Nina hadn’t said a single word to Ewan on the way home. She’d never imagined herself the sort of woman who’d use cold silence as a weapon, but the truth was she couldn’t find anything to say to him that wouldn’t come out scathing. Angry. Bitter. Disgusted.

Wounded.

She wasn’t going to show him any of that, not a single hint of it, because underlying the entire tangled pile of hateful emotions was the knowledge that she’d been a fool. Clearly, her recently recovered ability to experience intense emotions meant she’d been feeling too hard, too much, too fiercely, and it had led her astray. She’d been on the verge of letting herself give in to the risky, unexpected, and loathsome hope that she could trust him again. That something was still possible between them, if only they could figure out how to make it work. She’d been wrong about him. Again.

“Hey,” he said now as she went on ahead of him into the house. “Nina. Wait.”

“It’s late,” she replied.

“Nina.” This time, the warning tone in his voice stopped her.

She had a foot on the staircase, a mere few feet inside the front door. The first time she’d come to work for Ewan, he’d been living at a vast estate, Woodhaven. After that, they’d spent a few idyllic weeks hiding out in his family’s mountain cabin, just the two of them. Even though they’d fled there to keep him safe from the multiple attacks on his life, it had still been the best few weeks of her life. At least until the end.

This new house was not a mountain cabin, but it wasn’t Woodhaven, either. It was modest in comparison. The sort of home she’d always imagined herself living in with a family—at least before she’d died and come back with a bunch of gear in her head that had made all of that impossible. She hadn’t asked Ewan why he’d brought her to this smaller and cozier house. She didn’t want him to tell her it was because he’d somehow guessed it was the kind of house she’d always dreamed of living in.

“Ewan,” she answered without facing him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. How many times do I have to say it before you’ll give me another chance?”

Without replying, she went up the stairs and down the hall into her bedroom. He followed, but she’d expected him to. She could have slammed the door behind her. Locked him out. She could have avoided this confrontation the way she’d been ignoring all of his efforts at winning her back since she’d arrived, but she was tired of doing that. She wanted this confrontation, right here and now. If they were going to battle, she wanted to get it over with. Maybe then she could leave without feeling as though she’d need to look back. Without regret.

Ewan came through the doorway. “Don’t walk away from me!”

“Why? Because you’re my boss?” She swiped at the falling strands of her hair, irritated with this ostentatious style that had taken hours to put up and would probably take as long to pull down. She kicked off her shoes, curling her toes in relief at the release of pressure. Thousands of years of advances in women’s fashion, and high heels still pinched. “How dare I talk back to you, is that it?”

Ewan’s voice held a sneer. “Like that ever mattered to you before? How about because it’s rude, that’s why. And I’m tired of it.”

“Much better. That sickly sweet pleading was starting to work on all my nerves, especially the artificial ones.” She grinned, a hard baring of her teeth.

It was a deliberate zing at him and found its mark. Ewan scowled. It didn’t make him ugly, that anger. If anything, the blaze in his eyes and the set of his jaw only made him ever more beautiful to her. He was gorgeous when he looked fierce, and she despised herself for thinking so.

Ewan ran a hand through his hair, rumpling it. The familiar gesture stung her worse than any words could have. It reminded her too strongly of how close they’d been, and how far apart they were now.

Finally, Ewan said in a voice he clearly struggled to keep calm, “thank you for coming with me tonight.”

“It’s my job, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but . . .”

She waited for him to continue, but he said nothing. Nina put her hands on her hips, aware of how the motion dented the fabric around her body. She wore form-fitting uniforms all the time, but this was different. The inferno of Ewan’s gaze told her that, even if she hadn’t been able to feel it by the cling of the material.

She tilted her head and jutted a hip to emphasize her curves. His gaze grew scorching. Nina let a tiny, smug smile quirk the corner of her mouth. “You were jealous.”

“Yes.”

“Why?” It was the answer she’d expected, yet hearing it didn’t make her feel triumphant. Nina straightened her shoulders, aware of how that would direct his attention to her body and away from her face. She didn’t want him to see any hint of her real feelings. If she could barely control them, the least she could do was try to hide them.

