The ride home in the transpo after the gala auction had been a million years long and colder than the surface of the butchered moon. Ewan had wisely not tried to make conversation with her, and although Nina had found herself with a dictionary’s worth of words to say to him, she’d been unable to form a single sentence because of how hard her jaw was clenched. They’d gone immediately to their separate rooms and she’d lain awake for so long it had become evident she wasn’t going to get to sleep.

So, pancakes.

“I’ve been craving them since we got back,” she said now without turning. She’d heard the soft pad of Ewan’s bare feet in the hallway outside the kitchen doorway a few minutes ago. Wisely, he hadn’t tried to come in or say anything to her. “They’re what my mother always made for me when I was a kid and stayed home sick from school. Middle of the night, it didn’t matter. She’d make me these pancakes, and no matter how bad I felt, I’d feel better.”

“Do you feel bad about something, Nina?”

She thought she’d toss out a flippant answer to keep him off guard, but instead her shoulders hunched. She slipped the last pancake off the griddle and onto the plate, then turned off the burner. She didn’t turn to face him. She didn’t say anything.

His body heat warmed her from behind, and she wanted to turn, to bury her face against the side of his neck. She wanted to kiss him, and the thought that she never would again punched hard enough to push the breath out of her. She waited for Ewan to touch her, but he didn’t, and she supposed she ought to thank the Onegod or some other deity, but she was simply too sad to be grateful for anything.

“Did you make enough for two?” Ewan asked.

A choked laugh slipped out of her, and she wiped at the single tear that had managed to escape her eye. “Yeah. Sure. Do you like pancakes?”

“I like your pancakes.”

“You . . . do?” She’d forgotten that she’d made them for him. She wasn’t going to say so, though. “Could you please set the table?”

It wasn’t fair how well they worked together. How easily. She finished cooking and set it out while Ewan found the plates and flatware. They took seats opposite each other. He poured her coffee from the carafe.

Nina was tired of trying to keep silent. “What made you decide not to keep a serving staff?”

“I guess I got used to it at the cabin.” Ewan dug his fork into the platter of pancakes. He served her first, surprising her, although if he noticed he didn’t say anything about it. “There’s something relaxing about being in a house that’s not full of people whose sole purpose is to do things for me that I can easily do for myself. I don’t even send my clothes out to be cleaned anymore.”

She paused with a bite halfway to her mouth. Her eyebrows rose. “No way.”

“Yes.” He grinned. “Imagine that. I’m actually self-sufficient.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Once, his bare toes nudged hers beneath the table, but he moved them so quickly she didn’t have time to react. He dragged a bite of pancake through the rich, thick syrup and chewed it slowly.

“You should have told me,” Nina said finally, when she could no longer bear the burdensome quiet.

Ewan paused, then licked the sweetness from his lips. “I thought it would be a surprise.”

“A puppy is a surprise. Someone jumping out of a birthday cake? Surprise. What you did to me,” Nina said, “was selfish, and it’s not the first time you’ve been that way.”

He frowned. “That’s unfair.”

Her temper flew out of her like bats from a cave. Darkness against the moon. Nina got to her feet. Pacing. Fists clenching. She whirled on him.

“You lied to me! For weeks and weeks in that cabin. You had every chance to tell me the truth about your involvement with the enhancement tech. How easily you could have offered the upgrades, because you were the one who’d programmed them in the first place. What you did was worse than keeping the tech itself a secret, Ewan, because you kept it . . . from me. This huge, big secret, and you kept it from me.” She paused to catch a breath, expecting him to interrupt her in self-defense, but Ewan remained silent. “Now, you’ve done it again. Kept something from me that so easily could have been shared. Why didn’t you just tell me what you were going to announce at the party? How could you take me there, knowing what you were going to say, and not give me some kind of warning?”

“Because I needed to be sure it was all going to be put into place!” Ewan shouted loud enough to set her back a step. “Without Katrinka Dev’s support for this initiative, I knew it would never get off the ground. I was still persuading her right up until I gave that speech. She could have changed her mind at any minute. You don’t understand what it takes to change laws, Nina. You need people like Katrinka, or they don’t have a chance.”

Dev. That was the woman’s last name, and the bitch of it was, Nina knew she’d forgotten it at least once already.

The public opinion about the enhanced was that they were reset after every job, their memories completely wiped, but the truth was that after her full recovery and release into the private sector, Nina had only been reset twice. In her experience, the rich and powerful usually felt they were too far above the law to worry about her sharing their secrets. She’d never cared about losing any of those memories, because it had never mattered to her what any of them had done or whether or not she could remember it.

