beautiful,” she replied dreamily.
I snorted and waved at Tyrel as he started looking for a place to sit.
He came over just as Maddyn started to whisper curses in my ear about how she was no longer going to slip me the good meds.
I tossed her a look over my shoulder as I said, “You don’t give me any meds at all.”
Her face tilted. “And why is that?”
I shrugged and turned back to Tyrel as he bent down.
Man, he smelled good.
Were men supposed to smell that good?
Granted, Liner had smelled divine, but I thought that was just me being attracted to Liner. And though Tyrel was pretty to look at, he wasn’t mine…he was Maddyn’s. He just didn’t know it yet.