Dangerous Promise (The Protector)

by Megan Hart

  “Right.” He laughed, and she was glad he understood that she’d been teasing, not trying to make fun of him. “I could teach you, if you want.”

  She kicked at a rock that shot off over the edge of the cliff and clattered down the mountainside. “How to appreciate specialty flatware?”

  “Brand names, too. Specifically fashion apparel.” He slanted a grin toward her uniform.

  Nina frowned, feigning offense. “Are you implying I need some more fashionable attire?”

  “No, no, not at all,” Ewan said. “I mean, far be it from me to suggest you might look nice in something a little less . . . authoritative and utilitarian.”

  She laughed out loud, unable to keep up the pretense of being offended. “Sure. Let me get right on that. Because stilettos and a dress would absolutely be practical in my line of work. Not that I wouldn’t totally look bombtastic in an outfit like that, mind you. Because I would. But you know, running, kicking, jumping, and all that would be sort of hard.”

  She caught him giving her a weird look. “What?”

  “Picturing you in stilettos and a dress. That’s all.”

  She met his gaze, assessing his expression. The hike had left him sweaty, his dark hair spiking off his forehead instead of hanging over his eyes the way it usually did. He stretched, and the hem of his slim-fitting tank top inched up to bare a belly that showed no signs of overindulgences, despite his earlier complaints. The tuft of hair peeking from the waistband of his pants, dark as that on his head, snagged her attention before she looked back out over the valley in front of them.

  “And what are you imagining?” she asked finally, when he didn’t say more than that.

  “A party. Your hair down, maybe a few curls falling around your face. A red dress. Red shoes. You’d look fierce,” Ewan said. “You’d turn every head.”

  Pleased but not sure she wanted him to know it, she quirked a smile and looked at him. “Uh-huh. Red, huh?”

  “Red,” he repeated without so much as a hint of a smile.

  She held his gaze a bit longer before turning to look out again across the tops of the trees to the clouds and sky beyond. “How close are we to this waterfall?”

  “Not much farther, from what I remember. I mean, I could be way off. We could be miles away. I figured you’d have mapped out the whole route somehow. Making sure there weren’t any bears or something along the way.”

  The hint of teasing in his voice gave him away. “You realize I don’t have a built-in GPS, right? You can’t just input me with coordinates. And I could totally fight off a bear, by the way.”

  She demonstrated a quick flurry of fight moves, none of which would have done anything to a bear but irritate it.

  Ewan chuckled and shook his head. “Right. I know. Don’t worry, I know where I’m going. I think.”

  “If we get lost out here and have to survive on wild berries and tree bark, fair warning, I am going to be really, really cranky very, verrrrry quickly.”

  He gave her a look of mock innocence. “What, you mean you need to be fed at regular intervals? With real, actual food? That’s insane.”

  “Don’t try to find out,” she warned with a wag of her finger, following him as he turned away from the edge of the cliff and started back toward the trees. “It won’t go well for you.”

  “I have no doubt,” he said over his shoulder.

  They hiked in silence after that for a while. Nina drew in long, deep breaths, one after another, letting the clean, cool air fill her lungs and the sun warm her face. She relished the stretch and pull of her muscles working in ways they hadn’t been used in some time, because no matter how hard or often she worked out, it couldn’t compare with the physical exertion of actually using her body as it was meant to work. To climb, run, jump. Not just fight.

  It was meant to make love, too, she thought as she eyed Ewan’s round, firm ass beneath his clinging trousers. That would be a whole different kind of workout. One she was not likely to ever get to try and one she needed to stop thinking about, Nina reminded herself. She was only making herself crazy and annoyed and riled up, and there was no good reason for it. Ewan was far from the first handsome, sexy, billionaire client she’d taken care of, and she hadn’t had any trouble resisting any of them.

  “Almost there. It’s just ahead.” Ewan sounded a little winded, but the grin he shot over his shoulder was wide.