She cared very much about the stars going out, one by one.

“The first time I woke up with memories missing, I was in a hospital. There’s no telling if my partial amnesia would have happened anyway from my injuries, and to be honest, I didn’t really notice much of it until later, when they started testing me. So I might have lost them before that. But they did target specific things. Mostly memories of how I ended up there in the first place. Probably so I couldn’t remember that I’d been sent to do something illegal, that’s what I always thought. They wanted to be sure I couldn’t come back and sue them for killing me.” Nina hesitated, hating the way her voice threatened to crack. “Later, they tested the tech by deliberately targeting specific sections of memory. Once it was what I’d had for breakfast just an hour or so before. Do you know how that felt, Ewan, to try and try to remember something so simple, and not be able to?”

“I can’t imagine it.” Ewan got to his feet and stepped toward her, one hand out as though to touch her. At the last second, he stopped.

His clear hesitation slid another blade into her already stabbed heart.

She shook her head. “No. You can’t begin to. It was horrifying. Degrading. More than that, it was embarrassing in a way I can’t describe to you. Imagine reaching for something you know you should be able to grab, and it isn’t that it keeps slipping out of your fingers. It’s simply not there. Maybe it was never there. Maybe you’ve only been fooling yourself. When they took away the memories, Ewan, they stole pieces of our self-confidence.”

“I never wanted that for anyone.”

“I know you didn’t,” she said. “I know that’s why you erased the records to hide the tech. I know that’s why you worked so hard to make it illegal. I even understand why you didn’t tell me at first, why you kept it a secret. But how could you let me love you, knowing I didn’t know the truth? How could you do that to me?”

He crossed the room to her in a few long strides. She tensed, her reaction automatic. He should know better than to grab her unexpectedly. What she’d done to poor, twitchy Jordie Dev at the party tonight should have reminded him, if nothing else did.

She did not expect him to drop to his knees on the floor in front of her. It wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted him to yell at her. To fight. To keep her angry so she could stop wanting him.

“Get up,” Nina said in a choked voice. “Don’t do this.”

“It would have been better if you’d forgotten me,” Ewan said, head bowed, shoulders hunched. “I could live with myself if I knew you just didn’t remember me, Nina. But I can’t live this way, knowing you do recognize me, and that you hate me.”

Her fingers threaded through his thick dark hair. Her anger fled, leaving her empty, room to be filled with another rush of emotions. Swirling, biting, stabbing at her, she could barely distinguish one from the other.

“Oh, no, baby. No. I don’t hate you. How could I ever hate you?”

It was the truth. She was as much a liar as he’d ever been for telling herself otherwise. She tugged his head backward so she could see his face. His agonized expression tore at her. When his mouth twisted at the way she pulled his hair, Nina couldn’t stop herself from stroking her fingers over his mouth. Ewan’s lips parted at the touch. She slipped her thumb inside the wet cavern, pressing lightly on his teeth.

“I don’t hate you,” she said. “I want to, but I can’t. I love you, and I don’t want to do that, either, but I can’t seem to stop.”

He was on his feet in the moment after that, scooping her into his arms so suddenly that she clung to his neck and let out a squawk of surprise. He was taller than she was, but she had so much muscle that she thought he would stagger beneath her weight. He didn’t, not for a moment, as he carried her through the doorway and down the hall to the living room, where he settled her on the couch and covered her with his body as he kissed her. Long, slow, and deliberate swipes of his tongue soon had her desperate for more. When he moved down her body though, to push at the hem of her nightshirt, Nina stopped him.

“No. The last time you did this, we never finished,” she breathed.

Ewan shook his head, eyes aglow and his mouth glistening from their kisses. “You did.”

“I want you inside me,” Nina told him. “Now.”

Still, he hesitated, until with a small growl, she reached between them to stroke his thickening cock through the soft material of his pajama bottoms. When she pushed the waistband over his hips, Ewan gave in, helping her get him naked as she shucked off her panties. He slid his length inside her within a matter of seconds.

“Oh, yes. That, right there,” Nina murmured as he filled her. She arched, tipping her hips to take him deeper, offering him her throat so he could nibble.

She ran her hands up his sides, letting herself finally give in to the impulses to touch him that she’d been trying so hard to resist. Over his back, the muscles working as he thrust inside her. Down to his fit, firm ass. She grabbed a double handful of that sweetness, then let her nails scratch upward to the dimples at the base of his spine. Then up Ewan’s sides, pinching inch by inch until he shuddered and his movements became ragged.

“I love that,” he said into her ear. “More, please.”

