by Megan Hart
She bit her tongue for a moment before answering, more gently this time. Leona Smart, the owner of ProtectCorps and Nina’s direct supervisor, insisted all of her employees take courses in sensitivity training. Nina had never been very good at it, although she tried. “I understand how hard that must have been, Mr. Donahue. Believe me, I do.”
“How could you possibly?” He stalked from one end of the room to the other, pivoting on a bare heel to stare at her.
She’d read his files and knew he had no martial arts or military training or anything like that. Even so, the man moved like a predator, some kind of big cat, all sleek muscles and rolling gait. She wouldn’t have been surprised to see him snarl. Her heart tried to thump a little faster at what it would be like if he did, indeed, come at her physically. He couldn’t beat her, but he might be an interesting challenge.
“I was a soldier,” Nina replied simply. “I saw lots of good people die, and sometimes, it was my fault.”
Donahue went quiet at that. Contemplative. His lightweight pajama bottoms hung low on lean hips, and his sculpted abs flexed when he paced. Donahue had the body of a man who spent a lot of time making sure he looked good. With a small, internal sneer, Nina imagined her own scars on flesh covering muscles, sinews, nerves, and bones she’d worked hard to make strong even before her enhancements. She didn’t have to be pretty. She had to be fierce.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment, surprising her. “I know you were. And I respect the work you did—”
“Good. Many don’t.”
She’d been spit on more than a few times. Catcalled. The Second Cold War had been a lot hotter than the first one, and it had not seen a lot of civilian support. In school she’d learned about the Vietnam War, how the returning soldiers had been castigated and reviled. History did have its way of repeating.
That she could not actually remember most of her time in the army was not something she intended to point out to him. Donahue was already a vocal and public opponent to the enhancement procedures she’d endured to save her life and which had made her the woman she was today. The same woman who could, and would, subdue him in order to save his stubborn, arrogant life a dozen times over, if she had to. She folded her arms across her chest and widened her stance. If he tried to push past her, she would not hesitate to put him down, panther muscles or not. At this point, putting Ewan Donahue in his place would be a pleasure that had nothing to do with how good he looked without his shirt.
He crossed his arms over his naked chest, drawing her attention to the bulging, shifting, and straining muscles of his pecs and biceps. Was he . . . flexing?
Nina was neither impressed nor intimidated by this show, although she had no trouble admiring it. “I thought you had to use the facilities.”
“Look,” he said, his tone conciliatory now. A negotiator. Lobbyist, convincer. “There’s such a thing as personal privacy.”
Nina wasn’t convinced. “I’m fully aware of that, and of course I’m entirely capable of selective sight, which allows me to pixelate whatever it is I’m not supposed to be seeing. It’s pretty convenient.”
“Oh. Right. Selective sight.” Donahue’s lip curled.
“And hearing,” she added with a small smile, even though watching his disgusted reaction stung her in a place she could never seem to shield, no matter how often she was wounded there. It should only matter that he believed she could do the job he’d hired her for, not whatever else he thought about her as a person, but that subtle, invasive sense that Donahue didn’t think of her as a full, real person dug deep.
“In case there’s stuff I’m not supposed to hear. I mean, it’s all recorded in case someone later needs to access it. But I won’t have access to it.” She added that last bit as a dig of her own, to remind him of not only who, exactly, she was, but also what. She wanted to rub it in his face. Her enhancements, what she could do in the pursuit of his safety. She wanted him to hear it and know and . . . well, to see it. To see her.
“Yeah, well, I’m not capable of either of those things,” Donahue said. “If you don’t leave my side even for a second or so, what about when you have to use the facilities?”
Her smile didn’t falter. “I’m sure you’ve read all the materials about the enhancement procedures, Mr. Donahue. So then you know that I’m also capable of maintaining amazing control of all my bodily functions.”
The man actually blushed this time. A rising flush crept up his chest and throat to tinge his cheeks, and she was able to register the slight rise in his body heat. It was surprising, that reaction, but it made him seem no less a predator than he’d appeared before. “I’m aware of the procedures and results, yeah.”
“Then you know I can hold it for a long time,” Nina said smoothly. “But seriously, I’m sure you’re about to burst. So if you’d rather continue to argue with me until you lose control . . .”
“I don’t,” Donahue snapped, “ever. Lose. Control.”
Another of her serene smiles pushed more crimson heat into his cheeks. Nina stepped aside from the bathroom door with a flourish and a small, deliberately obnoxious bow. “Good. Neither do I.”
CHAPTER TWO
He should fire her and demand his money back—it had been an obscene amount of money, even for Ewan, who hadn’t bothered to ask the price of an item or service in at least a decade. The cost of keeping him alive hadn’t mattered to him, but he hadn’t realized the services would come along with such a load of bullshit.
Selective sight and hearing, she’d said, as though this was news to him. What Nina didn’t know was that Ewan had funded the research that allowed for those functions in the first place, along with most of the others she could brag about. More than funded; he’d invented and programmed the original tech and enhancement software that had transformed her from a normal, human woman into some kind of super soldier.
