Dangerous Promise (The Protector)

by Megan Hart

  “Good point. Finish your book.” But she kept looking at him instead, so Ewan said, “Now what?”

  “Is that all you do? Work?”

  “Of course not.” He swiveled in his chair to lean an elbow on the desk.

  Nina rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I’ve been here a week, and all I’ve seen you do is work. What do you do for fun? You don’t even play any sports or anything.”

  He used to. But going out in public had become a hazard, and he’d never really liked golf anyway. It was less a sport than a networking tool.

  “I used to run,” Ewan said.

  Nina looked impressed. “For fun? Competitively? Just in case of the rise of the undead?”

  “No, for that I have special shoes,” he said and admired the way her eyes lit up when she tossed her head back with a giggle. “Track and cross-country in high school. Kept up with it later, did a few fun runs, things for charity. Wasn’t into marathons or anything like that. But yeah, I liked running.”

  She set aside her tablet, carefully sliding it into the padded case and putting it on the coffee table. She stood. “So. Let’s go for a run.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “We could go ten miles in any direction and never reach the end of your property,” Nina said as they both stepped off the grand front porch of Donahue’s faux Victorian-style mansion and onto the circular gravel driveway.

  “You really want to run ten miles?” he asked.

  “I could. No sweat, and by that I mean pretty much literally. The question is, can you?”

  “I used to be able to, no problem. Now . . . not so sure. For I am old and no longer fit.” He put one arm across his chest to stretch his shoulder. Then the other. Lean muscles rippled.

  “Old, please, you’re what. Forty?”

  “Thirty-five,” he said with a frown that meant she’d gotten him. She knew of course exactly how old he was, but she’d wanted to poke at his vanity.

  He’d changed into a pair of ass-hugging shorts that could kill a girl who wasn’t careful. She thought of his accusation that she’d been flirting with him. He hadn’t been entirely wrong. He probably thought she actually wanted him, though, Nina thought as she eyed those sculpted butt cheeks. Donahue would never be the sort of man to understand how much easier it was to keep someone at a distance if you let them think they might get in your pants.

  “Don’t worry, Gramps. If you can’t make it, I’ll be able to carry you,” Nina said with a deliberate nonchalance she meant to poke at him again.

  Donahue stood at least a foot taller than her, which put him at about six-four. He probably didn’t outweigh her by much because a lot of her body weight was solid muscle. Still, she probably could carry him, if she had to, at least for a short distance. If her fight-or-flight reactions kicked in. If she had to save his life. She was ready in a blink to do that, although she hoped for both their sakes it wouldn’t come to that.

  He gave her a long, steady look. “Maybe we can start off with just a few miles, up to the hedge maze in the back garden and back? That’s about three miles, round trip. Nice and easy.”

  The man had a hedge maze? Of course he did. Why not? He also had several different kinds of gardens including a Japanese plot and one teeming with English roses. They ran past a full-size pagoda, and he caught her shaking her head.

  “What?” Donahue might’ve made some noises about being out of shape, but he wasn’t showing any signs of it. He’d easily kept pace with her, not even acting winded.

  She ran a bit faster so she could get ahead of him and turned, running backward. “You really do have more money than you know what to do with, huh?”

  “I’d say I know plenty what to do with it.”

  They ran through gently curving paths lined with roses that looked like something out of a catalog. She turned around with another shake of her head, but made no more comments, not even when they passed a miniature English Tudor cottage. At last they crested a sloping hill covered in lush green grass. The hedge maze was about half a mile ahead of them. Donahue at last had started sweating. He swiped at his face.

  “You really could go on for ten miles, couldn’t you? Probably more.”

  Nina had barely broken a sweat, but now she slowed so he could, too. “Biofeedback. I can sort of reassign some of my body’s functions if I have to, run on reserves. Yeah, I could go a lot longer, but eventually I’d crash like anyone else.”

  “I guess I’m more out of shape than I thought.” Donahue bent to put his hands on his knees. He shook his thick head of dark hair, spattering the crushed-shell path with sweat, and looked up at her. “But don’t worry, I don’t think I need you to carry me home.”

  She laughed. “I think you’re in better shape than you claim. But fine, you’re the boss. We can walk for a bit. You can show off your gardens. What else do you have, a little mini village?”

  “Next year,” he told her. “The architect is working up the plans. I’m going to import mini horses and pigs, too. For fun, because everything’s better when it’s miniature.”

  “Not everything,” Nina said.

  Donahue snorted laughter and shook his head. “I walked right into that one.”

  “I meant weapons,” she said with a deliberately mock-innocent rise of her eyebrows, watching to see his reaction.

  “Riiiiiight.”

  They walked. Nina had been regulating her breathing while they ran. She felt the miles, no question, but not the way she would have before the enhancements. Now she let herself relax into a more normal breathing pattern. Beside her, Donahue’s rapid heart rate and elevated temperatures were also returning to normal. She could smell him, Nina realized, a sensuously musky and thoroughly male odor, and it wasn’t because of her enhanced senses. He just smelled sweaty in that delicious way men could smell when they’d worked their bodies hard.