“Because I don’t want you talking to other men,” Ewan said. “Especially not right in front of me.”

Al was no threat to him, and Nina could have cleared up that little fact with a brief explanation. She frowned, instead, both at his tone and his words, but most of all, the implication behind them. “First of all, you might own my time and even my attention, but you don’t own me and you never have.”

“I know that. I’m not trying to own you, Nina.” Ewan shook his head, his hands clenched at his sides.

“You could have,” she blurted and shut herself down before her cracking voice could betray her emotions.

A tempest raged inside her, one she was sorry she’d longed for. She breathed through parted lips, noticing how longingly he gazed at her mouth. The pain of not kissing him, not reaching for him, felt real. Physical. It was an agony she once thought she would welcome. The days when nothing could rattle her, when nothing mattered more than a moment or so, had gone, and Nina was helpless against the onslaught of her emotional upheaval. She wasn’t used to being helpless.

She loathed it.

Ewan’s mouth opened, then closed. He scowled. The expression of bleak despair in his eyes threatened to tear her apart, but she couldn’t make herself look away.

“I don’t know what else I can do, Nina. I’ve tried everything I know. I’ve never had to, before. Try, I mean. Please, please, let me know what I can do to fix this.”

She tugged at the curls pinned too close to her head and breathed a sigh when they came down more easily than anticipated. She tossed the pins on top of the dresser as she raked through the tangles, then turned to face him. She crossed her arms over her chest and concentrated on her breathing.

“That’s the problem, Ewan. I don’t think there’s anything you can do.”

Nina had cried from anger or grief, from pain both physical and mental. She’d never believed tears were a sign of weakness, yet she refused to let them fall now. Not because she was still afraid of Ewan seeing how much he’d affected her, but because she knew that it didn’t matter how much she revealed to him. No matter how open she made herself, how vulnerable, she could never allow him to get close enough to her again to hurt her.

“I trusted you,” she said at last around the rough rasp in her throat.

This was love, she thought at the sight of Ewan’s bleak face and the bald, relentless torment in his gaze. Wanting someone even when they’d betrayed you. Aching for a kiss or an embrace, not for the physical gratification, which could be satisfied by almost any random stranger, but for the comfort of knowing your lover would protect you . . . even when you were the strong one. Perhaps especially then.

“I believed in you, Ewan. I gave you everything, and you took it, but everything you gave me . . . was a lie.”

He groaned and put the heels of his hands to his eyes. “I know. I know I messed up, Nina. I know I should have been honest with you, but I . . .”

“You what?” she challenged, when he didn’t continue. When he still didn’t speak, she strode across the room to snag his hand away from his face so he was forced to look at her. “You what, Ewan? You thought I’d never find out? You thought it wouldn’t matter to me? You knew they fitted me with tech that would need upgrades, and you knew you were the one who’d blocked all legal research and implementation of that tech. You also knew that you had all the upgrades any of us would ever need, but you were sitting on the specs. So please, convince me you had a good reason to keep all of that from me. Go ahead and tell me why you thought it could ever be a good idea for that to be a secret.”

He shook his head. Silent. Tears brimmed in his hazel eyes and he blinked hard, dashing them away. She wanted to take a merciless satisfaction in knowing she’d made him cry the way she was trying so hard not to, but she couldn’t. Even now, seeing his suffering, she wanted to take it away from him.

“I knew you’d hate me, once you knew,” Ewan told her.

She didn’t hate him and probably never would. “That’s the worst part of it, isn’t it? Knowing we’d found something brilliant and watching it burn to ash.”

Ewan let out a strangled noise. “You can leave, if you want. I’ll terminate the contract.”

Of course he would. She could walk out of here without a second glance. “I could have done that the second I saw it was you, and sued you for breach of contract, hiring me under false circumstances. I could have caused a scandal. It would have cost you a lot more than you paid me.”