Nina lost herself in the joy of this. It bubbled out of her in laughing gasps as she moved beneath him. She pinched harder and took his groan into her mouth with a kiss. She sucked his tongue, drawing it gently between her teeth and nipping at the last second. His cock got rock hard inside her, and all of this sent a surge of desire spiraling through her so tight, so deep, that she tipped over into climax with a startled cry.

Ewan joined her a moment after that, their bodies moving frantically together until he eased the pace and dipped his face into the hollow of her shoulder. He rested his weight on her for a moment before pushing up on his hands. Their bodies were still joined. He leaned to kiss her lightly.

“I love you, Nina. And I swear to you, I’m going to do whatever I can to make everything right between us. I promise you that. No more hiding things from you,” Ewan said. “I know you deserve better than that. I should never have tried to decide what was best for you. Clearly, I’m a hyper chump.”

In the aftermath of the sex, she ought to have felt languid and replete, at ease. And she did . . . to an extent. She also felt scourged and barren and emptied, as though the surge of entangled passions had cleaned her out.

This wasn’t the time to say “I told you so,” and Nina allowed her kiss to answer him, instead. She toyed with his tongue for a few seconds, her fingers threading once more through his thicket of dark hair. She pulled him down on top of her again, wriggling until they both settled into a tangled, if slightly uncomfortable, pile on the couch. She didn’t want to speak. She wanted to sleep.

“Nina . . .”

“Hush,” she told him with a kiss to his temple, her eyes closed. Her arms around him. Holding him close. She snuggled against him, ignoring the awkwardness of their position.

This was where she belonged.

* * *

Ewan woke alone again, this time on the couch with an indent from the cushion on his cheek. He stretched, thinking of the night before, then sat up abruptly. Nina wasn’t in the living room, nor could he hear her clattering in the kitchen. He tried to judge what time it was by the light slanting through the front windows, but wasn’t able to.

Scratching his head and rubbing at the sleep in his eyes, he went upstairs to the master bathroom to run the shower hot, hoping to ease the stiffness from his muscles. It helped a little, and by the time he got out, his head was clearer, too. He dressed quickly in sweatpants, thinking he’d get in a workout. His comm pinged as he tugged on a T-shirt, and, thinking it might be Nina, Ewan lifted it. Katrinka had sent him a series of messages Ewan wasn’t sure he wanted to answer, but he lifted the comm to thumb the screen awake. As he did, the comm pinged again, this time with a viddycall.

“Katrinka,” he said before she could say a word. “Listen. About last night . . .”

Katrinka shook her head to silence him. “Last night was a debacle, Ewan.”

“I can’t quite deny that.” He yawned broadly and scratched at his head again. “I can’t apologize for her, Katrinka, that’s not my place.”

“I’m not asking you to apologize for her. Far be it from me to wax caustic about my own offspring,” Katrinka said lightly, “but my son has not been the easiest child to raise. Whatever she did to him, I’m sure he did something to deserve it. He’s so deep into the candy that he’s become an obnoxious little twit, and he wasn’t a prize to deal with before that.”

“He’s got a brilliance to him that will take him far, if he can get it under control,” Ewan countered, not wanting to agree with her on the subject of her child’s annoying personality.

Katrinka rolled her eyes and waved a hand. She set down her comm so she could walk as she spoke, her hands waving and the fringed edges of her tunic fluttering as she paced. “The facts are, if you want to get anyone behind you on this issue, we can’t have your girlfriend punching people out in the middle of the fundraisers. It’s bad for business.”

“I also can’t deny that,” Ewan said.

“The initial approval reports were fantastic. I mean, listen, everyone at that party last night was there because they’d supported the original act, of course, but also because they were the ones I figured would have the easiest opinions to change.” Katrinka paused, then started pacing again. “Let’s face it, the enhanced soldiers have fallen out of the public eye, even with the dustup you experienced recently. Nobody’s been thinking much about them at all. Of course, punching my kid is going to turn some gazes back that way, and they won’t be the kindly sort.”

“Dustup?” Ewan gave a rueful chuckle. “Is that what you call repeated attempts on my life over a course of months?”

Katrinka twirled to face the comm screen. “Ewan, darling, you know as well as I, perhaps even better, how quickly public trends change. How easy it is to lose favor and attention. I’m not saying that the entire situation regarding the enhanced isn’t still viable, of course—”

“Good,” Ewan interrupted. “Because I intend to fully get behind the support of repealing that act as well as forwarding the integration and implementation of upgrades to the tech for those thirteen who are left. That’s going to require a huge change in public perceptions.”

“Well,” Katrinka said, “we can start with your girlfriend.”

