by Megan Hart
“Good. Thank you.”
They were still squared off, but he visibly relaxed. He held up the drone. “Anyway, it’s just one that takes pictures. Probably one of the news agencies. Or the tabloids.”
“Do you want pictures of yourself taken without your permission?”
“Of course not!”
She shrugged. “Then I think it was as important for me to neutralize the threat as if it had been loaded with a gun or electro-shocker, or a gas canister.”
“Maybe not quite as important,” Donahue said.
She waited a second to see if he was going to smile. He did, though barely. She made sure to sound respectful when she answered, “Anything that brings you any measure of harm is something I will do my very best to prevent. Anything. If you’re mine, you are mine all the way.”
Something grew in the space between them, real and palpable, an echo of the previous tensions but something more. Something bigger. It tightened the muscles in her belly and at the base of her throat; she swallowed against it, but it didn’t go away. Nina lifted her chin, staring at him. Incapable of so much as a blink. She was used to time slowing when faced with danger and there had been nothing so far in her life, she thought, as dangerous as the man staring her down now.
“All the way,” Donahue echoed after a moment in a low, rasping voice that sent an inferno of sensation to her very core.
Physical reactions to sexual arousal and to threats were so similar—increased heart rate, blood pressure, sweating. The sensations rushed through her, and Nina took a step back. She almost never had to put conscious effort into controlling her body because the tech automatically did it, but she could do it by concentrating, if she had to.
She had to, now.
The heat in Donahue’s gaze swept over her, and she would have been left shaking, if she hadn’t forcibly shifted her body’s responses. Her stomach twisted with it, and she breathed deeply. Fists clenching. It all lasted no more than a few seconds, barely long enough for her to notice it, and she was gratefully certain that Donahue hadn’t. It had all left her stunned and uncertain and tense.
The last time she had felt this vulnerable, she’d woken up in agony on a hospital bed, blind and deaf from the bandages surrounding her head. She’d lost everything that had been important to her. Family. Friends. Lovers. The life she had known. Good had come from it, as Nina believed it always did from surviving adversity, but what good would come from stepping forward and offering her mouth to Ewan Donahue, which was all she could think about doing in that moment?
No good, nothing good at all, nothing but disaster.
Nina didn’t move toward him. She tossed her braid over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips. She cleared her throat, her voice steady and not shaking only because she could control that as well as she could control her heart rate.
“We should get back to the main house,” she told him.
Donahue nodded. “Yeah. Yes. Fine. Good.”
She wanted to take off running but couldn’t. It was her job. She couldn’t leave him behind her. She had to wait for him to lead to make sure that if anything else came after him, she would be there protect him from it. So, awkward and hating it, because nothing had made her feel this uncertain and unstable since before she’d gone into the army, Nina gestured at the path.
Without a word or another look at her, Donahue took it.
CHAPTER SIX
Ewan knew, of course, all about Nina’s capabilities. He’d been the one to design them, after all. The automatic biofeedback that allowed her to shift more energy into muscles being used for fighting or fleeing. Her body’s ability to slow her breathing while gaining more oxygen from each breath. The way she would be able to go faster, higher, harder just by a few simple shifts in her neurological responses. He hadn’t realized how irritating it would be when she used those enhancements on him.
Or how sexy.
She’d dropped him like it had meant nothing at all. He’d been on the ground watching her make that super jump into the sky before he had time to blink. Flat on his back with his cock aching and rigid in his shorts. Thank the universe for the tight briefs he wore that had kept his erection in its place.
He’d never reacted that way to a threat before. If he were mad or scared or upset about something, the very last thing in the world on his mind was getting laid. Hell, he’d never even understood the appeal of angry fucking.
It wasn’t because of the threat, or the danger. It was entirely because of Nina and her strength. The way she’d handled him with such ease, swiftness, and confidence. The pain of him hitting the ground hadn’t been sexy, but watching her in action had been one of the hottest things Ewan had ever seen . . . and he hated it. He didn’t need a reminder about what she was, and he definitely didn’t need to find it attractive. The idea of it was perverse, like if the doctor had wanted to make love to his monster after creating it.
Home now, both of them showered and with dinner in their bellies, he was trying so hard not to keep replaying how she’d straddled him that he’d barely tasted a bite of the pasta and vegetables he’d eaten. He couldn’t get the feeling of her weight on him out of his head, nor how swiftly she’d been able to take him down. It was almost more than he could do not to pull her close and unbind the braid at the base of her neck and sink his fingers deep, deep into that silky weight. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t shake the feeling of how easily she’d taken away his control.
“Are you still angry?” Nina asked him now quietly from her place on the couch. She had the tablet in her hands, but he didn’t think she’d been reading, because he’d too often felt the weight of her gaze on him as he pretended to work.
Ignoring her hadn’t helped him to forget the way his body had reacted to her strength and later, even more, to what she’d said. “Mine.” Her words echoed in his memory until he had to shift against the rise of his prick like some schoolkid who didn’t know how to control himself around a pretty girl.
“They already broadcasted some of the photos they managed to get before you grabbed the drone,” Ewan said in a flat voice. He spun the monitor to show her. “This one’s my personal favorite.”
