Dangerous Promise Read online

  “Good. Thank you.”

  They were still squared off, but he visibly relaxed. He held up the drone. “Anyway, it’s just one that takes pictures. Probably one of the news agencies. Or the tabloids.”

  “Do you want pictures of yourself taken without your permission?”

  “Of course not!”

  She shrugged. “Then I think it was as important for me to neutralize the threat as if it had been loaded with a gun or electro-shocker, or a gas canister.”

  “Maybe not quite as important,” Donahue said.

  She waited a second to see if he was going to smile. He did, though barely. She made sure to sound respectful when she answered, “Anything that brings you any measure of harm is something I will do my very best to prevent. Anything. If you’re mine, you are mine all the way.”

  Something grew in the space between them, real and palpable, an echo of the previous tensions but something more. Something bigger. It tightened the muscles in her belly and at the base of her throat; she swallowed against it, but it didn’t go away. Nina lifted her chin, staring at him. Incapable of so much as a blink. She was used to time slowing when faced with danger and there had been nothing so far in her life, she thought, as dangerous as the man staring her down now.

  “All the way,” Donahue echoed after a moment in a low, rasping voice that sent an inferno of sensation to her very core.

  Physical reactions to sexual arousal and to threats were so similar—increased heart rate, blood pressure, sweating. The sensations rushed through her, and Nina took a step back. She almost never had to put conscious effort into controlling her body because the tech automatically did it, but she could do it by concentrating, if she had to.

  She had to, now.

  The heat in Donahue’s gaze swept over her, and she would have been left shaking, if she hadn’t forcibly shifted her body’s responses. Her stomach twisted with it, and she breathed deeply. Fists clenching. It all lasted no more than a few seconds, barely long enough for her to notice it, and she was gratefully certain that Donahue hadn’t. It had all left her stunned and uncertain and tense.

  The last time she had felt this vulnerable, she’d woken up in agony on a hospital bed, blind and deaf from the bandages surrounding her head. She’d lost everything that had been important to her. Family. Friends. Lovers. The life she had known. Good had come from it, as Nina believed it always did from surviving adversity, but what good would come from stepping forward and offering her mouth to Ewan Donahue, which was all she could think about doing in that moment?

  No good, nothing good at all, nothing but disaster.

  Nina didn’t move toward him. She tossed her braid over her shoulder and put her hands on her hips. She cleared her throat, her voice steady and not shaking only because she could control that as well as she could control her heart rate.

  “We should get back to the main house,” she told him.

  Donahue nodded. “Yeah. Yes. Fine. Good.”

  She wanted to take off running but couldn’t. It was her job. She couldn’t leave him behind her. She had to wait for him to lead to make sure that if anything else came after him, she would be there protect him from it. So, awkward and hating it, because nothing had made her feel this uncertain and unstable since before she’d gone into the army, Nina gestured at the path.

  Without a word or another look at her, Donahue took it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Ewan knew, of course, all about Nina’s capabilities. He’d been the one to design them, after all. The automatic biofeedback that allowed her to shift more energy into muscles being used for fighting or fleeing. Her body’s ability to slow her breathing while gaining more oxygen from each breath. The way she would be able to go faster, higher, harder just by a few simple shifts in her neurological responses. He hadn’t realized how irritating it would be when she used those enhancements on him.

  Or how sexy.

  She’d dropped him like it had meant nothing at all. He’d been on the ground watching her make that super jump into the sky before he had time to blink. Flat on his back with his cock aching and rigid in his shorts. Thank the universe for the tight briefs he wore that had kept his erection in its place.

  He’d never reacted that way to a threat before. If he were mad or scared or upset about something, the very last thing in the world on his mind was getting laid. Hell, he’d never even understood the appeal of angry fucking.

  It wasn’t because of the threat, or the danger. It was entirely because of Nina and her strength. The way she’d handled him with such ease, swiftness, and confidence. The pain of him hitting the ground hadn’t been sexy, but watching her in action had been one of the hottest things Ewan had ever seen . . . and he hated it. He didn’t need a reminder about what she was, and he definitely didn’t need to find it attractive. The idea of it was perverse, like if the doctor had wanted to make love to his monster after creating it.

  Home now, both of them showered and with dinner in their bellies, he was trying so hard not to keep replaying how she’d straddled him that he’d barely tasted a bite of the pasta and vegetables he’d eaten. He couldn’t get the feeling of her weight on him out of his head, nor how swiftly she’d been able to take him down. It was almost more than he could do not to pull her close and unbind the braid at the base of her neck and sink his fingers deep, deep into that silky weight. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t shake the feeling of how easily she’d taken away his control.

  “Are you still angry?” Nina asked him now quietly from her place on the couch. She had the tablet in her hands, but he didn’t think she’d been reading, because he’d too often felt the weight of her gaze on him as he pretended to work.

  Ignoring her hadn’t helped him to forget the way his body had reacted to her strength and later, even more, to what she’d said. “Mine.” Her words echoed in his memory until he had to shift against the rise of his prick like some schoolkid who didn’t know how to control himself around a pretty girl.

  “They already broadcasted some of the photos they managed to get before you grabbed the drone,” Ewan said in a flat voice. He spun the monitor to show her. “This one’s my personal favorite.”

  It showed him being dropped to the ground while Nina looked directly into the camera lens. She looked fierce. A warrior. She looked beautiful, though he wasn’t about to admit that aloud, not again.

  “I especially like the commentary,” he added, and read aloud: “‘Donahue Dumped.’ ‘Billionaire Bounced.’”

  “Oh, c’mon. Are you really a billionaire?”

  He pressed his lips together for a moment before answering. “You know everyone’s a billionaire now, ever since the New World Credit system went into effect.”

  “Right. I wasn’t aware that Gray Tuesday had made everyone a billionaire, though. I really missed out.” She gave him a steady gaze as neutral as the one he was giving her.

  Had she noticed his arousal earlier? Was that why she’d so carefully backed off from him for the rest of the day? Ewan spun the monitor around to look at his photo again with another frown. It was embarrassing as hell. “A couple different groups are trying to take credit for the drone. Most of them are obviously lying.”

  “What do your people say?”

  He shrugged and scrolled through the file of photos they’d managed to download off the drone. There were the mortifying ones of him biting the dirt, along with several of Nina in full action. He didn’t click on any of those. He didn’t need photographic reminders of how she’d looked. He was never going to be able to forget. There were also a few aerial shots of his property, though nothing terribly suspicious.

  “It was a media drone. Nothing serious, not scouting for vulnerabilities or anything like that,” he said. “Not armed. Relatively minor memory capacity. Hell, it wasn’t even one of the better models, it’s almost like something some kid could’ve built in his garage.”

  Nina got up from the couch and moved to look over his shoulder. This close, he