* * *

Nina had paused outside Ewan’s bedroom doorway when she heard the sound of voices, one of them female. She wasn’t the sort to hover in doorways, but she did hear the term “girlfriend.” It gave her mixed feelings. One, a still giddy joy lingering from the night before. Two, another burst of pride and pleasure that someone other than Ewan was referring to her that way, that someone else had seen them as a couple. Finally, third, a slight wince at the term itself, which seemed somewhat ridiculous, all things considered, and a final small grimace at her taking pleasure at any of it in the first place.

Talk about a complicated mess of feelings.

She didn’t need to use enhanced hearing to notice when Ewan came to the door. She didn’t jump or look startled, but instead gave him a dry grin as he gestured for her to come inside. He held up the comm so she could see who he was talking to.

“Hi,” Nina said, conscious that she still wore her thin nightshirt and her hair was a mess. “Katrinka, I’m sorry about Jordie—”

“There are other things to worry about,” Katrinka said. Her face loomed in the screen as she frowned. “You need a total makeover.”

Nina gave Ewan a glance, but he shrugged with a grin and waved toward the comm. Nina looked at Katrinka. “For . . . what?”

“If you’re going to be the spokesperson for this movement, you certainly need to put on a pretty face. People like pretty things, Nina. Hyper fetching, as they say.”

Ewan said softly, “She’s more than pretty, Katrinka. Nina is beautiful.”

“How sweet, you’re so in love, it’s making me nauseous—thank goodness I haven’t bothered with breakfast yet,” Katrinka said with another wave of her hand. “But nobody else is in love with her. To most of them, Nina Bronson is a soldier, and that’s about the best thing you can say about her, which I don’t need to tell you, is not really the greatest thing.”

Nina frowned, with a glance at Ewan, who looked delicious in his workout gear, his hair still damp from the shower. “I am not ashamed that I was a soldier. I was never ashamed. I’m not a soldier anymore, though. You know that. I’m not allowed to be.”

“Of course you’re not. But you still are, to them,” Katrinka said. “So we’re going to make you something completely different.”

Nina didn’t answer her at first, then raised her brows. “What, exactly, are you going to make me?”

“A star,” Katrinka said.

Nina burst into laughter. Ewan put his arm around her waist, pulling her close to his side, and she leaned into him as naturally as if they’d never fallen away from each other. She shook her head.

“I don’t need to be a star, Katrinka.”

The other woman waved a finger. “Do you want to help Ewan overturn the Enhancement Repeal Act?”

“Of course.”

“Then we have to get public opinion behind you. Make people see that you’re more than a soldier or a bodyguard. We spent a long time convincing them that the tech inside your head was a curse. If you want the world to change its mind and think it’s a blessing, you’re going to have to make them want to change.” Katrinka looked at something offscreen. “I have to go. Ewan, I’ll ping you later.”

With that, she was gone. Ewan’s comm went dark. He set it on the nightstand and turned to Nina with his hands and his expression both open.

“No idea,” he said before she could comment.

Nina pressed her lips together for a moment, thinking about what Katrinka had been saying. “How did she know we were together?”

“Lucky guess?”

They stared at each other until she motioned for him to come toward her. He put his arms around her. She kissed him lightly, pulling away when he tried to deepen the embrace. She pressed her forehead to his, eyes closed.

“Are we doing this?” she asked him.

Ewan’s breath tickled her face before he moved to nuzzle the side of her neck. He spoke without hesitation. Solid, in a way she hadn’t known she needed him to be until she let out a sigh of relief.

“Yes. Absolutely. We are doing this. Together,” he said. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. Oh, but wait. First I have to do something.”

She laughed, trying to grab him as he walked away from her. “No, no . . . come back here.”

“In a minute.” He tapped something into his comm, looking up at her for a second with a secretive smile on his face.

Her comm pinged from down the hall. Nina’s eyebrows raised. “Did you just ping me?”

“Yes.”

“Something you couldn’t just . . . tell me?”

“Go see,” Ewan said.

With a backward glance at him, Nina went to her room to read the message. Taking the comm, she went back to his room to find him waiting for her stretched out on his bed, hands linked behind his head. He wore a giant grin and nothing else.

“You fired me?” she asked, incredulous.

“Yep.”

Nina put her comm on the nightstand and pulled off her nightshirt. She straddled him. “You. Fired. Me.”

“Yes. Conflict of interest,” Ewan told her, his words trailing into a shivery sigh when she gripped his sides. “Didn’t want you to be . . . compromised . . .”

“I love you,” Nina said, and set about devouring him.