It showed him being dropped to the ground while Nina looked directly into the camera lens. She looked fierce. A warrior. She looked beautiful, though he wasn’t about to admit that aloud, not again.
“I especially like the commentary,” he added, and read aloud: “‘Donahue Dumped.’ ‘Billionaire Bounced.’”
“Oh, c’mon. Are you really a billionaire?”
He pressed his lips together for a moment before answering. “You know everyone’s a billionaire now, ever since the New World Credit system went into effect.”
“Right. I wasn’t aware that Gray Tuesday had made everyone a billionaire, though. I really missed out.” She gave him a steady gaze as neutral as the one he was giving her.
Had she noticed his arousal earlier? Was that why she’d so carefully backed off from him for the rest of the day? Ewan spun the monitor around to look at his photo again with another frown. It was embarrassing as hell. “A couple different groups are trying to take credit for the drone. Most of them are obviously lying.”
“What do your people say?”
He shrugged and scrolled through the file of photos they’d managed to download off the drone. There were the mortifying ones of him biting the dirt, along with several of Nina in full action. He didn’t click on any of those. He didn’t need photographic reminders of how she’d looked. He was never going to be able to forget. There were also a few aerial shots of his property, though nothing terribly suspicious.
“It was a media drone. Nothing serious, not scouting for vulnerabilities or anything like that,” he said. “Not armed. Relatively minor memory capacity. Hell, it wasn’t even one of the better models, it’s almost like something some kid could’ve built in his garage.”
Nina got up from the couch and moved to look over his shoulder. This close, he
could smell her shampoo and the hint of coffee on her breath, both familiar even after so short a time. Ewan had never been married. He’d never wanted to be married. Yet here he was, smelling her shampoo and knowing how she took her coffee and how she looked when she was sweaty from a workout, or when she first woke up, or a dozen other things about her that he didn’t want to know.
“You want my advice?” Her breath tickled his ear.
Ewan closed his eyes for a moment before forcing them open. He refused to even glance in her direction. He shifted a bit away from her, but it didn’t help. He wanted to turn and press his lips to the smooth, warm, and fragrant insanity of her skin.
“What?” he bit out.
“Don’t read anything about yourself in the cesspool of social media. It’s never good. Or if it is good,” she murmured, “and you want to believe it, then you might have to believe the bad stuff, too. So just don’t read it.”
Had her lips brushed his ear at those last words? He twisted in his desk chair as she took a step back. Heat flooded him. “What do you know about it?”
“You think I wasn’t all over the media at one point? I’m one of the fifteen soldiers to undergo the enhancement procedures. There isn’t anything about my entire life that someone didn’t comment about sometime, somewhere.” She was silent, then added, “It kind of made a mess of my personal life.”
“Maybe you should have yourself reset.” He said it bluntly on purpose. Making distance between them. Putting her in her place, if only to remind himself of where that was.
She took a step back. “Wow. Well, Mr. Donahue, that’s not exactly the purpose for my enhancements. I mean, sure, I guess I could ask for some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind action, if I wanted to.”
“So, why don’t you? If it’s so painful to remember all that stuff that happened?”
Her lip curled before her expression quickly smoothed. “Because everything that ever happened to me made me who I am. Even the bad things. Maybe especially the bad things. Would you erase your bad memories, if you could?”
“I can’t,” he insisted, not sure why he was being such a prick about it, except that everything about the woman in front of him had unsettled him. Put him on edge. “But you can. So why don’t you?”
She studied him for a long moment. “You know that I can’t choose it. Right? It’s something that’s just done to me. I mean, you could decide, after this gig, to have me reset to forget you.”
“I won’t do that. That’s unethical.”
Nina shrugged. “But you could. It’s part of what you’re paying for. Protection. Discretion.”
“And you’re all right with that?” Ewan asked. “It doesn’t bother you at all?”
“I signed a contract.”
He frowned. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I’m shiny fine with it,” she said.
“I’m not. It’s wrong.” He wanted to say more than that, to tell her about Katie and how it had been at the end. He didn’t owe Nina an explanation about anything, and the fact he was even considering telling her the truth about his involvement in the enhancement tech made him way, way less than shiny fine.
Nina gave him a hard stare. “You’re the boss.”
“For someone who’s supposed to be such a great fighter, you’re not big on confrontation.”
She looked at him over her shoulder as she took her place again on the couch. “You’re not paying me to fight with you. You’re paying me to fight for you. If you want to add on something for a bonus, though, I’m sure I could manage to let you get on my nerves enough to really fight with you. If you want.”
She was witty. Strong. And yes, beautiful and sexy and amazing, and it was making him crazy, because all he could think of now was being underneath her and on top of her, both of them sweating and swearing and tearing each other apart.
“It wouldn’t be a fair fight,” he said, and meant in more ways than her physical strength.
She gave him a cool smile. “You never know, Mr. Donahue. I might let you win.”
“I don’t take what I don’t deserve,” he told her roughly.
“All right,” Nina said. “So I’d let you work for it.”
