Wicked Attraction (The Protector)

by Megan Hart

  He was really good with the kids. Nina watched him talk to each one, listening to their projects and their progress. Offering advice or commiseration, depending on what they needed. She’d seen a little of this side of him before, at Woodhaven, when she’d first gone to work for him. It had impressed her then and still did, more than any amount of money ever could have.

  From across the room, Ewan looked up from where he’d been bent over a table, offering a solution to a problem. Their eyes met. Locked. He smiled, just a little, before returning his attention to the young man in front of him.

  “Mr. Donahue sure is hyper icy,” Betts said. Her finely shaped black eyebrows furrowed over her dark eyes, free of any cos-tech—something unusual enough for Nina to notice they were natural. “Are you his girlfriend?”

  Nina, unfamiliar with the new slang, had to think a minute to understand if Betts was giving Ewan a compliment. She decided it must be. “Um, no. I’m his bodyguard.”

  “Oh. Does he still need one?” Betts frowned.

  “He thinks so.” Nina looked at the girl. “Last night, something happened here. Do you know anything about it?”

  “No.” The answer came too quickly to be the truth.

  Nina hadn’t really been expecting the girl to know anything, but she also hadn’t anticipated that Betts would flat-out lie to her. Nina kept her tone neutral as she focused her senses, noticing the girl’s elevated heartbeat. The slight dilation of Betts’s pupils. The nervous way her eyelids fluttered.

  “The sec team said they thought it was probably just some attempted vandalism,” Nina commented.

  “Someone did paint some hyper noxious graffiti on the walls out front,” Betts said, again too quickly. “I saw it when I came in this morning.”

  Nina made a show of looking casually around the room. “Is there anything in the lab that anyone might want to steal?”

  “Sure, everything.” Betts had relaxed a tiny bit, her response not a lie or half-truth this time, at least not based on her body’s reactions. “The sugarheads would love to get their hands on any of this tech in here, sell it for credits. They’re bad around here. They sell candy in the parking lot. That should be illegal.”

  “You think?” This attitude surprised her. Candy had been introduced sometime during Nina’s childhood, and the government-approved drugs had become as prevalent and socially acceptable as cigarettes and booze had once been.

  Betts nodded. “Yeah. Candy isn’t any good for anyone, not really. It just causes problems. It’s not supposed to be addictive, but everyone knows it is.”

  “Yeah, it can be bad news.” Nina had never partaken much, preferring an adrenaline rush to a “sugar” high. She knew Ewan had been both a user and a seller briefly. It still surprised her that someone from Betts’s generation would be so against it. “I take it you don’t use sugar.”

  “No. I’d never get into it! Those guys do.” Betts frowned and jerked her head toward the two kids at the far end of the room. “But you know what? They didn’t get this week’s bonus, and I did.”

  Nina laughed. “More than a good enough reason not to sugar up.”

  Betts seemed a little relieved that the direction of the conversation had changed. She nodded, looking over at the other group. “Yeah. They’re not really much competition anyway. Jordie’s really the only one who I have to worry about. But Mr. Donahue’s really fair about the bonuses. Even if someone didn’t really deserve it for being hyper cranial about something, if they haven’t won it in a while, he ends up finding a reason to give them one. Usually he only does it online though, when we submit our weekly reports. He hasn’t been in to the lab for a long time. He meets with us on the comm.”

  “Is that Jordie?” Nina pointed toward the young man Ewan was still helping.

  Betts drew in a breath, rough. “Uh, no, he’s not here today.”

  Nina carefully didn’t make a big deal out of Betts’s reaction, although once again, the girl was clearly responding negatively. There was no way to prove Jordie’s absence had anything to do with last night’s issues, but Nina was going to guess it did. She was also going to guess that Betts knew it.

  “Is he sick?” Nina asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s not like he’s my boyfriend or something, I mean, he doesn’t tell me why he doesn’t come in. We don’t have to, you know, get a note from the doc or anything.” Betts bent back over her tablet. “I should get back to work.”

