Wicked Attraction (The Protector) Read online

  He shook his head. Silent. Tears brimmed in his hazel eyes and he blinked hard, dashing them away. She wanted to take a merciless satisfaction in knowing she’d made him cry the way she was trying so hard not to, but she couldn’t. Even now, seeing his suffering, she wanted to take it away from him.

  “I knew you’d hate me, once you knew,” Ewan told her.

  She didn’t hate him and probably never would. “That’s the worst part of it, isn’t it? Knowing we’d found something brilliant and watching it burn to ash.”

  Ewan let out a strangled noise. “You can leave, if you want. I’ll terminate the contract.”

  Of course he would. She could walk out of here without a second glance. “I could have done that the second I saw it was you, and sued you for breach of contract, hiring me under false circumstances. I could have caused a scandal. It would have cost you a lot more than you paid me.”

  “You didn’t.” He scrubbed at his face, eyes still red, but his expression hopeful.

  Nina sighed and shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  The answer to that was complicated, and it was late. She was too exhausted to think about it right now, or to make sense of it. Anything that came out of her mouth would be garbled and nonsensical, unless she pushed her body to fight off the tiredness. The tech was meant to keep her going in extreme circumstances, and this hardly counted as that.

  “It’s late.” Her jaw cracked with a yawn. “I really need to go to bed. We can talk about it in the morning.”

  “Why didn’t you immediately terminate the contract, Nina?”

  The tone of his voice, while vaguely threatening, wasn’t scary. Still, the slant of his mouth and his clenching fists, the low fury in his voice, all pushed away her fatigue. Her heart rate stepped up. Her breathing quickened. Ewan Donahue got Nina’s motor revving, and it had nothing to do with her enhancements.

  “Because I’m a professional,” she lied. If anything, her choice to stay had been entirely amateur.

  They stared at each other.

  “You know what? This was a mistake.” Ewan shook his head, tossing his hands outward as though trying to push her away. “I thought if I brought you here, if I showed you that I was sorry—”

  “That what? You could bend me over and ravish me, and all would be forgiven? Just have a little bit of the old in-out, in-out? You think making me come gives you some kind of power over me?” She demonstrated with a hand gesture far more rude than walking away had been. She crossed the room to him, standing so close she could feel the whisper of his breath on her skin, although they weren’t touching. “Is that what you want? To control me?”

  Ewan didn’t answer.

  Spurred on by inclinations she didn’t want to stop and explore, Nina slid her hands up the front of Ewan’s tux jacket. Her fingers tightened in the material. She tugged. He moved. Her lips parted as he leaned closer. Her tongue flicked his mouth.

  She bit him.

  Hard, but swiftly, her teeth snipping his lower lip. She didn’t draw blood, but the sharp intake of his breath showed so clearly that she’d hurt him. Still, she didn’t kiss him. She let her mouth hover over his. Waiting.

  Ewan groaned something that sounded like her name. Like a plea. The sound of it hit someplace inside her, somewhere deep. Nina could run faster, harder, longer than normal people. She could go without sleep, without food, endure tortures that would make someone else pass out.

  She could control her body in a hundred enhanced ways, but she could not stop herself from giving in to the urge to kiss Ewan.

  Nina’s mouth slid over his in a slow, slick glide. His tongue stroked hers. She shuddered, her nipples tightening against the smooth fabric of the dress he’d bought her. Her breasts, bare beneath the clinging material, ached for his touch.

  “This onedamned red dress,” she muttered into his mouth. “I never should have let you talk me into wearing it.”

  His hands moved up and over her hips to curve around her ribs, right below her breasts. “Why? You look amazing in it.”

  “That’s exactly why. You can’t resist me.” She growled, rasping, when his palms moved upward to cup her through the dress’s thin material.

  Ewan flicked his thumbs over her nipples. “I don’t want to resist you.”

  He pulled her closer so his erection pressed against her through his tuxedo pants. When he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her face and gave him her cheek. He countered with a low, wicked chuckle and ran his lips over the curve of her jaw and down to her throat, nibbling. Each tiny nip sent arcs of electric arousal through her.

  “Resist me, Ewan.”

  His mouth traced the curves of her breasts bared by the gown’s scooped neckline, his reply muffled. “ . . . No.”

  Nina gasped out a curse when his lips captured her nipple through the fabric. With a swift, smooth motion she was behind him with his wrist in her fist and his arm twisted. She pressed herself against his back, not pushing hard enough to break his bones, but hard enough to get him to move forward a few hesitant steps toward the bed he’d bought for her.

  She let him go just as they both reached it. Ewan bent forward, hands flat on the soft comforter. Nina was still behind him, her hands on his hips. Her crotch nudged his ass as Ewan looked at her over his shoulder. She’d thought he might be smiling. Smug. Instead, his gaze on hers was open and blazing. Without a word, he rolled onto his back, shifting easily so that she ended up standing between his legs at the side of the bed.

  “I’m not resisting you,” Ewan said and put his hands up as though she were holding a gun on him.

  It was not about the heat flaring between them. She’d gone without sex for longer than this. It was not about lust.

  Nina loved this man more than she thought she’d ever be capable of loving anyone. She was the one who could not resist. She was the one who did not want to.

  The dress opened down the front with a simple slide of her fingertips along the hidden seam. She tossed it to the side and stood before him wearing only the sheer red lace panties that she’d found waiting for her in the drawer earlier today when he’d told her she’d be accompanying him to the party. No stockings. No bra. Only the transparent crimson panties she knew he’d been imagining her wearing every time he looked at her.

  Ewan’s fingers curled, but he lowered his hands and gripped the comforter on either side of his hips instead of reaching for her. His eyes never left hers. His tongue swept along his lower lip, leaving his mouth open, wet and inviting.

  “I’m not resisting you,” he repeated in a lower voice this time. Rough, harsh, and full of longing. “Do whatever you want.”

  Nina straddled him, her breath hitching as her heart pounded fast and hard. She didn’t try to slow it the way she would have while fighting. She wanted to endure this throbbing ache in her chest, the base of her throat, her wrists. Between her thighs. She wanted it to overwhelm her.

  Ewan was rigid beneath her as she rocked her body against his. Nina ran a hand up the front of his tux. Her fingers curled around his throat. Ewan tilted his head back a little to give her complete access, still keeping his gaze locked to hers.

  “If I want to hurt you?” she whispered.

  “Even that.”

  Instead of gripping his throat, she yanked open his bow tie. Whipped it free of his shirt. She bent to undo the buttons, and when they blocked her, she tore his shirt open down the front. Her nails dug into his chest beneath, lightly at first. Then harder.

  “Maybe especially that,” Nina said, watching his pupils dilate. Feeling his cock thicken as his hips nudged upward, pushing his hardness against her, she couldn’t hold back her sighing groan of pleasure. “Oh. . . .”

  He rolled then, taking her with him and moving them both on the bed so he was on top of her. She didn’t turn her face this time when he kissed her. She gave him her open mouth, her tongue, the clash of her teeth. Her nails dug into the spare flesh of his belly. The crisp da