“You didn’t.” He scrubbed at his face, eyes still red, but his expression hopeful.

Nina sighed and shook her head. “No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

The answer to that was complicated, and it was late. She was too exhausted to think about it right now, or to make sense of it. Anything that came out of her mouth would be garbled and nonsensical, unless she pushed her body to fight off the tiredness. The tech was meant to keep her going in extreme circumstances, and this hardly counted as that.

“It’s late.” Her jaw cracked with a yawn. “I really need to go to bed. We can talk about it in the morning.”

“Why didn’t you immediately terminate the contract, Nina?”

The tone of his voice, while vaguely threatening, wasn’t scary. Still, the slant of his mouth and his clenching fists, the low fury in his voice, all pushed away her fatigue. Her heart rate stepped up. Her breathing quickened. Ewan Donahue got Nina’s motor revving, and it had nothing to do with her enhancements.

“Because I’m a professional,” she lied. If anything, her choice to stay had been entirely amateur.

They stared at each other.

“You know what? This was a mistake.” Ewan shook his head, tossing his hands outward as though trying to push her away. “I thought if I brought you here, if I showed you that I was sorry—”

“That what? You could bend me over and ravish me, and all would be forgiven? Just have a little bit of the old in-out, in-out? You think making me come gives you some kind of power over me?” She demonstrated with a hand gesture far more rude than walking away had been. She crossed the room to him, standing so close she could feel the whisper of his breath on her skin, although they weren’t touching. “Is that what you want? To control me?”

Ewan didn’t answer.

Spurred on by inclinations she didn’t want to stop and explore, Nina slid her hands up the front of Ewan’s tux jacket. Her fingers tightened in the material. She tugged. He moved. Her lips parted as he leaned closer. Her tongue flicked his mouth.

She bit him.

Hard, but swiftly, her teeth snipping his lower lip. She didn’t draw blood, but the sharp intake of his breath showed so clearly that she’d hurt him. Still, she didn’t kiss him. She let her mouth hover over his. Waiting.

Ewan groaned something that sounded like her name. Like a plea. The sound of it hit someplace inside her, somewhere deep. Nina could run faster, harder, longer than normal people. She could go without sleep, without food, endure tortures that would make someone else pass out.

She could control her body in a hundred enhanced ways, but she could not stop herself from giving in to the urge to kiss Ewan.

Nina’s mouth slid over his in a slow, slick glide. His tongue stroked hers. She shuddered, her nipples tightening against the smooth fabric of the dress he’d bought her. Her breasts, bare beneath the clinging material, ached for his touch.

“This onedamned red dress,” she muttered into his mouth. “I never should have let you talk me into wearing it.”

His hands moved up and over her hips to curve around her ribs, right below her breasts. “Why? You look amazing in it.”

“That’s exactly why. You can’t resist me.” She growled, rasping, when his palms moved upward to cup her through the dress’s thin material.

Ewan flicked his thumbs over her nipples. “I don’t want to resist you.”

He pulled her closer so his erection pressed against her through his tuxedo pants. When he tried to kiss her mouth, she turned her face and gave him her cheek. He countered with a low, wicked chuckle and ran his lips over the curve of her jaw and down to her throat, nibbling. Each tiny nip sent arcs of electric arousal through her.

“Resist me, Ewan.”

His mouth traced the curves of her breasts bared by the gown’s scooped neckline, his reply muffled. “ . . . No.”

Nina gasped out a curse when his lips captured her nipple through the fabric. With a swift, smooth motion she was behind him with his wrist in her fist and his arm twisted. She pressed herself against his back, not pushing hard enough to break his bones, but hard enough to get him to move forward a few hesitant steps toward the bed he’d bought for her.

She let him go just as they both reached it. Ewan bent forward, hands flat on the soft comforter. Nina was still behind him, her hands on his hips. Her crotch nudged his ass as Ewan looked at her over his shoulder. She’d thought he might be smiling. Smug. Instead, his gaze on hers was open and blazing. Without a word, he rolled onto his back, shifting easily so that she ended up standing between his legs at the side of the bed.

