by Megan Hart
“It wasn’t nothing. It happened.” He slammed his mug down too hard on the tabletop. Burning coffee spilled on the back of his hand. He hissed, cursing.
Nina got up from the table and drew cold water onto a dish towel and came back to wrap his hand, moving so much faster than he could have. “Careful, Ewan. Let me see.”
“I’m fine.” He protested, but when she gave him a long, steady stare, he let her pull his hand closer.
“That’s a nasty burn. You should call the doc.”
Ewan frowned. “I’ll be fine.”
“You’ll be fine with a blister,” Nina said coolly. “If you want me to call, I can.”
“I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself, Nina.”
Her lip curled. “Oh, yes. I’m sure you are. Never mind that I was trying to help. I forgot my place. Thanks for breakfast, but I’m not hungry anymore.”
“I know that’s a lie,” Ewan bit out. His hand stung, throbbing, and he knew she was right about calling the doc. “You’re always hungry.”
“I’m not always hungry!”
“You eat more in one day than I could eat in a week!”
They were both on their feet, breathing hard, so close he could feel her heat against him and all he could think about was how good she’d felt beneath him. How much he loved it when she hurt him while they were making love, how she knew exactly where and how to do it so that it never felt like pain, but only the greatest kind of pleasure.
“This is a stupid argument!” Ewan shouted.
“Yes, I know!”
Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. He thought he caught the hint of her quirked smile, but it was so faint he couldn’t be sure. He took a step back to get out of her face, give her some distance. He took a deep breath, then another. He thought about sticking out his hand for her to shake and calling a truce. It wouldn’t be as good as kissing her, but he couldn’t be sure she wouldn’t bite him . . . and not in the way he liked. Before he could do anything, Nina put a hand to her temple with a wince.
Her entire body jerked. She winced again, then grimaced. “Ah.”
Ewan reached for her at once to put a hand on her shoulder. “What, baby? Are you okay?”
She blinked rapidly. “Blank spot.”
“What? Nina, sit down. What’s going on?”
Tremors ran through her muscles, vibrations he could feel in his fingertips. She sagged forward against him, but only for a moment before both her hands came up and she pushed him away. When she stared into his face, it was entirely without recognition. It lasted no more than a heartbeat or two before she was frowning. Her gaze had cleared.
“What happened?” Ewan asked.
“Glitch in the tech.” Her voice had gone hoarse. She went to the sink and drew a glass of water. She gulped it and filled the glass again. She drank the second more slowly, finishing half before putting the glass on the counter to wipe her mouth. “It happens.”
“How often?” Concerned, Ewan crossed to her, but she put up a hand to keep him from touching her. He kept his distance.
Nina lifted her chin and looked at him dead in the eyes. “Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters. Nina, if something’s going wrong . . .” Ewan trailed off at her expression. “Baby, please let me help you. I can call the doc—”
“That won’t help. I’ve been in for my checkups and everything is fine. It’s a small glitch in the tech because it’s degrading. It needs to be updated.” She paused, then looked away, no longer meeting his gaze. “There’s nothing you can do about it, Ewan.”
He could, though. They both knew it, but this time, Nina wasn’t saying it aloud. The truth rose to his lips, but Ewan bit back the words.
He didn’t want to make promises he couldn’t keep. He’d already broken her trust once. He couldn’t do that again. Until he could be certain he was able to not only make the actual upgrades to the tech but also get the laws reversed so that using them would be legal, he wasn’t going to tell her he was working on it. If she hated him for keeping the truth from her before, he couldn’t imagine how betrayed she would feel if he convinced her there was a solution in store, only to have it fall through.
“Does it hurt you?” he asked quietly.
“There’s pain,” Nina said after a moment. “It hurts more after the physical pain goes away.”
Ewan swallowed hard against the surge of emotions closing his throat. “Last night—”
“I told you,” Nina said sharply. “It happened. We don’t have to talk about it. It was just a thing. A mistake we both knew better than to make.”
“I guess I’m not as good as you are at forgetting,” Ewan said, his words meant to sting.
If they did, Nina was hiding her reaction. “I’ve had more practice.”
Ewan thought of the contract he’d terminated. All he had to do was send the file to ProtectCorps, and Nina could and would be out of his life within minutes. At the very least, he should tell her he’d terminated it and let her make the decision.
“I need to leave for the lab in half an hour. Will you be ready?” Ewan said instead, once more making the choice to hide some truth instead of using honesty. He knew it. He didn’t care.
He wasn’t ready to let her go.
“I’m ready right now,” Nina answered.
She was answering the question he’d asked her and not his unspoken thoughts, but her reply still sent a shiver of sorrow through him. He said nothing about it but gave her a curt nod. He left the room, sensing her gaze on him the entire way, but when he looked back to confront her, she’d turned away.
CHAPTER FIVE
About a month ago, Ewan’s former partner and co-inventor of the enhancement tech, Wanda Crosson, had been arrested for the repeated attempts she’d made on his life. Wanda had been one of the few who knew about Ewan’s family cabin in the mountains, where Nina and Ewan had gone to hide out until the threats died down. Wanda had shown up there with her own guard-for-hire, another enhanced soldier who was the only one who could take on Nina and expect to get out of it alive.