  She might not have known much about his past relationships before starting this job, but it had only taken a few quick searches on her tablet to pull up enough information to tell her everything she needed. The term “playboy” had been invented long before Donahue had started working his way through a lengthy list of women he’d been linked to romantically in the past decade, but he seemed to have done more than his share to keep the stereotype alive. Even if he hadn’t been as close to a nemesis as Nina could have, she wouldn’t have wanted to get involved with him beyond something sexual, casual, meaningless. She didn’t want to like his scent, or his laugh, or anything else about him. She didn’t want to give him the benefit of any doubts, and yet . . .

  Over the past week, she’d watched him dealing with his business and other people, that flippant arrogance evident in so many of his interactions the same way he’d been with her. The way so many of her most powerful clients behaved. Yet she’d also seen him be kind, first to a teenager who’d been working in one of his labs as an apprentice. The girl had been stumbling over her current project, dejected and certain she was a failure in the tech industry. Donahue had given the girl an hour or more of his time, respectful and helpful in his advice. And he’d been kind to several members of his staff who’d requested time off to visit family or friends, even though none of them had been due paid leave.

  So, he could be kind, she thought. He could be generous. He had a sense of humor that wanted to mesh with hers, if either of them would let go long enough to really laugh together. He was also vehemently and vociferously opposed to everything she was, and a direct reason why she was never going to be able to continue the truncated process that had left her enhanced but without hope of the required maintenance and upgrades that would keep her functioning properly. She did not need to impress him, Nina thought with a small frown. She definitely didn’t like him.

  “Let’s sit for a few minutes.” Donahue gestured to a small, manicured section of the garden. There was a water fountain for them both to drink from.

  There was also a real fountain. A group of angels spouting water into a raised basin covered in wa
ter lilies and full of greenish-black water. He even had fish. Rich people, Nina thought with a shake of her head as she watched Donahue bend over the smaller fountain to drink.

  “They’re carp,” he explained when he saw her looking into the pond. “Decorative carp, not koi. Did you know that there are some collectors who will pay hundreds of thousands of credits for koi? Even now, after the war.”

  The Second Cold War had changed international trade so significantly that even now, eight years after the official end of it, there were still all manner of things people used to take for granted that were no longer available. Fruits, vegetables, grains. Quinoa, for example, which had become immensely popular a decade or so before the war began, had taken the place of rice in many Asian countries but barely a single grain could be found here in the North American United States.

  Still, she could hardly be shocked that people would still spend money on decorative pets. The kind of people who had the money to spend on pagodas and English Tudor cottages in gardens would also find a way to get quinoa if they wanted it, or anything else. Including pretty fish.

  “We can feed them.” He pointed at small dispenser filled with brownish pellets. “They’ll swim right up to the surface.”

  Nina twisted the knob to let a handful of pellets fill her palm. She scattered them into the water, watching the lily pads moving with the currents created by the big fishes’ tails. She laughed. What was it about the way fish blooped up to the surface, mouths gaping, that was so endearing?

  “So . . . why not koi?” She asked, watching Donahue sprinkle his own food into the water.

  “These are for a practical use. I might have more money than I know what to do with, but I don’t need to spend it on fish just to look at them.”

  “What do you do with them, if you don’t just look at them?”

  “Eat them.” Donahue gave her a serious look. “They’re for food. In the event of a siege.”

  She started to laugh at the absurdity, but the chuckle trailed away at the look on his face. “Wow. You mean business.”

  “Like you said, I could run ten miles in any direction without reaching the end of my property. I have walls. I have security. I have everything that’s supposed to keep me safe. But what about if I can’t get out? What if deliveries can’t get in? This pond is one of several food sources on the property. These carp are bred to be low maintenance, quick breeders, and nutritious.”

  Nina bent over the edge of the pond. “How deep is it?”

  “This part of the pond is about ten feet deep, but there are two tunnels leading to other ponds there.” He pointed. “So the fish can migrate without overbreeding. Another tunnel leads to a pond near the pagoda, which is also built to be practical, not just pretty. It houses the filtration equipment for the ponds as well as an additional solar resource for power. The cottage? Similar.”

  She straightened. “Impressive. But I guess you’d better really like fish.”

  “Beer battered with some chips made from potatoes grown on the grounds? Nothing better. You’d be surprised what you can get used to, if you have to,” Donahue said. Then, before she could answer, added, “Yeah. I’m sure you can. Soldier and all that.”

  “The food in the army is actually pretty good,” she told him. “Reconstituted beef stew was my favorite. I was never much a fan of fish. I had a bad tuna salad experience once. Never quite got over it.”

  Nina brushed the crumbs from her palms into the water and watched the fish swirl up from the greenish brown depths. She was aware of Donahue beside her, but when she looked up and caught him staring, she took a step back. The smile that had been tugging at the corners of her mouth faded.

  “You’re staring at me again,” she said.

  Donahue frowned. “Did it hurt?”

  “When I fell from heaven?”

  He laughed under his breath and shook his head. “That’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It hurt. A lot. For a long, long time. Sometimes it still does.”

