He should fire her and demand his money back—it had been an obscene amount of money, even for Ewan, who hadn’t bothered to ask the price of an item or service in at least a decade. The cost of keeping him alive hadn’t mattered to him, but he hadn’t realized the services would come along with such a load of bullshit.

Selective sight and hearing, she’d said, as though this was news to him. What Nina didn’t know was that Ewan had funded the research that allowed for those functions in the first place, along with most of the others she could brag about. More than funded; he’d invented and programmed the original tech and enhancement software that had transformed her from a normal, human woman into some kind of super soldier.

Not a cyborg, he reminded himself as he used the toilet, his back facing her but with full awareness that she stood close enough to grab him if she wanted to, or that all she had to do was lean in a little bit to see everything nature had blessed him with. Not a robot. She hadn’t been fitted with metal limbs or artificial organs. Just a series of nanochips connected to her brain and nervous system, the tech running specialized software that allowed her greater than natural control over her bodily functions. Endurance, strength, focus. Special functions that could erase her memories of anything top secret or confidential with nothing more than a preprogrammed series of codes. None of that was supposed to come along with a smartass attitude.

It hadn’t been meant to come along with that face, either. Pale amber eyes fringed with curling dark lashes and sparkling with barely restrained humor and yeah, right now, mockery. Smooth bronze skin free of any kind of makeup that he could see. A lush, full mouth that wouldn’t quit. And her hair . . . universe help him, even pulled back into the tight, utilitarian braid at the base of her neck, he could see it was thick and silky, as dark as his deepest fantasies.

Because that what she was, right? A fantasy, something he’d dreamed up a long time ago, when he’d believed the tech would make life better for those who were enhanced. Before he realized how messed up that was. Playing at being the Onegod in a world where religion had become regarded as no more real than fairy tales.

Nina Bronson was a fantasy, all right, but one Ewan could no longer allow himself to imagine.

He turned from the toilet, half-expecting to see her smirking, but she was looking carefully uninterested, her gaze settled somewhere to his left. “I need to take a shower. Sure you don’t want to climb in there with me?”

He’d been aiming for sarcasm, but the second the words came out of his mouth, he realized they sounded less like a threat and more like a sexual come-on. The way her sleek black eyebrows rose made it obvious that she’d thought so, too, but scratch it, that was the last thing in the world he’d meant. Maybe not the last thing, he admitted as Nina gave him another of those frustratingly chilly smiles. At about five-four, she stood close to a foot shorter than him. Her body beneath the simple black uniform of leggings and a long-sleeved top was fit and firm and still curvy in all the places a man needed a woman to curve. She studied him like she could ferret out every scrap of a secret he’d ever tried to keep.

“I could, but in the event of a rising threat”—her gaze dropped for the barest second to the front of his pajamas, he was sure of it, though it happened so fast he couldn’t have proven it—“I’ll need to be able to take care of it with my clothes on.”

“Don’t like to fight naked, huh?”

She smiled. “I like to do a lot of things naked, Mr. Donahue, but fighting isn’t one of them.”

He’s always been a sucker for a woman with a sense of humor and a sharp wit. This particular woman, though, represented everything he was working so hard against. He’d hired her for the job in spite of his personal beliefs, not to support them. And not for any other reasons, either, her ripe mouth and quick comebacks notwithstanding.

Besides, Ewan told himself with scorn, he preferred blondes.

He reached into the glass shower enclosure to start the water running. “How can I be sure you’re using that selective sight like you say you are?”

Her smile vanished immediately. Her back straightened, shoulders squared. Her voice, which previously had been slightly husky and tinged with amusement, went subzero.

“Because to ogle you inappropriately in the shower or in any other way would be a direct violation of my standards, both those set by the company I work for, and also my own personal set of morals and ethics. Because I do what I say I’m going to do, Mr. Donahue, and for you to assume or believe anything less is a direct affront on my character.”

Before he could say anything else, glass shattered. The bathroom window above the deep soaking tub burst inward. A long metal tube hurtled through the open space and hit the tile floor, bouncing hard enough to chip the porcelain before rolling to a stop near his feet. The slow hissing of gas came first, followed next by the eye-watering sting.

“Get in the shower!” Nina shoved him, hard, into the glass enclosure, and shut the door behind him. “Turn the water on high!”

Another metal tube hurtled through the window, but this one didn’t have time to hit the floor. She grabbed it in midair, crossing the distance between where she’d been and leaping into the tub in a mere two or three strides. She knocked over a display of decorative soaps and stupid seashells one of his exes had put there, but Nina didn’t pay a second’s attention to the crash. Nor to the glass still sticking out in shards in the window frame.

One, two, three, she kicked out the glass and leaned out the empty window space. She threw the metal tube outside. All of this happened so fast Ewan barely had time to register the scalding water on his bare chest. He stepped out of the spray with a hiss as Nina drew her stun weapon from the holster at her waist.

She aimed.

She fired.

From outside came a faint scream. A moment later, alarms began to bleat. Not the ones that announced a breach of the house itself; those should’ve gone off the second the window broke. Instead, the perimeter alarms went off. Whoever had managed to get past them the first time without setting them off wasn’t so lucky this time.

Steam had barely had time to fill the shower and spill over the top of the glass enclosure into the rest of the bathroom when Nina turned and stepped out of the bathtub. The tube on the ground was still hissing gas with an acrid stink. Inside the shower with the water blasting, the smog was dissipating enough to make him cough, but not enough to knock him down.

Grabbing up the tube, Nina took another of those amazing three-four step leaps and tossed that tube out the window as well. She snagged one of the tidily rolled towels from the basket between the tub and sink. Yanked open the shower enclosure, stepping inside just enough to thrust the plush cloth beneath the water.

Then she threw it over his head and face.

The next thing Ewan knew, he was on the floor of his bedroom, sopping wet, with a puddle ruining his fourteen-hundred-credit rug. Nina lay on her back beside him, her eyes closed. Chest rising and falling rapidly. When he sat up, she turned her head to look at him.

The whites of her eyes had gone threaded with crimson, but she was grinning. “Well. How’s that for a good start?”