He hadn’t.
Wanda had been only one part of several groups, including the League of Humanity, that had been threatening Ewan. Some for his involvement in the original enhancement tech, others for his efforts at pushing the laws making the tech illegal for anything beyond use in private service, as well as those forbidding any upgrades. Since Wanda’s arrest, any threats of real importance had ceased. The sudden abandonment of what had been years of ongoing threats only proved Nina’s theory that the focus on Ewan had never really been about the enhancement tech in the first place. In this world, there’d always be something to protest and a way to monetize it, a way to rile people up to get them to support a cause. The League of Humanity had moved on to greener pastures.
Nina wasn’t glad the focus was turning away from the enhancement tech, though. If people were busy hating, there were also their opposite counterparts who worked in support of the enhanced soldiers. When nobody was paying attention any longer, there was nobody left to rally for them.
This didn’t mean she was hoping the security system at Ewan’s lab had been tripped by anyone trying to bring him harm, but it also didn’t mean that she automatically believed, as Ewan seemed to, that it had been simple vandalism. He’d spent about half an hour with the security team here at this facility, going over the reports of what had happened the night before. So far, none of them, including Ewan, seemed concerned.
Nina had stayed in the background, quiet, paying attention but not drawing attention to herself. She watched him interact with the team of men and women he’d hired to protect this building, its contents, and the people who worked inside it. She had no criticisms of the way they’d handled anything, and she’d often admitted her specialty was reaction, not analyzation. Nothing about this situation screamed of danger to her, and yet there was a low-grade, persisting sense of something being . . . off.
“We won’t
even bother to clean up the paint,” Ewan told her after the team had left him alone in his office. “Bare walls seem to invite more attempts at vandalism.”
“The sec team said the front door camera lens was painted over, and someone tried to jimmy the locks,” Nina said.
Ewan looked at her. “You were listening.”
“Of course I was.” She looked around his office, which in comparison to the elegantly appointed home office he’d had in Woodhaven, was sparse and unassuming. “What do you have in here that anyone could want to steal?”
“If someone wants to break into a solid concrete building without windows or signage,” Ewan said, “it seems to me that they are looking to steal whatever they can find.”
“It would seem to me that they knew of something specific, or else why would they bother? You don’t have any particularly strong security setup here. Standard,” Nina said. “Nothing out of the ordinary that would give anyone the idea that there’s anything special in here.”
Ewan leaned back in his chair, fingers linked behind his head, and put his feet on the desk. “Or, like I said, they were just trying to break in because it looked easy enough to do, and to see if there was anything they could steal. Or ruin for the fun of it. This lab isn’t in the best neighborhood, you know.”
“It’s in the middle of nowhere,” Nina said with a chuckle. “Which means that whoever was hanging around here last night had to make an effort to get here.”
“You think it’s something more important than some kids hyped up on candy, trying to score some junk they can sell to buy more sugar?” Ewan studied her, not mockingly. Seriously waiting to hear her opinion on things.
“Is it possible that it’s a decoy?” Nina asked.
Ewan said nothing for a moment, then put his feet on the ground with a thump. “Who or what would they be decoying?”
“It could be a reason to get you here,” Nina pointed out. “Certainly, in the past, there’ve been attempts to get you into places on purpose where you’d be vulnerable.”
“My security here might not be anything above standard, but my home and personal sec team still works around the clock to monitor any kind of threats against me, Nina. Truly, there’s been nothing. If anything, I’m the opposite of a target, no longer trendy. But if you really think there’s something not right about all of this . . . I trust your judgment. Implicitly.”
That meant more to her than any number of compliments about her beauty. An ache rose within her, a pinching throb of sorrow and regret. Unlike the other times recently when the return of her emotional capacity had threatened to drive her to her knees, Nina didn’t try to push it away. She nodded at him, forcing her voice to be steady.
“Thank you. That means a lot.”
Ewan smiled. “You’re welcome. So, what do you think I should do about this?”
She smiled in return after a moment, and while the ache didn’t go away, at least it eased. That had to mean something, didn’t it? Maybe she was finally going to return to normal . . . whatever normal was for her. Nina looked around his bare office, thinking hard about what it was about all of this that was setting off her internal alarms. She couldn’t come up with anything specific.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Keep your security doing what they do, I guess. Keep paying attention. You might be right, it could be something simple and stupid, not directed at you personally at all. I mean, since you’re not trendy anymore and stuff.”
He laughed, shaking his head, then looked at her with a smile still tipping his lips. His eyes gleamed. “As if I ever was. Hey, you want a tour of the lab?”
“Absolutely.”
“It’s not much to look at,” Ewan said as they paused in front of a bank of glass windows showcasing a stark white room lined with tables and equipment. A couple of young people pushed themselves along the rows in their battered desk chairs, apparently having a race. Ewan shook his head. “This the third place I ever bought and outfitted, so it’s not the most up to date. I let kids apprentice here, now.”