  He frowned harder, moving toward her. “It’s not supposed to.”

  She could’ve easily ducked his touch, but didn’t. She braced herself for it, though, and when the brush of his fingers traced the edge of her hairline it was both as wonderful and as awful as she’d expected such a touch to be. She hadn’t closed her eyes, and his gaze met hers with the same burning intensity they had the first time they’d met. This time, though, if anyone was being burned by a touch it was her. She had no scars along the path his fingers had taken, but the touch had left a tingling sting of fire behind, the way her scars had hurt when they were fresh.

  “It hurts because the tech needs upgrades,” she said in a low voice, refusing to cut her gaze from his. “You don’t hear about it because groups like the LOH have ruined the truth by twisting it to fit their agenda, so the real stories are suppressed. But yes. Sometimes, it hurts, even though it’s not supposed to. It hurts a lot.”

  “Have you ever done something that you’re ashamed of, Nina? So ashamed that you can’t forgive yourself?”

  That question had so many answers that she couldn’t find a single one to give him. Donahue looked up at the sound of something overhead. Shading his eyes, he grimaced.

  “It’s a drone.”

  “Get down,” Nina said at once.

  Everything shifted. Slowed, at least in her perceptions. Focused. Above them, the small mechanical object whirred close enough that she could see the lens in the front of it. Also another, larger opening that could conceal a weapon.

  Donahue still stood next to her. Without looking at him, Nina commanded, “I said get down!”

  He was not moving fast enough to suit her. The drone whizzed closer, making a series of rapid clicks. It was taking photos. That didn’t mean this machine was not also armed and simply getting itself within range.

  Sweeping his leg, Nina dropped Donahue onto the soft, lush grass, making sure to keep a grip on him long enough to stop him from hitting the ground too hard. In seconds she’d moved past him to springboard off the raised concrete edge of the pond. Her muscles bunched, tensing. Her first leap took her a few scant inches short of the drone, but without even a moment’s downtime she twisted in midair. Her other foot hit the concrete wall and she pushed off, harder this time.

  The drone was trying to fly away, but she was faster. Nina’s fingertips skimmed the metal, knocking the machine off course just enough to bring it within reach. She grabbed it, mindful that it might be fitted with self-defense mechanisms. She braced herself for the pain, but all she felt was a thin burning from the metal, heated by the sun. No jutting spikes, no electric shock.

  She ended up on one knee, the drone crushed against the front of her. Donahue had been flat on his back, though now he rolled onto his side and onto one knee. He looked furious.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Nina stood. The drone in her hands buzzed, struggling, and she sought a deactivation switch. The risk, of course, was that it might have some kind of self-destruct option, since it didn’t seem equipped with self-defense. Her fingers found a small, rubbery button and she pushed it anyway, to keep the drone from fighting against her grip.

  She tossed it to the grass next to his feet. “When I tell you to get down, you get down. Or I will subdue you. I told you that the first day I was here.”

  Donahue’s fists curled at his sides. Still in reactionary mode, Nina’s own hands did the same. She took a step back. Fighting stance. Her body moved, swift and sure and without hesitation, her hands moving in a set of familiar patterns of self-defense before she checked herself. Forced herself to stand up straight.

  Donahue backed up, looking a little sick. “Shit. Yeah. I just . . . shit.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment, lowering her hands and scanning the sky for any more threats. “My job is to protect you. I am very, very good at my job. If that means dropping you on your ass, Mr. Donahue, then . . . well. Wha
t’s more important? Your pride or your life?”

  He bent to pick up the drone without answering her. He turned it from side to side, studying it. “No markings.”

  “Did you think whoever sent it would’ve put their name on it?” She let out a slow breath.

  He looked at her without expression. Damn. He was super pissed.

  “Of course not. I’ll have this analyzed.” He tucked it under his arm and strode off toward the house before stopping abruptly to say over his shoulder, “Wait, do I need to ask permission before I go?”

  Double damn.

  With a sigh, Nina jogged in front of him. “Don’t. Don’t do this.”

  Donahue was blushing again. It might’ve been the earlier flush from the exercise, but she didn’t think so. He was embarrassed, and she didn’t want him to be. Certainly not because she’d been able to get him to the ground without so much as a blink.

  She held up her hands, open palmed.

  “Is it because I’m female?” she said. Some men had a real problem with that. Hell, some women did, too.

  Donahue looked stunned. “No!”

  “Good. Because my gender doesn’t make me any less capable of doing this job. The one you hired me for,” she reminded him. “Nor were you ever a soldier. Right?”

  “No. I definitely was not.”

  “So I have training that you didn’t. And I’ve had the enhancements, which make me even more capable than the general protector. Look,” she started, frustrated and not sure why it mattered so much. Donahue was a client. She hadn’t failed him. She’d done her job. If he didn’t like the way she handled the work, he could fire her. She’d go on to another assignment. They’d already discussed that option. “There isn’t any room here for ego. Not if it means keeping you safe.”

  Begrudgingly, he finally nodded. “I know. And it wasn’t that.”

  Confused, she tilted her head to look at him. “Well . . . what was it?”