Dangerous Promise (The Protector) Read online

  “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