Not a cyborg, he reminded himself as he used the toilet, his back facing her but with full awareness that she stood close enough to grab him if she wanted to, or that all she had to do was lean in a little bit to see everything nature had blessed him with. Not a robot. She hadn’t been fitted with metal limbs or artificial organs. Just a series of nanochips connected to her brain and nervous system, the tech running specialized software that allowed her greater than natural control over her bodily functions. Endurance, strength, focus. Special functions that could erase her memories of anything top secret or confidential with nothing more than a preprogrammed series of codes. None of that was supposed to come along with a smartass attitude.
It hadn’t been meant to come along with that face, either. Pale amber eyes fringed with curling dark lashes and sparkling with barely restrained humor and yeah, right now, mockery. Smooth bronze skin free of any kind of makeup that he could see. A lush, full mouth that wouldn’t quit. And her hair . . . universe help him, even pulled back into the tight, utilitarian braid at the base of her neck, he could see it was thick and silky, as dark as his deepest fantasies.
Because that what she was, right? A fantasy, something he’d dreamed up a long time ago, when he’d believed the tech would make life better for those who were enhanced. Before he realized how messed up that was. Playing at being the Onegod in a world where religion had become regarded as no more real than fairy tales.
Nina Bronson was a fantasy, all right, but one Ewan could no longer allow himself to imagine.
He turned from the toilet, half-expecting to see her smirking, but she was looking carefully uninterested, her gaze settled somewhere to his left. “I need to take a shower. Sure you don’t want to climb in there with me?”
He’d been aiming for sarcasm, but the second the words came out of his mouth, he realized they sounded less like a threat and more like a sexual come-on. The way her sleek black eyebrows rose made it obvious that she’d thought so, too, but scratch it, that was the last thing in the world he’d meant. Maybe not the last thing, he admitted as Nina gave him another of those frustratingly chilly smil
es. At about five-four, she stood close to a foot shorter than him. Her body beneath the simple black uniform of leggings and a long-sleeved top was fit and firm and still curvy in all the places a man needed a woman to curve. She studied him like she could ferret out every scrap of a secret he’d ever tried to keep.
“I could, but in the event of a rising threat”—her gaze dropped for the barest second to the front of his pajamas, he was sure of it, though it happened so fast he couldn’t have proven it—“I’ll need to be able to take care of it with my clothes on.”
“Don’t like to fight naked, huh?”
She smiled. “I like to do a lot of things naked, Mr. Donahue, but fighting isn’t one of them.”
He’s always been a sucker for a woman with a sense of humor and a sharp wit. This particular woman, though, represented everything he was working so hard against. He’d hired her for the job in spite of his personal beliefs, not to support them. And not for any other reasons, either, her ripe mouth and quick comebacks notwithstanding.
Besides, Ewan told himself with scorn, he preferred blondes.
He reached into the glass shower enclosure to start the water running. “How can I be sure you’re using that selective sight like you say you are?”
Her smile vanished immediately. Her back straightened, shoulders squared. Her voice, which previously had been slightly husky and tinged with amusement, went subzero.
“Because to ogle you inappropriately in the shower or in any other way would be a direct violation of my standards, both those set by the company I work for, and also my own personal set of morals and ethics. Because I do what I say I’m going to do, Mr. Donahue, and for you to assume or believe anything less is a direct affront on my character.”
Before he could say anything else, glass shattered. The bathroom window above the deep soaking tub burst inward. A long metal tube hurtled through the open space and hit the tile floor, bouncing hard enough to chip the porcelain before rolling to a stop near his feet. The slow hissing of gas came first, followed next by the eye-watering sting.
“Get in the shower!” Nina shoved him, hard, into the glass enclosure, and shut the door behind him. “Turn the water on high!”
Another metal tube hurtled through the window, but this one didn’t have time to hit the floor. She grabbed it in midair, crossing the distance between where she’d been and leaping into the tub in a mere two or three strides. She knocked over a display of decorative soaps and stupid seashells one of his exes had put there, but Nina didn’t pay a second’s attention to the crash. Nor to the glass still sticking out in shards in the window frame.
One, two, three, she kicked out the glass and leaned out the empty window space. She threw the metal tube outside. All of this happened so fast Ewan barely had time to register the scalding water on his bare chest. He stepped out of the spray with a hiss as Nina drew her stun weapon from the holster at her waist.
She aimed.
She fired.
From outside came a faint scream. A moment later, alarms began to bleat. Not the ones that announced a breach of the house itself; those should’ve gone off the second the window broke. Instead, the perimeter alarms went off. Whoever had managed to get past them the first time without setting them off wasn’t so lucky this time.
Steam had barely had time to fill the shower and spill over the top of the glass enclosure into the rest of the bathroom when Nina turned and stepped out of the bathtub. The tube on the ground was still hissing gas with an acrid stink. Inside the shower with the water blasting, the smog was dissipating enough to make him cough, but not enough to knock him down.
Grabbing up the tube, Nina took another of those amazing three-four step leaps and tossed that tube out the window as well. She snagged one of the tidily rolled towels from the basket between the tub and sink. Yanked open the shower enclosure, stepping inside just enough to thrust the plush cloth beneath the water.
