Dangerous Promise (The Protector) Read online

  This is going to change everything.

  “Careful,” Wanda tells him as she watches, anxious, waiting for him to return the chip to the special protective box she designed for it. “Use the tweezers!”

  Ewan doesn’t dare laugh at her in case the puff of his breath blows the chip from his fingertip. The specialty tweezers lift the tiny piece of tech easily, and he slips it into the case. Closes it. Sets it on the table. Only then does he burst into a flurry of relieved chuckles that taper off at the sight of her frown.

  “What’s so funny? This is big,” she tells him. “So big, Ewan, how can you be laughing?”

  He wants to tell her it’s not because he finds humor in any of this, but because the giddy, relieved joy of holding in his hand, or rather on his fingertip, the results of so many years’ effort is making his head spin. Ewan puts both hands flat on the table, head bowed, while he tries to get himself under control. She could never understand. Wanda is a scientist, focused solely on her experiments. Even the greatest pleasure she takes in creating something that works never results in giggles. She’s one of the most serious people Ewan has ever met.

  “This is going to change the world,” she says. “How can you be laughing?”

  He wants to stop, but something in the way she looks at him has another surge of chuckles bursting out of him. Up his throat, out his mouth, they bark harsh and sharp. Almost painful. That’s when he realizes he is dreaming, that none of this is real, because he hasn’t spoken to Wanda Crosson since Gray Tuesday.

  * * *

  So this was a dream, and he didn’t want to be having it. Did not want to revisit the past and his first research partner, didn’t want to be reminded of how he’d failed her as he had managed to fail every other person in his life who’d ever counted on him for something.

  He had to wake up.

  The problem was, even when he was certain his eyes had opened, he could see nothing but darkness beyond even what was normal in his bedroom. He could hear nothing but a soft, cottony muffle. A weight on his body and face made him struggle to clear his way free. He should have been terrified, yet one thought remained.

  Nina was there.

  Nina would not let anything bad happen to him.

  In the next moment, a firm hand on his shoulder helped him to sit. A gust of warm, sweet breath caressed his cheek. His lips. He was turning his head without thinking, finding that mouth with his own.

  He kissed her, lips parting, tongue sweeping inside the sweet cavern of her mouth. Her fingers gripped the back of his neck. His hands reached and found her body. Curves. Muscle. Strength. He kissed her again.

  That was when the real pain began.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ewan’s kiss overtook Nina harder and faster than any attack with fists or weapons ever had. It stunned her into inaction, only for a second or so, only for the time it took for her heart to beat a few times. To take a breath or two.

  Then she pulled away to take his face in her hands and stare deeply into his eyes. With her mouth still wet from his kiss, she tried to tell him not to worry. Not to struggle. In the emergency lighting that had come on in the aftermath of the decibel bomb’s blast, he should have been able to see her clearly, but his gaze was clouded. He didn’t know what he was doing, that much was obvious.

  This was not the time, not the place. Definitely not the man to be kissing her. Yet something in her could not resist brushing her lips over his once more before the security team swarmed in and hauled the attacker off the floor. It was Dima.

  “Trust me, I’m here, you’re safe,” she said even though she knew Ewan couldn’t hear her.

  He’d recovered a bit by that time, at least enough to shake off the hardest effects from the decibel bomb. He didn’t kiss her again, but why would he? Confusion in the aftermath of an attack like that was common. Expected, actually, since the fierce blast of noise and light often knocked people unconscious and also caused hallucinations.

  He must have thought she was someone else.

  She got him out of the bedroom, away from the broken glass and toppled furniture. In the anteroom he settled on the couch with his head in his hands while Nina made sure there was nothing else around that was going to harm him. The security staff had gone ahead and called his on-staff physician, who arrived disheveled and grouchy, like a disgruntled parent called yet one more time to the aid of a troublesome teen.

  “Sorry I can’t get attacked in the middle of the afternoon when it’s more convenient,” Ewan said in a raspy voice at the doc’s complaints.

  The doc, whose name Nina hadn’t learned because, typically, Ewan hadn’t introduced him, frowned. Heavy dark brows furrowed over his glinting black eyes. He stood, an immense mountain of a man who looked more like a wrestler than a medical professional. “How about you stop getting attacked at all? Isn’t that what she’s here to prevent?”

  “She’s here to keep me safe. And she did. Again.” Ewan looked at Nina.

  Maybe he had heard her, then. Maybe he remembered the kiss as truth and not imagination. An uncommon impulse to take his face in her hands swept over her, but she didn’t give in to it. They shared a long look that broke when Ewan, with a grimace, dropped his face into his hands.

  Nina’s head hurt in the aftermath of the decibel bomb, but by the looks of it, Ewan was in way worse shape. He sat with his hands pressed to his temples while the doc checked him over.

  “I can give you a painkiller,” the doc began, but Ewan waved him to silence and shot Nina a look.

  “No. I’m fine. I don’t want to be impaired, in case something else happens.”

  “You’re going to be impaired from the pain, if nothing else. A decibel bomb is nothing to joke about, Ewan. You’ve got several burst blood vessels in your eyes, and the ringing in your ears isn’t going to stop for a few hours, maybe longer.”

  Ewan shook his head with another of those sharp glances at Nina. “I said no. I can handle a little headache.”

  The doc sighed and muttered under his breath, something about why pay him if he wasn’t going to be allowed to do anything for the patient. Then he clapped Ewan on the shoulder hard enough to make him stagger from the weight of the grip and gave Nina a look. He hadn’t asked her if she wanted pain relief.

  “My head hurts, too,” she offered mildly without looking at Ewan. “Decibel bombs are a bitch.”

  The doc laughed. “Yeah, and I could give you something that would dissipate in your system so fast it wouldn’t be worth taking.”

  She knew that, of course. Her body’s ability to metabolize incapacitating substances was meant to keep her safe from being drugged. Surgery was hell. Just because she had a high tolerance for pain didn’t mean she didn’t feel it at all.

  Ewan waited until the doc left before he looked at her again. He still wore the low-slung pajama bottoms that he’d worn to bed. Bare chest and feet. Aside from the couple bright streaks of crimson, one threading through his left eye and two smaller ones in the right, there was no sign that anything had happened to him. Well, other than his rumpled hair and the scowl.

  “I’ve known Dima for years,” he told her. “He’s an affable drunk who blows through money like water. And Vanslyke . . .”

  Ewan trailed off, shaking his head. So far, there hadn’t been any connections between Dima and Vanslyke and any of the organizations that had so far been behind the attacks on him, but it was only a matter of time before something would turn up. Nina was sure of it. She’d broken both Dima’s arms, and he’d started squealing, spouting out names and dates that had meant nothing to her. He’d passed out before the security staff dragged him away, but they’d be getting more information out of him.

  Ewan looked at her. “Vanslyke’s stupid attack was meant as a decoy, wasn’t it? To get everyone out of there, to distract us from Dima on the couch. He’s passed out and stayed over a dozen times in the past. I didn’t give it a second thought.”

  Nina nodded slowly, after a second or s