The plan had come together surprisingly well, once he’d gotten it into his head that this was the right thing to do. Nina had been right, she was no strategist, but her vivid imagination had been what started it all off, and Ewan had to admit—it was crazy. But it was going to work.

If he survived it, anyway.

“You’re sure you’re comfortable?” Nina asked.

“Absolutely,” he assured her. “So long as they don’t aim for my head.”

She frowned before realizing he was teasing her. Then she ran her hands over his chest, feeling for the lightweight, shockproof vest he’d donned beneath his T-shirt. They’d decided it wouldn’t be suspicious for him to be wearing it, not after all the recent threatening activity.

“It fits you well.” Her palms rested on his chest as she looked up at him.

He couldn’t feel her touch through the layers of material, and yet a flash of heat flooded him. His memory of the kiss had joined his repeated reimaginings of the other things he kept thinking about. His gaze skated over her mouth. If she noticed his look, she ignored it.

They’d talked about various ways this could go down, but in the end had decided it was best if he was attacked as far away from the house as possible. He could have dismissed the household staff to help protect them, but since someone would have to be maintaining the estate while he was gone, and he didn’t want any of them to miss out on their pay while things were in upheaval, he and Nina had figured they would have to tempt the attack somewhere on the grounds.

So, they were going running.

Over the past week, Ewan had carefully seeded all the information he thought necessary to the staff responsible for monitoring the threat levels. He’d scheduled the security staff to have deliberate gaps in the coverage, along with arranging for service calls to the perimeter fencing and security systems that would provide a very narrow but extremely accessible time frame for anyone to gain entrance to the property. It had been a long time since he’d done any actual programming on his own, but he’d made sure to encode any of the correspondence with an individual identifier so that if any of his staff did indeed forward what was meant to be confidential information or share it in any way, he’d be able to figure out who it was.

Now, all they had to do was wait.

“I feel like a worm on a hook,” he said under his breath as he stretched, watching Nina do the same.

As always, she wore her black leggings and long-sleeved shirt, both made of that strong material that wouldn’t stop a bullet but that could blunt a knife. Her harness, crisscrossing over her shoulders and around her belly, along with the thigh straps, had been fully fitted with all of her gear. Compared to her, Ewan was nearly naked, wearing only a pair of running shorts and the singlet with the shockproof vest beneath.

The scary part was not that his team had come up with reports about any threat levels rising, but that they had not. The same circulating criticisms and calling out by the various groups, including the League of Humanity, and nothing new. If anything, the threats had dropped off in the wake of a new surge of social outrage over something else that had nothing to do with him. It hadn’t left Ewan feeling any safer; if anything, it made him even more suspicious of someone on his team falsifying reports. It had also convinced both him and Nina that there were some definite threats on the horizon that were being kept from him deliberately.

“You don’t look like a worm.” Her eyes gleamed as she looked him over, up and down, then tilted her head and went around the back to give him an inspection he doubted was completely necessary but left him fighting a grin.

“Yeah? What do I look like?”

She’d circled around to the front of him again, this time to rest her hands on his shoulders. “You look strong. Like a good runner.”

Their feet crunched on the gravel as he took a step closer to her to lower his voice. Even though she’d had them both fitted with sound-blocking devices, now would not be the time for anything regarding this plan to be overheard by anyone monitoring them. He leaned close to speak directly into her ear, but in doing so caught a whiff of her fresh scent. It distracted him for a moment as he breathed it in.

Nina turned her face toward his, their cheeks brushing. “If anyone is watching us, they’re going to assume we have something going on.”

“That would only fuel the scandal and the rumors, wouldn’t it?” His hands settled on her hips, fingers tightening briefly before he stepped away from her with a grin he was pleased to see looked as though it had caught her off guard.

“You’re playing with danger,” she told him with a wag of her finger.

Ewan grinned, jogging a few steps backward. “How so?”

“Distracting me,” Nina told him as she started after him. “If you wanted to make out with me, you should have asked me yesterday.”

“Yeah? Why yesterday?” Ewan turned to face the path, setting off at an easy, steady pace that would not too easily wind him. He couldn’t deny the rising thrill of anticipation inside him, and only some of it had to do with this plan they’d put together.

Nina jogged beside him, keeping pace. “Because today I’m too busy.”

“I love how you banter.” Ewan lengthened his stride, but slowly, easily. He needed a good, long run for the sake of how it would make him feel, but there wasn’t any point in running himself ragged if nothing was going to happen today. “Not many women can keep up with me.”