“I’m not resisting you,” Ewan said and put his hands up as though she were holding a gun on him.

It was not about the heat flaring between them. She’d gone without sex for longer than this. It was not about lust.

Nina loved this man more than she thought she’d ever be capable of loving anyone. She was the one who could not resist. She was the one who did not want to.

The dress opened down the front with a simple slide of her fingertips along the hidden seam. She tossed it to the side and stood before him wearing only the sheer red lace panties that she’d found waiting for her in the drawer earlier today when he’d told her she’d be accompanying him to the party. No stockings. No bra. Only the transparent crimson panties she knew he’d been imagining her wearing every time he looked at her.

Ewan’s fingers curled, but he lowered his hands and gripped the comforter on either side of his hips instead of reaching for her. His eyes never left hers. His tongue swept along his lower lip, leaving his mouth open, wet and inviting.

“I’m not resisting you,” he repeated in a lower voice this time. Rough, harsh, and full of longing. “Do whatever you want.”

Nina straddled him, her breath hitching as her heart pounded fast and hard. She didn’t try to slow it the way she would have while fighting. She wanted to endure this throbbing ache in her chest, the base of her throat, her wrists. Between her thighs. She wanted it to overwhelm her.

Ewan was rigid beneath her as she rocked her body against his. Nina ran a hand up the front of his tux. Her fingers curled around his throat. Ewan tilted his head back a little to give her complete access, still keeping his gaze locked to hers.

“If I want to hurt you?” she whispered.

“Even that.”

Instead of gripping his throat, she yanked open his bow tie. Whipped it free of his shirt. She bent to undo the buttons, and when they blocked her, she tore his shirt open down the front. Her nails dug into his chest beneath, lightly at first. Then harder.

“Maybe especially that,” Nina said, watching his pupils dilate. Feeling his cock thicken as his hips nudged upward, pushing his hardness against her, she couldn’t hold back her sighing groan of pleasure. “Oh. . . .”

He rolled then, taking her with him and moving them both on the bed so he was on top of her. She didn’t turn her face this time when he kissed her. She gave him her open mouth, her tongue, the clash of her teeth. Her nails dug into the spare flesh of his belly. The crisp dark hairs there brushed her knuckles.

She arched under him as he dragged his mouth from hers and found her neck. The slope of her breasts. Then, moving lower, Ewan took her nipple between his lips and sucked gently until she gave a low cry and dug her fingers into him again.

He lifted his head to look into her eyes. “I can’t resist you, Nina, I don’t want to, and I’m not going to. I want to taste you, everywhere.”

“Oh yes, that. Now. But I need you naked first.”

She wriggled out of her skimpy panties easily enough. They moved together to get him out of his clothes, a struggle compared to how little effort it had taken for her to strip down for him. She started laughing first, and he joined soon after until they were both chortling as they worked him free of the tuxedo.

It felt so good to laugh with him.

Better, almost, than the heat of his lips and tongue returning to her skin, better than the stroke of his fingers between her thighs and his touch on her through the lacy panties. Even if her guffaws did choke into a series of hitching breaths as her throat closed and scalding tears stung her eyes at the sudden rushing force of her emotions.

If she let herself be swept away now, she wouldn’t recover. She would drown in her love for him, in her grief. Her fury would shred them both, unrecoverable.

Nina focused instead on the physical pleasure. Ewan’s touch. The weight of him as he lowered his full nakedness onto her. His breath, scented with red wine. She lost herself in the taste of his kisses and the flavor of his skin when she moved her mouth over his chest.

Nina shifted, and Ewan slid inside her without warning. Both let out a startled cry. He tried to pull out, but she hooked her ankles over his calves, holding him there.

“No,” she said. “I want you.”

“You have me,” Ewan said into her ear as he began to thrust.

She muttered an invective at the rush of ecstasy coursing through her when he moved. Then an order, also muttered, for him to hush, and when he seemed like he meant to talk again, she covered his mouth with her hand. His eyes looked amused over the rim of her palm, but he went quiet except for the low groan when she used her heels on his ass to get him moving harder. Faster.