  “Sure.” Nina watched her for a minute or so, noting that the girl’s body temperature was still a little higher than what was considered normal, and her heartbeat was still racing. Betts’s fingers trembled when she tapped at the tablet screen, and although the teenager made a big show of working on something, she wasn’t actually doing anything but typing and erasing the same few strings of letters over and over again.

  Before Nina had the chance to pursue her questions further, Ewan crossed the room to her. “Ready to head out?”

  “Yeah.” She paused with a glance at Betts, who was studiously ignoring her. Nina said the girl’s name and waited until she looked up. “Nice meeting you. Hyper icy on the bonus.”

  The girl nodded, looking guilty. “Thanks.”

  “What was that about?” Ewan waited until they were outside and in the transpo before asking. “With Betts. She looked like you’d scared her.”

  “I think she knows something about what happened last night.”

  Ewan’s eyebrows rose. “You think so? Why?”

  “The way she reacted when I asked her if she knew anything about it. Sketchy. I could be wrong,” she added. “But you might want to keep it in mind.”

  “I will. Thanks.” He typed a command into the transpo controls and leaned back in the seat. “Is it okay if we don’t go home right away?”

  Her stomach had been rumbling for the past half hour or so. “I have a couple of protein bars in my bag if it gets, as the kids say, hyper noxious.”

  “We can stop for something to eat, don’t worry about that.” Ewan gestured.

  Nina chewed the inside of her cheek for a second. “Of course, then. Sure. Wherever you want to go.”

  “Great.” He settled into the seat and looked out the window, not saying much.

  She didn’t like the silence, but she also didn’t know if she wanted a conversation. She let herself study him in profile, his features highlighted with the soft glow from the transpo window. It wasn’t that he’d aged in the past few months, she thought. It was that the businesslike fortitude she’d seen in him when they first met had returned. There was a chill between them, and could she blame him? The passionate interlude was something she didn’t regret but certainly knew better than to repeat. Other than that brief time last night they’d had very little but arguments and dissatisfaction between them since he’d rehired her, and it wasn’t all Ewan’s fault. She was as much to blame.

  Maybe that was all it was ever going to be, now. Blame and guilt and anger and regret. A lifetime of joy lost before it could even be had.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ewan hadn’t planned for anything beyond the trip to the lab today, but he also didn’t want to go right home after. His estate at Woodhaven had been vast, outfitted with every entertainment option he could think of, from the media room to the large gardens. In contrast, the modest home he’d moved into, while updated with every possible convenience tech, still sometimes felt too small. He’d thought it would be cozy with Nina staying there, but he realized now he’d been trying too hard to recreate those idyllic weeks at the cabin.

  Nothing would ever bring those times back.

  It would never be the same as it had been when they’d been falling in love, even if she took him to bed a thousand times. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye without turning his face in her direction. Nina had made it clear that the sex had been solely physical. A thing that had happened, meaning nothing. Her exact words.

  He still hadn’t told her that he had the terminated contract
signed and waiting to be sent off to ProtectCorps. She could quit if she wanted to, but she was still here. That had to mean something, even if the sex hadn’t.

  After stopping so they could pick up some takeout food, the transpo had arrived at their destination—a squat, nondescript building. It announced the address in its flat, metallic voice, along with an admonition about the legalities and risks associated with being dropped off in this place. Ewan pressed his thumb to the control pad to unlock the doors, but the transpo wouldn’t let them out until Nina had done so, too, and only after they’d both read the waiver scrolling up on the screen.

  She gave him a curious glance. “Safety measures, wow. Not what I expected.”

  “I should have asked you first,” Ewan said at her hesitation. “We don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”

  “Whither thou goest.” Nina shook her head but said no more than that.