  It was that grin that set him apart from the others. The teasing sense of humor. The glints of kindness and generosity she’d seen in him. He was more than a hot ass. Also more than a smartass.

  I promise you, Nina, the last thing in the world you’d be able to do is break my heart.

  She didn’t want to break his heart. Nina had done that too many times, to so many people. Watching him take the trail ahead of her, though, Nina had to admit to herself that Ewan’s vehement denial that she could ever possibly mean anything to him—that denial itched and burned inside her like an allergic reaction.

  She ought to have let him take her to bed. It would have been fun. Even if he was a selfish lover, a possibility based on whatever she’d gleaned about his past relationships, the sex would have been good. The tech guaranteed her body’s responses, voluntary and involuntary, all worked at their peak, every time.

  Thinking of it now, a slow pulse of friction tickled between her legs. Nina, irritated with herself, forced away the arousal. She focused instead on the trail and the faint sound of rushing water.

  “I can hear it,” she said.

  They rounded a bend in the trail after a minute or so and came out into a clearing full of the rush and crash of falling water. The falls themselves weren’t that high, but they fell in pretty patterns over a natural setting of rocks and boulders to splash into a frothy greenish-black pool at the bottom. Nina moved next to Ewan to look it over.

  “Gorgeous,” she said and turned to see him looking at her. She raised her eyebrows. “What?”

  “I haven’t been here in years and years, that’s all. But you’re right. It all looks the same as I remember it.”

  She tilted her head to study him, wondering what he was about. “You missed it.”

  “Yes. More than I thought I might.”

  But there was something else, more of those shadows in his gaze, so she asked again, this time with a small, impatient gesture. “You’re still staring. What?”

  “I never wanted to bring anyone else to see this place.”

  She frowned, mostly at his tone, which was a little sharp-edged. “Do you wish you hadn’t brought me here?”

  “No,” Ewan said. “That’s the thing, Nina. The moment we began talking about this plan, I had no hesitation about bringing you here. I wanted you to see it. I knew you’d appreciate it in a way that very few other people in my life would have.”

  “Sounds like you need to reconsider the sorts of people you surround yourself with,” she said after a moment or so, wishing she could take his words as the compliment she thought he meant them to be, without putting more meaning behind them. “I’m not sure how anyone wouldn’t be able to enjoy this.”

  Ewan shrugged and set down the small backpack he’d stocked with snacks for the hike. Then the water bottle from his belt. He worked the buttons on his shirt, one at a time. Her eyebrows rose again, watching him.

  “You know how it is these days. People take virtual vacations, rigged up to machinery the makes them feel as though they’re doing exciting, exotic things while they never leave the safety and comfort of the sensory deprivation tank. They’re building domes over parks to keep the kids from having to deal with real sunshine, real air. We rely on technology to improve our lives without ever considering what it’s taking away.”

  She looked at the pool of water churning and swirling. His rant wasn’t far off the mark, and he hadn’t said anything about the enhancement tech, but it felt uncomfortably close to a judgment about it. She watched from the corner of her eye as Ewan shrugged out of his shirt. His body was l
ean, muscled, with a contrast between the dark patches of curling hair on his chest and lower belly against his much paler skin.

  “You’ll burn,” she murmured.

  He shook his head. “Nah. I get the melanin shots once a year.”

  “Ah.” Nina tipped her face upward to the sun. She didn’t need anything like that. She’d never burned in her life, not even in the desert. “Feels good out here.”

  “I’m going in.”

  She opened her eyes. “Oh, you’re not!”

  “I am.” He grinned, bending to untie his boots. “It’s as cold as a blizzard, but you’ve never had a swim like it.”

  She’d done her share of cold-water dips, jumping in with full gear and equipment, all of that. She was no fan of freezing water. “You’re not selling me on it, I have to say.”

  “Suit yourself.” He kicked off his boots and started with his belt.