“Is this where you invented it?” Nina put her fingertips on the narrow windowsill, leaning closer to peer inside the room. Nobody in there seemed to notice or care that they were being observed.
Ewan didn’t have to ask her what she meant. “No. That was in the first lab I opened. It burned a while ago.”
“After Gray Tuesday.” She slanted him a grin, not meaning to be snarky about it, but knowing that he’d used the worldwide catastrophic data hack as a way to erase the records of his involvement with the enhancement tech. “Convenient.”
Ewan gave a low, sheepish laugh. “It wasn’t arson, if that’s what you’re suggesting. It was a legitimate fire. That’s why I have the specs for the upgraded tech, but no working examples . . .”
He paused. Shrugged. “We don’t have to talk about that.”
“What are the kids working on?” She gestured, giving him the benefit of not pursuing the topic. It wouldn’t lead to any good place, and she knew that. Like probing a sore spot on the inside of her cheek or rubbing a paper cut on the tip of her finger, she was only going to cause herself a constant, fresh agony.
“They’re each doing their own thing. I mean, when they’re working, obviously.” His laugh sounded more genuine this time, and he shook his head. His expression was curiously paternal when he looked back into the room. “If I hadn’t had a good apprenticeship in the tech field, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I’ll always remember that. So when I take on an apprentice, I make sure they’re really interested in working in this field. That it means something to them, that they want to make a difference somehow. Then I let them go off on their own. Experiment. See what they come up with. One of the things I missed a lot when I was hiding out was working with them. I need to get back into it. Be more of a hands-on mentor, I guess. I haven’t done any real work in a long time, you know. Other than working at spending my money.”
Her heart panged at his self-deprecation, especially because she knew it was for her benefit. “You’re very good at that.”
“Lots of experience.”
She studied his profile as he still stared into the room. “You like working with the kids.”
“Yeah. I do.” He turned to her. “Looking for someone to eventually take over my legacy, maybe. Who knows? There’s always a bit of ego in working with young people, I’ll admit that.”
“You don’t think you’ll ever have any of your own to take over the family business?” Her question surprised herself. There’d be no babies in her future, but somehow she hadn’t considered that Ewan might assume he’d never be a bio father.
Ewan seemed as surprised by her question as she was. “Not really. Call me old fashioned, but I think children should only come along after you’re set up in a committed partnership.”
She couldn’t look at him after that, because the clear, brutal honesty in his gaze was too much to bear. They’d talked about “forever,” but that had been lovers’ talk. Bound up in the giddiness of their time alone together in that cabin, drunk on possibilities and fantasies and each other. They’d spoken of children, but not about having them together. To imagine that Ewan had considered becoming a parent with her was too much, coming too hard on the heels of the night before. A vivid memory of his hands on her body and the taste of him as she took his flesh between her teeth sent a shiver through her that she masked with a slight cough behind her fist.
“They’re waving at you,” she said instead and pointed at the kids inside the room. “Maybe you should go in and talk to them.”
“Nina.” Ewan’s low voice sent another quiver through her, but he said no more than that.
She didn’t look at him. After a moment, he pressed his finger to the keypad next to the door and waited for it to beep so he could open it. He held it open for her without a word, waiting for her to go through it before he followed.
“Mr. Donahue!” The girl who’d been bent over a tablet, scrolling with a fingertip, g
ot out of her seat and gave him a wide grin. She wore her tightly curling hair in twin puffs on top of her head, adorned with bright ribbons. “Hey, guess what? I figured out how to implement that base tech using the programming we talked about last time.”
“Great, that’s terrific. Betts, this is Nina. Betts came up with this amazing idea for a way to chip migrating birds to help the flocks avoid places where they might hit danger.”
“Because birds just go where they think they ought to be going,” Betts said. “But you know, if something gets built in the way or there’s some kind of environmental disaster, they get into trouble. If I can get them to accept this tech, which would be put into their natural food sources, it could keep whole flocks from getting wiped out.”
Nina had joined the NorthAm Army because she’d wanted to make a difference in the world, but as she listened to this young woman, no more than seventeen or so, talk about what she was working on, Nina definitely felt as though she’d been slacking. She glanced at Ewan. “Sounds incredible.”
“The tech would go into the insect population,” Ewan said. “She didn’t mention that part. About how she’s actually come up with working specs for tech so tiny and so realistic that it can be released into the wild among the natural bugs it mimics, so the birds will eat it.”
Nina laughed and put her fingertips to her temples, spreading them open with a small, sharp puff of her breath. “Mind. Blown.”
“Thanks.” Betts giggled. “It’s shiny fine, I guess. I haven’t actually made any micro insects yet, I’m still working out the . . . bugs.”
The three of them laughed.
“Your work is more than shiny fine.” Ewan dug into his pocket for his personal comm. He typed quickly, then drew his fingertip across it in a signature and pressed the pad, which whooshed in a distinctive tone of sending a message. “Worth this week’s bonus, for sure. It’s in your account.”
“Oh wow!” Betts danced in place while the other kids in the room groaned or clapped in congratulations. “Yeah! Woo! Thanks, Mr. Donahue!”