  She pressed her thumb to the control pad, and the doors opened with a whoosh. She followed him out of the transpo and into the stark concrete entryway. Hands on her hips, she looked around at the barren site, then back at him with a wide grin. “Are you kidding me?”

  In the past two decades, most zoos and aquariums had been privatized due to public backlash against the keeping of animals for entertainment. It meant that any place housing animals had to have extra security, all visitors had to make an appointment to get in, and it was so expensive that most people had to settle for virtual viewings, instead. Despite his recent work with conservation, preservation, and the return of previously almost-extinct species to native habitats, Ewan himself had never been to the NorthAm Aquacenter.

  The Aquacenter had originally been built as an airplane hangar to house bomber jets. Christophe Hale, a man so rich he made Ewan seem like a pauper, had purchased the abandoned facility and turned it into a private aquarium full of exotic fish, including many species that had been on the verge of extinction. Hale had completed the aquarium over a course of a single year and stocked it with more live animals than had ever been housed in any facility in history, public or private.

  “My sister hated this place, to be honest,” Ewan told Nina. “She loved animals, but she despised Christophe Hale because he insisted that animals were better off living in captivity, where they could be monitored and preserved, than in the wild.”

  “I’m not someone who believes animals are being mistreated simply because they’re not in their natural environment, even if I did give you a hard time about the spiders,” Nina told him. “If anything, I’m well aware that none of these animals would still be alive at all if they hadn’t been born in this facility.”

  “They have dolphins here,” he told her.

  Nina smiled. “I know.”

  “Have you ever seen a live dolphin?” Ewan asked as he and Nina waited for their thumbprints to open the Aquacenter’s first set of doors.

  She shook her head. “No. I did a virtual dive once. It was glitchy and ran a loop over and over. Gave me vertigo, and I had to cut out early. They wouldn’t give me a refund, either. You?”

  “No.”

  “A first for you,” she murmured with a sideways glance at him. “And you’re sharing it with me.”

  “Can’t think of anyone else I’d rather share it with,” he said and waited for her to give him a snarky comment about how sappy he was being.

  She didn’t.

  One of Hale’s infamous eccentricities had been his deep-seated but warring beliefs that animals were better off in captivity, even though they were also better off without any type of human interaction beyond observance. The dolphins here wouldn’t be trained to do tricks for food treats. In order to keep human interaction away from the animals, Hale had designed all the habitats to be cared for entirely by artificial tech, so the tour of the facility was self-guided. The two of them had to sign in to the flat-screen at the front doors, then wait in a stark lobby for a complete security scan. Nina laughed lightly under her breath.

  “Guess it’s a good thing I haven’t been wearing my harness,” she said as the scan beeped a warning about a concealed weapon. She placed the knife from her boot into a holding locker with a shrug. The scan beeped again. With a sigh and a chuckle, Nina removed two more hidden knives and placed them in the locker.

  This time, the scan came back clear. The next set of doors opened. Once inside, cool blue lighting and the soft noise of ocean waves greeted them, along with a series of lighted guidelines projected on the bare wall in front of them.

  “More safety precautions,” Nina said aloud as the words grew brighter, then dimmed to reveal the next set of instructions. Her eyebrows rose as she looked at Ewan. “Do they really have to warn people not to put their hands in the shark tanks?”

  Her giddy tone and the light in her eyes lifted Ewan’s heart, making him glad he’d brought her here. “Apparently.”

  She laughed again, her eyes alight as she studied the words on the wall, then turned to him with a grin. Nina reached for his hand and linked her fingers through his, squeezing. The touch lasted only a few seconds, long enough to send Ewan’s heart thudding faster in the cage of his ribs. Nina would hear it and know how she’d affected him, but he didn’t try to calm himself. He wanted her to notice.

  He wanted her, period.

  The first room they entered contained a low saltwater pool splashing with artificial waves. Guests could lean over the edge of a curving platform to study the fish, crabs, and other sea life. More softly glowing holographic signs assured them that they could feel free to touch the animals, but that the Aquacenter wasn’t responsible for pinched fingers.