“Yet, you don’t like one who can overtake you,” she said, pushing faster to get ahead of him. She turned, running backward to face him the way he had a few minutes ago. Laughing, Nina made a rude gesture. “C’mon, Donahue. Keep up.”

He did, letting her stay just ahead of him. “You’re wrong about me, you know.”

“Yeah?” She eyed him as she faced forward again. She was barely out of breath.

“Yeah . . .” He, however, had to gulp some air, and that was all he managed to say.

Telling Nina that her strength aroused him was probably a bad idea, anyway. Despite the back-and-forth tension that had been ebbing and flowing for the past few weeks, getting involved with her was only going to cause more trouble than it would be worth. Beyond that, there was the real problem of the threats on his life to be dealt with. He didn’t need to be thinking with his cock right now.

They ran in silence for a while after that, heading up toward the fish ponds. Gravel crunched beneath his running shoes. Ewan lifted his chin and breathed in deeply. Fresh air. Mown grass. A tingling scent of water as they drew closer to the deep, cold ponds teeming with fish. Every sense was heightened.

“Need a break,” he said, even though he could have run for another few miles. He feigned a limp. “Pulled something.”

Nina slowed and turned. “Let me take a look.”

There was no sign of surveillance. Nothing to indicate that someone was heading their way to harm him. Even so, a creeping sense of unease started tapping up his spine, raising the hairs on the back of his neck and bumping his flesh.

Ewan paused in front of the pond’s concrete rim and bent at the waist to rub his calf as though he were cramping. Nina bent, too. Her fingers followed his, kneading the muscle.

With her mouth against his ear, she said, “Something’s coming.”

* * *

Nina wasn’t surprised they’d sent a drone. This one was bigger than the one that had tried to take pictures and way more menacing. It was too far away for her to tell what it was loaded with.

Assess the situation—approaching drone, unknown weaponry, but based on the information they’d leaked to Ewan’s staff and the way it had conveniently shown up right now when there were known vulnerabilities in his security, she was going to assume the worst.

“It’s going to fire on you.” Still pretending to rub the faked injury to his leg, she put herself between Ewan and the drone, a position that wouldn’t do much because the unit was approaching from above. “I’m going to do my best to make sure the hit is deflected onto your torso. You’re going to feel pressure and some tingling that might spread out to your arms and legs, but that vest will protect you against all standard hits. I’ll try to avoid getting hit, myself, but if I do, you keep to the plan. Got it?”

Ewan nodded. She didn’t look at him, keeping her eyes on the drone, but she felt the tension in his muscles. Heard the rapid panting of his breath, sensed the stepped-up beating of his heart.

Nina had told him she was not a strategist, and that was the truth. She reacted to threats. There was no time for anxiety when she was fighting; she moved. Struck. Protected. But this whole thing was more complicated than that, because it relied not only on her skills at defending herself and her client against danger but also on the end result, over which she had no control. Ewan had been the one to take care of the final arrangements. She hadn’t asked him how, exactly, he’d managed to set up the transportation away from his estate, but she knew he’d done it through a series of “back doors” that were supposed to make the entire business anonymous and untraceable. By giving his staff all the information they had about how someone could get to him, they’d both hoped the rest of the preparations would go undetected. There were a lot of “ifs” that they hadn’t been able to control. No time to dwell on them now.

She’d asked Ewan to trust her with his life, and now it was her turn to trust him.

“What if they miss?” he asked under his breath as the drone zoomed closer, so silent they probably wouldn’t have noticed it if they hadn’t been expecting something to happen.

“I expect it’ll try again until it thinks it killed you,” Nina said.

Ewan stifled a laugh as though it were a cough, but his shoulders heaved with it. “Let’s hope it does, right?”

He was laughing, even now? Nina drew a breath that slipped out of her on a chuckle of her own in response as she glanced at him. Ewan Donahue was an enigma to her, blowing hot and cold, serious and then goofy when she least expected it. She wasn’t sure she’d ever quite get a handle on him.

“Is it going to hurt?” he asked.

Nina straightened as the drone came closer. Two small portals in the front opened, dual tubes extending. “Yes. Stunbullets won’t kill you, but even if they have illegal ammunition, old-style bullets, that vest will stop them from getting too deep.”

Incredibly, Ewan laughed again. “Great. Right. Bring it on.”