“Deeper,” Nina said.

She wanted to block out everything else and succumb to this desire. If she could run faster, jump higher, in this post-enhancement body she could also climax with less effort—and with Ewan, she already had discovered her capacity for arousal was more than it had been with anyone else.

He slowed. Nina protested, but Ewan kept his pace steady and even. He rolled his hips to press against her where she needed it the most. When she urged him again, he shook his head and kept the same smooth, slow strokes.

It was exactly what she needed to get her there, and how could she keep hating him for knowing so well how to bring her pleasure? It made her helpless against the rush and throb of it all through her. Nina didn’t want to refuse it. Orgasm built and let her block out all the rest; it made her greedy and selfish, but she didn’t care. She gave up to all the sensations, but she closed her eyes and would not look at him as she shook with the tremors of her climax. She bit back his name.

She also bit him, sinking her teeth into the closest place she could reach. The skin of his upper bicep, slick and salty with sweat, gave beneath the pressure of her mouth. Ewan shouted hoarsely, at last moving faster. The harder she bit, the deeper he thrust inside her. He buried his face against the side of her neck. Her arms went around him, pulling him closer. She bit him with ever increasing fierceness until he cried her name and shuddered. Spent, he fell forward onto her, and Nina blinked away another round of tears, despising herself for them but as helpless against them as she’d been against the orgasm.

Only half a minute passed before Ewan shifted to keep his weight off her. He didn’t let go of her, though. He kissed her shoulder. His breathing softened and slowed. He would fall asleep soon, and she didn’t want him to do it in this bed, next to her.

“In the hospital,” she said finally, loud enough to rouse him out of dozing, “I learned to focus on my body. It was mostly pain, then, of course. But I figured out if I was able to concentrate on the actual, real physical sensations I was experiencing, it helped.”

“Helped what?”

She cleared her throat, staring at the ceiling. “Helped me to keep from thinking too much. Stopped me from feeling. And then eventually, I couldn’t feel at all.”

Ewan tensed. He pushed up on an elbow to look down at her. “I see.”

“You don’t,” she told him without looking at him. “I don’t think you can. You can’t understand, Ewan, what it’s like to reach so hard for something and have it simply not be there. To have blank spots in your memories. You can’t understand how it feels to know that anyone could, at any time, strip you of your past.”

“You feel now,” he said in a low voice. “I know you do. It came back to you.”

Nina shook her head. “At what cost? You can’t answer that, because you don’t know.”

“I’ve fought hard to make it so that not just anyone can do anything like that to you. At the very least, that it would be done only with your consent ahead of time, and in a limited framework . . . it’s not much better, I know that.” He coughed lightly. “But I tried to make it the best it could be.”

She shook her head. “You would think that knowing you could lose your memories would make you more likely to hold onto them as much as you could. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes. I think so.”

Nina kept her gaze on the ceiling, concentrating on keeping her voice steady. “But you don’t, really. You learn tricks, ways to control what you think about so that . . . well, so that sometimes, you simply don’t have the memories to begin with. Or if you do, they’re nothing you care about losing. You focus on the things your body is doing. Your mind holds onto that, the physical part of it. Not whatever you’re feeling about it. That way, if you lose those memories, what have you forgotten, really? A series of sensations, not emotions. Because they’re so linked. Memories and feelings. It’s hard to separate them.”

He didn’t say anything this time. His body tensed next to hers, and in the next moment there was a distance between them. Chill air made her shiver, and she didn’t counter it by raising her temperature. She let herself be cold.

“Is that . . . what you were doing now? With me?” Ewan asked her.

She looked at him then. “Yes.”

He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His shoulders hunched for a moment before he straightened them. “I see.”

This time, she thought he might.

She waited for his anger or frustration. For accusations. All she got from him was a small sigh that barely moved him, as though the breath he’d taken in had stayed locked deep in his lungs.

“Why?”

“You know why,” she told him.