Then she threw it over his head and face.
The next thing Ewan knew, he was on the floor of his bedroom, sopping wet, with a puddle ruining his fourteen-hundred-credit rug. Nina lay on her back beside him, her eyes closed. Chest rising and falling rapidly. When he sat up, she turned her head to look at him.
The whites of her eyes had gone threaded with crimson, but she was grinning. “Well. How’s that for a good start?”
CHAPTER THREE
Donahue had ordered a special tech crew to come in and clean his bathroom of any residual gas as well as test to see what kind it had been, and he hadn’t resisted at all when Nina had given each of the crew members a complete pat down, one at a time, before she’d let any of them over the front door threshold. They’d come in with their gear and been gone in an hour or so, promising results as soon as possible. Donahue had been very quiet for the rest of the morning, at least with her.
The medicinal gel on Nina’s eyes was gooey and disgusting, but it had thoroughly rinsed them free of whatever gas had been coming out of that tube. She’d be coughing a bit for the next few days as her lungs recovered, but she’d refused the inhaler Donahue’s personal doc had offered. Irritated lungs weren’t going to slow her down.
If anything, Nina was glad that the first attack had happened so fast and had been so easy to neutralize. She was no stranger to hand-to-hand combat or weaponry engagement. She could hold her own in both. But it had been so much more impressive of her to handle this situation the way she had.
She held back a small chuckle as she remembered the look on Donahue’s face when she’d pulled the towel off it, then forced herself to sober. The threat itself had obviously been meant as a warning, but that didn’t mean she could take this any less seriously than if it had almost killed her client. After all, the fact that the intruder had been able to breach Donahue’s perimeter security in the first place was reason enough for her to be even more on guard.
Leona had told Nina this job was probably going to be an easy one, but it seemed like that was wrong. Donahue’s estate was supposed to be one of the best-protected in the world, yet someone had been able to get close enough to lob those tubes through the bathroom windows. Someone had been smart or lucky enough to get away before the rest of the security team could find out who’d done it. Most likely, the intruder had been assisted by someone on-site, and that was an entirely new can of worms, all of them wiggling free.
“Your eyes are looking better,” Donahue said. “Are you sure you don’t want the inhaler?”
She shook her head. “Nah. I’ll be fine. How are you feeling?”
“Excremental,” Donahue said flatly.
He’d showered in a guest bathroom and dressed in a suit. Solid navy fabric, tailored to fit his lean, muscular body. A paler blue shirt picked up the azure hints in those hazel eyes. What kind of bro wore a suit to hang around at home? The sort who worked hard to make himself look good, she reminded herself. A man concerned with appearances. Shallow and self-serving.
Nina herself had also showered quickly, right behind him, while he brushed his teeth and shaved, but she’d dressed in an outfit identical to the one she’d been wearing originally. Smooth black leggings tucked into serviceable boots and a matching, slim-fitting shirt with long sleeves. All her gear fit into a series of holsters on a harness she wore crisscrossed over her chest, back, and thighs. Come to think of it, she thought, it was her version of a business suit. Combat gear. What she wore when she was feeling vulnerable.
She thought she understood him a bit better all of a sudden.
“Can’t say I blame you. If you can’t feel safe in your own home, you can’t feel safe anywhere, I guess.” Nina watched his expression shift at her words, which had been honest but also meant to poke him a little. Draw him out. She needed to learn him, his reactions and emotions and responses, and not only from files or reports.
“Isn’t that what I’m paying you for? To feel safe? Yet the irony here is that hiring you probably opened me up to even more scrutiny and threats than if I’d gone with someone
else. Smart offered me a different protector. You know that, right? I picked you because—”
“I’m the best,” Nina replied calmly.
Only fifteen NorthAm soldiers had been enhanced before the program had been shut down. All of them were forbidden by international treaties to serve their country because it had been deemed their enhancements gave them an unfair advantage. Nobody had seemed to care about unfairness when she and her fellow soldiers had been suffering in the line of duty. Nobody cared that she’d faced death and come back from it ready and willing to go back to fighting for and protecting her country, but instead had been relegated to private service.
Only three of the others, plus her, had ended up working for ProtectCorps. The rest had retired or gone into private hire. Donahue was one of only a few who could afford to pay for the level of protection Nina could provide. You’d think he’d have appreciated it more, if for no other reason than she was costing him a lot of money.
“You’re controversial,” Donahue said. “One of Smart’s other protectors wouldn’t have been.”
Nina nodded. “True, but you’re paying ProtectCorps the beaucoup credits for the best, and discretion is part of that. You think that something got leaked about you hiring me?”
“It must have. I can name at least three groups right off the top of my head who’d want me dead just for letting you inside my home, much less using your services, and all of them are ones that have stood behind me in the past. Hiring you, best or not, was risky. I knew it when I did it,” Donahue added.
“Maybe you should associate yourself with a better class of people.” Nina shrugged.
Donahue frowned. “Chemical attacks like that usually have a DNA-like string of components that make it possible to identify where they were made. If you find out where it was manufactured, you can usually figure out who was behind it. I can tell you already who did it, though. The team can analyze it, but I already know.”