Wicked Attraction (The Protector) Read online

  Sure enough, before Nina had even bothered to get out of the bed, the door opened. The woman who entered wore a pair of faded jeans that had gone out of style at least two decades before. A knit sweater in multiple blocks of color, also too ugly to be called retro, clung to her lean frame. The bun of ebony hair on top of her head looked precarious.

  She had a nice smile, though, which she turned on Nina full force. “Hello, there. Did you sleep well?”

  “Sure, I slept shiny fine.” Nina didn’t return the smile but kept her expression neutral. Pleasant, but not welcoming. “What’s going on?”

  The woman had the audacity to plop herself on the edge of Nina’s bed, not moving even when Nina gave her a pointed glance. “Do you remember your name? The date?”

  Nina named a date that felt like it might be right and added, “Nina Bronson. Am I supposed to not remember that?”

  “Many of our clients arrive a little . . . unsteady,” the woman said with a smirking smile that definitely left Nina unsteady, but with irritation, not uncertainty. “And what is your occupation?”

  “I’m a private security operative.” Nina paused, frowning, digging backward. That felt right. Normal and true. “I was on a job.”

  The woman pursed her lips.

  “No? I wasn’t on a job?”

  “What’s the last thing you remember before waking up here?”

  “Being abducted,” Nina lied, because she did not remember that at all. The last thing she truly remembered clearly was Leona telling her she had a new gig. She remembered signing the contract. Therefore, she’d been on a job. If she was here now, then something had happened to her while working. She took another guess. “I was drugged. Maybe even injured.”

  “Oh, my goodness.” The woman raised both her eyebrows but didn’t deny what Nina had claimed. She shook her head. “I apologize profusely, Ms. Bronson. At times, the treatments result in vivid dreams. I can make sure to note that, so your treatment can be adjusted to accommodate that. Do you feel injured?”

  “No,” Nina said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I could’ve been here long enough to start healing.”

  That didn’t feel right, though. She flexed a bit, testing her muscles and joints for any hints of pain. There were a few faint aches and pains, and when she rolled up the sleeve of her flowered pajamas, she found a faint pattern of bruises on the inside of her arm. Without pulling off her pajama bottoms, she couldn’t see if the small aches on her legs matched the bruising pattern. All of that meant very little. She could’ve banged herself up during a workout, or protecting the client she could not, at this moment, remember.

  “Something bad happened to me, or else I wouldn’t be here,” she said stubbornly.

  The woman smiled gently. “Ms. Bronson, I can assure you, Limone Luxury Health Spa has only voluntary clients here.”

  “Health spa!” Nina snorted rude laughter. “Uh-huh. More like psych ward.”

  The moment the words came out of her, she stopped laughing. The underlying stink of a hospital. The monitoring. There’d been nothing voluntary about her arrival here, she knew that in her bones, and the fact she couldn’t force the memories to return had left her more than unsteady. She was unsettled. Unnerved.

  “I’m in a psych ward,” she repeated, starting to convince herself.

  “No, no. Of course not.”

  “A lab. A research facility,” Nina said, her voice louder this time.

  Be quiet.

  Be still.

  The voice was solid. Real. Yet the woman in front of her didn’t so much as blink at the sound of it. Nina faltered, putting a hand to her ear, tilting her head to figure out where it had come from.

  “I’ll make sure your treatments are adjusted,” the woman repeated. “My goodness, we want all of our clients to feel comfortable and pampered here at the Limone Luxury Health Spa—”

  “Go ahead and say the name of it once more. You haven’t managed to convince me yet.” A fresh pain twinged in Nina’s head. She winced.

  “Here at Limone Luxury Health Spa, it’s our goal to make our clients as comfortable and pampered as possible,” the woman continued without irony.

  Nina held up a hand. “Look, I’ve never actually been a client of a luxury health spa, but I’ve been inside more than one while on the job, and the first thing I can tell you is that you’re dressed all wrong.”

  The woman looked down at her clothes with a frown, then back at Nina, who continued before the woman could answer.

  “You’re in civilian clothes instead of scrubs or a uniform. And you haven’t even told me your name. That’s a dead giveaway,” Nina said. “Ass kissing is generally best accompanied by a name tag or an introduction. You know, in case I want to complain, ’cause that’s what the people who go to luxury health spas like to do.”

  “I’m Adami, and here at Limone Luxury . . . Health Spa.” She stuttered a little on the words, and Nina was glad to think maybe she’d rattled the woman. “Ahem, we encourage individual expression instead of uniforms.”

  “Like these pajamas?” Nina flipped back the comforter to show them off.

  Adami beamed. “Exactly!”

  “The only thing I would like to personally express about these pajamas is the desire to throw them in a fire,” Nina said with a sneer. Her fingers twitched, making fists on top of the blankets.

  She could be out of the bed in a minute, Adami’s throat in her hands. She could squeeze.

  Kill.

  Adami recoiled. “You don’t like them? Oh, no, that’s terrible. I’ll have something else brought to you right away. Would you prefer stripes or checks, or another pattern?”

  “How about you bring me back my own clothes? I’m not an invalid.” Nina swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She had no trouble standing, which seemed to shock Adami, who’d probably been expecting Nina to be weak. Adami stumbled back toward the wall with a look of clear terror.

  Nina paused. Did she look frightening? Her teeth bared, she made as though she was going to step toward Adami. The woman didn’t quite cower, but it looked as though it took every bit of her willpower not to. She tapped the side of her head to activate a personal comm. She didn’t speak, though. Maybe she was waiting to see if Nina intended to attack her before she called in the wolves.

  Visual as well as auditory monitoring? Check. Whoever was watching would be ready to burst into this room in seconds, most likely fully armed with weapons even Nina couldn’t protect herself from. Assuming that they knew who and what she was—and she had to go with that they surely had to. It meant this woman was important enough to warrant being protected, but not so important that they weren’t willing to risk her getting hurt or killed before anyone could rescue her. So Adami wasn’t the head of this operation. That would also explain why the woman seemed so terrified. She knew she was expendable.

  “I’m not going to do anything to hurt you,” Nina said calmly. Her fury at the ugly sleepwear had vanished, replaced with wariness and the uneasy desire to laugh. A flurry of pained giggles slipped out of her, links in a chain of hilarity that sounded wrong. “Why don’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “I’m here to . . . I’m here to make sure you know how to . . .”

  Nina pulled the ugly pajama shirt over her head and tossed it onto the dresser. Then the pants. They were not only hideous, but would encumber her should things start going sideways. She anticipated that happening at any moment. Unconcerned with her nakedness despite being convinced she was being observed, Nina put her hands on her hips. She could hear the flutter of Adami’s heart, the fast pace of her breathing. The other woman was scared, and that was fine with Nina, who didn’t mind being intimidating.

  Adami didn’t deserve to be intimidated, she thought suddenly, the fierce anger that had been building dwindling like a punctured balloon. Nina drew in a breath and put her fingertips to her temple, where an ache had begun to throb. She blinked against a few seconds of blurriness, and her vision cl