For one crazy second, he almost took her up on it. He wanted to. Under other circumstances, he wouldn’t have hesitated, but all he could think about now was her answer when he’d asked her if it hurt.
Yes, she’d said. And sometimes it still did.
He’d done that to her, although she didn’t know it. Would never know it, not as long as he could fight to keep any hint of that knowledge from going public. He knew that no matter what sort of pain lingered in her, he wasn’t going to be responsible for making anyone else go through it. Ever.
Plus, there was the real truth that the only way he could win a physical fight with her was truly if she let him win, and he wasn’t going to put himself in that position.
They didn’t say much to each other for the rest of the night. Small talk, nothing personal. Nina stayed quiet and in the background when he dealt with business. He opened a bottle of wine, but she refused a glass. He didn’t ask her if it was because she didn’t drink or if she simply didn’t imbibe while on the job. He didn’t ask her much of anything at all, and when it was time for them to once more share space in his bedroom, he tried to stay awake in the darkness, but the sound of her breathing lulled him quickly into sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Donahue had been quiet since yesterday, which was all right with Nina because she didn’t have much to say to him. Nina had used sexual tension as a way to keep clients in line before, but it had always been nothing more than surface. What happened in the garden, her reaction to him in those tense moments after the drone attack, had left her unnerved. Something deep and dark had uncoiled inside her, triggered by his scent and the faint thunder of his heartbeat, the warm brush of his body heat. She was always aroused after the danger had passed, all of her enhanced senses firing on high until the tech returned her to normal, but this had felt different. Undefinable, but undeniable. It rankled a bit that he seemed to be outright ignoring her as though she were no more than a piece of furniture.
When her personal comm pinged, she glanced toward him to see if the noise had caught his attention, but he was concentrating on his computer and didn’t even glance her way. Nina stood. He still didn’t look at her, and then she knew for sure he was deliberately pretending she didn’t exist.
Screw that. They didn’t have to be besties, but he didn’t get to simply erase her. She spoke aloud, deliberately, making sure he would hear her. “I have to take this.”
“I’m working,” he answered immediately. “Go in the other room.”
Nina pressed the tip of her tongue between her teeth, gently biting although she wanted to make it hurt badly enough to remind her not to snap at him. It took only a few seconds for that desire to fade, of course. Donahue hadn’t known just how true his statements about emotions and their inability to linger had been in regards to Nina, but he’d still been right.
“You know I can’t do that, Donahue.”
If he noticed she’d dropped the “Mr.” he didn’t acknowledge it. He did look at her, finally. “I’m working on something really intricate. You talking on the comm will absolutely interrupt me. So if you can’t go into the other room, you’ll have to ignore your personal business until I’m finished working.”
“It’s from my boss. It could be important, or it could be about you,” Nina said crisply, and yeah, that was meant as a dig. She wasn’t proud of how she reacted when she felt stung, but now wasn’t the time to work on her personality. “Regardless, I do need to answer it. I’ll keep my voice down and go in the corner. But I’m not leaving the room you’re in unless you dismiss me from your service.”
“You are so difficult,” Donahue muttered.
Nina drew in a long, deep breath that she kept from being a sigh only through great effort. “And you are extremely stubborn.”<
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Neither of them spoke for a few seconds while they stared at each other. Did she imagine the faintest quirk of a smile at the corners of his lips? She must have, because he shook his head and then jerked his chin toward the corner of the room near his floor-to-ceiling shelves. Nina gave him a broad grin on purpose, even though the very last thing she felt like doing was smiling.
She thumbed the screen of her personal comm to reply to Leona’s message. In moments, Nina’s boss pinged through. Today she wore her blond hair in a high topknot decorated with synthfeathers and glittery stones. Her eyes usually shone a brilliant, glowing violet or teal, but today they were brown, without cosmetics.
“Nice lipstick,” Nina said, aware that Donahue was listening even if he was adamantly pretending that he was not. “Great color on you.”
Usually, Leona would have blown Nina a kiss for that compliment, but today she only frowned. “I have some bad news, and I wanted you to hear it from me first, before the media gets to it.”
“Sure.” Nina shrugged.
“Hendricks is gone.”
Nina’s eyes narrowed in confusion. “What do you mean, gone?”
“Dead,” Leona clarified with a hitch in her voice that was as wildly out of character as her natural-colored eyes. “He went home last night after his last assignment and took his own life.”
Nina did not stagger, but she did reach for the shelf to steady herself. Her heart thudded rapidly until it was forced to regain its natural rhythm. “Why?”
It was a question she knew her boss couldn’t be expected to answer. Leona shook her head. Nina closed her eyes for a few seconds, pressing her fingertips to the spot between them before she looked at Leona again.
“What was his last assignment?” Nina asked.
“You know I can’t tell you that,” Leona said.
Nina nodded. “Did he leave a note?”
“Yes. It said, ‘I forgot her.’”
She didn’t dare to turn around and look at Donahue now. She swallowed, waiting for pain to slit its way up her gut like a knife, but emptiness swelled inside her. A blank, still force crept along her nerves and settled at the base of her brain. She wasn’t calm. She was merely . . . nothing.