  He was actually going to do it. Laughing, Nina shook her head and watched him strip down to his briefs.

  Ewan hooked his thumbs in the waistband of his briefs and shot her a blatantly saucy look. “You gonna turn around?”

  “Oh, whoa, whoa, hold on there.” She held out her hands, shaking her head. “You’re going to strip down totally naked and plunge into water at who knows what temperature, and I haven’t even checked it out yet? There could be all kinds of threats in there.”

  “Uh-huh.” He eased the waistband a tiny bit lower. “You gonna get in there and make sure it’s safe for me?”

  “It’s my job, isn’t it?” She was already unbuckling her harness and belt.

  Eyes on his, holding his gaze. It was a bit of a game, and she knew it, even if she’d be scratched if she could parse out why he was playing it. He was testing her. She didn’t have to get in that water. She certainly didn’t have to take off her clothes the way he had . . . but she was going to, because he’d given her an unspoken challenge, and she meant to rise to it.

  It took her less time to strip down than he’d taken. She didn’t make a tease out of it but simply shucked off her gear and set it on a convenient rock, then took off everything else except her tank bra and panties. She put her hands on her hips, making sure to keep her gaze on his and not letting it drop lower, even though she had to admit it, she really did want to see if the sight of her nearly naked body was making him react at all.

  “It’s going to be very cold in that water, and colder when we get out,” Ewan said.

  Nina rolled her eyes. “So what are we talking about? Shrinkage?”

  “Damn!” Ewan swore. “That’s not . . . it wasn’t . . .”

  She guffawed and turned, heading for the pool without taking off her underwear. She didn’t dive in headfirst. That would have been foolish. Instead, she cannonballed, knees to her chest, making a splash.

  Ewan hadn’t been kidding about the water. It was cold, but deliciously so, nothing like the sub-zero temps Nina had been exposed to during her combat training as well as after, when they were testing the enhancements to see how much her body could endure. If anything, this water felt brisk and fresh, sluicing away the sweat and grime from the hike.

  She broke the surface and tossed her sopping braid over her shoulder. Ewan stood poised on a rock near the water, one foot curled over the edge. He jumped in with a holler, and Nina turned as a wave of chilly water pushed over her. She blinked, sputtering and laughing as he disappeared beneath the water.

  He didn’t come back up.

  The water rippled where he’d gone under, but other than that, there was no sign. Without a second thought, Nina took a deep breath and dove under the water. Eyes open, she searched the dark depths. Churned by the falls, the water was far from clear, but she could control the size of her pupils and therefore see better in the darkness. She swept her hands in front of her, trying to find him. If he’d hit his head, he might be unconscious, sinking to the bottom of the pool . . .

  She knew it was him grabbing her when it happened, but instinctively, she reacted. Twisting in the water, she unhooked his grip from her shoulders and came around behind him to slip an arm beneath his chin. She could choke him out in seconds in this hold, although she had no intentions of doing so. Already she was regretting how fast she’d acted. How hastily, in fact.

  He didn’t struggle against her after the first few seconds. They broke the water together, him with a gasp, her with a smaller sipping of air since she hadn’t yet run out of breath. She should have let him go immediately, but her defense response was still ticking and she didn’t dare. They floated in the cold water for another minute, her body pressed along the length of his back. One arm under his chin, the other across his belly.

  When at last she let him go, she didn’t move far away from him. She didn’t think he was so startled that he was going to sink or anything, but the warmth of his skin in the cold water had been . . . well, hell, Nina thought, she’d liked it. Touching him. Feeling him against her. She had liked it too much.

  Treading water, Ewan turned. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

  “I know. It was an automatic reaction. I thought maybe you’d hurt yourself when you jumped in. You took me by surprise.” She shook her head and blinked away water. “I should have had better control over my response. I could have hurt you. Bad.”

  He frowned, his dark hair plastered down over his forehead until he pushed it away with a hand. “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a pause.