  Nina rested her arms on the rim of the platform for a moment, then let her fingers trail in the water. The fish swarmed, nibbling at her fingertips but swimming quickly away. She looked at him.

  “I guess Hale didn’t think crabs and stingrays were as important to keep away from people as some other kinds of animals,” she said.

  Ewan read the lighted words projected into the air above the water. “This habitat looks as though it were altered a little after his death. Maybe someone else authorized the changes.”

  “Do you ever think about that when you decide what to do with the Katie Foundation?” Nina glanced at him. “I mean, do you make sure that you’d do what she would do?”

  “I try to. It’s hard to say what my sister would have done, unless she’d actually done it. But I try.”

  “Her memory is important to you,” Nina said.

  It was a sentiment that shouldn’t have needed to be stated aloud, but he nodded. “Yes.”

  “You’ve done a lot in her name,” she added.

  He hesitated before answering, wondering if she meant the enhancement tech, then decided it probably didn’t matter. “Yes.”

  “You’re a man of firm convictions, Ewan Donahue. You know that?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “I’m not sure everyone would agree with you on that one, but . . . thank you.”

  Quietly, they both studied the ebb and flow of the artificial pool and its inhabitants. Hale hadn’t opted to pipe in music, so the only sounds were the splash of the waves and the softness of their breathing. Ewan let a small crab crawl over his hand before withdrawing it.

  “This is amazing,” Nina said. “So beautiful.”

  Ewan also leaned on the wall. “Watch out for sharks.”

  “I’d punch a shark right in the nose,” Nina replied seriously. “No shark’s gonna mess with me!”

  “Shh, don’t say that out loud here. The ghost of Christophe Hale will come after you,” Ewan warned through a chuckle at the thought of Nina fighting off a shark with her fists. He believed she could.

  “Nobody else is here.” Nina looked around the room.

  Ewan shrugged. “I bought all the appointments for today. I figured that way, we could take as much time as we wanted to and wouldn’t have to deal with anyone else.”

  “Wow,” Nina answered with
an impressed twist of her mouth. “That’s extravagant.”

  “You can do anything when you have enough money,” Ewan said in a low voice.

  Nina tilted her head at him, a faint smile on her lips. “Yes. Very true.”

  She didn’t take his hand again as they walked through each exhibit, but that was all right. It was enough to walk beside her. To watch her face light with glee at the sight of the fish in their glass houses. To simply be with her, in the moment, enjoying this experience. Not fighting. Not angry. This was how it could have been all the time, if he’d only been honest with her from the start, he allowed himself to think briefly before shoving that idea aside.

  When they’d finished with the shallow pool, they followed the tour through a corridor lined with rectangular tanks, each showing off a different species of aquarium fish that had once been popular as pets. Goldfish, betta, guppies. Schools of colored fish twisted and turned in mesmerizing patterns.

  Nina paused in front of one tank. “My mother said that when she was a very little girl, you could go to carnivals and throw Ping-Pong balls into small glass bowls. If you did, you could win a goldfish and take it home.”

  “I remember my mom telling me something similar. Crazy to think about that now, isn’t it? How different the world is, now?”

  She glanced at him, her lips pursed. “That’s what the world does, Ewan. It changes all the time. Sometimes so fast you blink and it happened without you noticing.”

  In the next room, Nina touched her fingertips to the thick, curving glass of the wall, behind which a pair of dolphins cavorted. The bigger one twisted, sending itself spiraling upward and out of sight. The smaller one blew a stream of bubbles and paused, floating, in front of the glass. “What do you suppose they think, when they look out here and see us?”

  “The ones in that tank probably think we’re funny-looking dolphins.” He pointed to the softly glowing sign on the wall that explained how this particular set of dolphins had been raised as part of an experiment in psychology.