Dangerous Promise (The Protector) Read online

  She didn’t dare to turn around and look at Donahue now. She swallowed, waiting for pain to slit its way up her gut like a knife, but emptiness swelled inside her. A blank, still force crept along her nerves and settled at the base of her brain. She wasn’t calm. She was merely . . . nothing.

  “It didn’t say who,” Leona added quietly, her brows knitted.

  Nina shook her head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? Had he been reset?”

  “I can’t say. Client privilege.”

  Which meant yes.

  “I wanted you to hear it from me,” Leona went on. “You know the story will break and be spun a hundred different ways. The media is going to have a field day with this.”

  “Thanks. Is there anything else?”

  There wasn’t, and Leona disconnected. Nina slipped the comm into its spot on the leather harness circling her thigh and finally turned to face Donahue. He was no longer pretending not to know her.

  “Allan Hendricks,” he said. It made sense that he knew the name. Most of the world knew all the names of the enhanced, if only from the media reports that had been so rampant about them.

  “Yes. You overheard.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donahue told her. “Were you . . . close?”

  That was another question that had no good answer. Certainly not one she owed him, anyway. Nina met his gaze from across the room.

  “I’m not sure I want to talk to you about this,” she said.

  Donahue looked first irritated, then almost relieved. “Right. Sure. I understand. It’s not any of my business.”

  “You should get back to work,” she told him. “I’m sure you’re very, very busy.”

  Again, Donahue looked annoyed, but although he opened his mouth, he shut it without speaking. He turned back to his computer. Nina returned to her spot on the couch where she’d been trying to read, but nothing could hold her attention and soon she was up, unbuckling the various weapons on her harness and laying them out on the table in front of his desk.

  Donahue looked up. “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning. Inspecting. Making sure everything is in order, the way it should be. Because if something should happen and I wasn’t prepared, it would make it that much harder for me to protect you.” She glanced at him. “Not impossible. Just more difficult.”

  Donahue didn’t reply to that. After a moment she heard the whisper of his fingers again on his touchboard. She kept her attention on what she was doing but felt the weight of his stare. She looked up.

  Donahue got to his feet and came around the edge of the desk to lean on it. He crossed his arms. “I don’t like to talk about my feelings.”

  “You did not come across to me as someone who would.” She wiped a soft cleaning cloth over a knife blade and held it up to the light to inspect for dings or chips on the cutting edge.

  “If you want to, though . . .”

  Nina glanced at him. “I don’t mind talking about my feelings, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’m just not sure I want to discuss them with you, in particular.”

  “Oh.”

  She waited for him to go back to his computer, but he didn’t. He watched her return the knife to its place on her thigh. She cleaned another, again holding it up to make sure it hadn’t been chipped or dulled before she put it back into its place on her harness.

  “He was my lover,” she said finally when it became clear Donahue was waiting for her to say something. “I would call him a boyfriend, except that mostly we only ever fucked and didn’t do the rest of the stuff you’re supposed to do when you’re in a relationship with someone. No flowers or walks holding hands, no snuggling on the couch.”

  “He didn’t want that?”

  She shrugged, concentrating on the weapons she’d laid out on the table in front of her. “Oh, he did. At least he did before I went away. I was the one who held him off. It didn’t make any sense to me. I knew I was going into the army, and I knew that meant I wouldn’t be able to see him for a long time. Maybe never again. It didn’t seem right to get all worked up emotionally over something that wasn’t going to last. I wanted sex, not love.”

  “Been there,” Donahue said.

  She glanced up with a small, humorless grin. “I’m sure you have.”

  “It’s a human need,” Donahue told her. “But then again, they say love is, too.”

  Her smile faded. “Yeah. I believe that. Don’t you?”

  “In theory. In practice, though, we tend as a species to consistently fuck it up.”

  Nina swallowed hard at his words and continued cleaning and sorting her gear. “Some people get it right. They stay in love.”

  “I don’t believe it,” he said with a shrug. “There’s no way to prove it.”

  “No way to prove love?” Incredulous, she looked up at him. “You don’t believe people who say they love each other?”

  Donahue stared at her, his expression indecipherable. “Emotional responses can’t be quantified.”

  “And because you can’t measure them, that makes them not real?”

  “It makes them unreliable,” Donahue said. “And I don’t work with unreliability.”

  She supposed that made sense. Even so . . . “That’s sad.”

  He shrugged and tilted his head to study her as he changed the subject. “What happened when you went away?”

  “He joined the army, too. We were not assigned the same unit, but it didn’t matter. We both ended up enhanced. Imagine that,” Nina said without so much as a waver in her voice. “The odds? There are only fifteen of us. What had to happen in the universe to put us both in the wrong place at the right time to even be eligible for the procedures?”

  “If I believed in the Onegod, I might think it had something to do with it,” Donahue said without so much as a hint of a smile. “What happened after that?”

  She slipped her shockgun into its holster and then put her arms though the harness, heavy with the weight of her equipment, and buckled it in the front. She felt better with it on. Less naked. Nina stretched carefully, making sure everything she’d put back on fit without restricting her. She faced him.

  “I died,” she said. “Then I spent months in recovery. When I came home, I was followed by controversy and drama. I fell out with my family. Friends. I wanted to be loved more than anything. I needed it more than I ever had.”

  “I’m sorry,” Donahue said with a twist of his mouth that wasn’t quite a frown.

  Nina closed her eyes for a blink that lasted longer than it should have. “He said he thought fucking me would be better than it had been before, since I had all this new stamina and whatever. Like somehow my ability to control my breathing was supposed to make me better at sucking cock.”

  Donahue let out a slow, strangled noise that she ignored. She opened her eyes. His brow had furrowed, his lips parting as though he meant to speak but wasn’t sure what to say.

  “He fucked me, but I needed him to love me.”

  “And he didn’t?”

  She forced herself to straighten her shoulders. Lifted her chin. She waited for her voice to crack with emotion, for tears to fall, but there was only that soothing emptiness. That calm. The nothing. “He did. Probably more than he had before. The problem wasn’t him. It was me. I couldn’t . . . feel . . . anything for him. I remembered what it was like to want him. I knew that once upon a time, if I hadn’t loved him with everything I had, at least I’d loved him enough. After I got the tech, I could feel desire, but I couldn’t feel . . . love.”

  “Because of the tech,” Ewan said, his voice hoarse and strangled and gruff.

  “Because of something,” she said. “I can regulate my heart rate. Why not my emotions, too?”

  “Is that what you were doing?”

  She shook her head. “Maybe subconsciously? I only know the more I tried to feel something for him, the less I felt, overall.”

  “Fight or flight. The body reacts to intense emotions the same way it does to real,