  “I shouldn’t have tried to grab you.” Ewan struck off toward the falls. He ducked under them and after a moment, stuck out his head to gesture to her. “Come on.”

  Unsure if he was angry or embarrassed or what, Nina followed. She hesitated outside the rushing curtain of water, then held her breath and pushed through it. Behind was a small alcove in the rocks, nothing even close to a cave.

  Ewan had settled on top of a flat, algae-covered rock. He moved to the side to give her room, and she sat next to him. Shoulder to shoulder. His skin had humped into gooseflesh. Hers had not, because her enhancements were regulating her temperature more efficiently than his.

  “I once hid here for a whole day. Packed a lunch. Brought a book. Scared the crap out of my mom and grandma,” Ewan said conversationally. “I’d had a fight with my sister and ran away because I thought they were taking her side.”

  Nina looked at him. “What was the fight about?”

  “She told me I was adopted.” He snorted out soft laughter, shaking his head. “She was eight years older, and I’m convinced she never really forgave my parents for having me, or me for being born. Anyway, I packed up a couple sandwiches and headed out here, determined that I was going to stay away all night. I figured they’d come looking for me, and since we often all came here to swim, I knew they’d try to find me here. So I hid behind the waterfall.”

  Nina tucked her knees up and rested her chin on them. “What happened? Did they find you?”

  “Mom and Grandma came with Katie. I heard their voices. Thing was, I knew my mother and Gram didn’t know about this little niche behind the waterfall, but Katie did. I waited for her to say something about it, but instead all I heard her talking about was what a pain in the ass I was.” Ewan plucked at the algae, tossing bits of it into the water.

  “And then what?”

  He looked at her with a crooked smile. “I heard my mother agreeing with her. She said it was true, that I was good at making trouble. I’d always known she loved my sister more than she did me. Maybe, like Katie, she was unhappy to have me come along. Anyway, my grandmother might have defended me, but I didn’t hear her. My mom and Katie told each other how much of a terrible kid I was.”

  “That must have made you feel terrible,” Nina said after a second or so.

  “It didn’t make me feel good, that’s for sure.”

  She also picked off some of the soft algae and rubbed it between her fingers, watching them get stained green before she rinsed them in the water. “How old were you?”
<
br />   “Ten. Katie was eighteen.”

  “Old enough to know how to be kind,” Nina said with a curl of her lip. “What was your mother thinking, to allow such a thing?”

  Ewan shrugged. “I’ll never know. I had decided to come out when they got there, because I was tired and hungry. I wanted dinner. But after hearing that, I figured I’d never go home again.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yeah,” he said after a pause and another shrug. “Where else would I have to go?”

  “Did you ever tell them you’d heard what they said?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Didn’t seem like there was much point. My mom didn’t treat me badly, even if she did favor Katie. And Katie, for all her disdain, wasn’t outright cruel to me. She was so much older, anyway, that she’d started moving on with her life and didn’t need to make room in it for me. As it turned out, what she thought about me as a kid didn’t much matter.”

  Nina twisted a little on the rock to face him. “Why not? Did you get to be closer when you got older?”

  “No,” Ewan said. “She got sick before we could ever be close. And then she died.”

  Nina was quiet for a moment before putting an arm around his shoulders. His skin was chilly. He didn’t lean against her, but he didn’t pull away, either. She let her fingers squeeze gently, offering him some warmth she wasn’t sure he wanted from her.

  “I have a sister,” she said finally. “Patrice. We’re two years apart. I’m the younger. I was very close with my sister when we were growing up. I haven’t spoken to her in five years.”

  Ewan looked at her. “How come?”

  “I died,” Nina said. “But I didn’t stay dead. I went away and came home different, and at first it seemed like it was going to be shiny fine. But then the media got involved. My family had their lives invaded. It broke up Patrice’s marriage. My parents took her side. It was a lot of mess. My mother and father both died shortly after I came home, from the stress of it all. At least according to my sister.”