Ewan hadn’t planned for anything beyond the trip to the lab today, but he also didn’t want to go right home after. His estate at Woodhaven had been vast, outfitted with every entertainment option he could think of, from the media room to the large gardens. In contrast, the modest home he’d moved into, while updated with every possible convenience tech, still sometimes felt too small. He’d thought it would be cozy with Nina staying there, but he realized now he’d been trying too hard to recreate those idyllic weeks at the cabin.

Nothing would ever bring those times back.

It would never be the same as it had been when they’d been falling in love, even if she took him to bed a thousand times. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye without turning his face in her direction. Nina had made it clear that the sex had been solely physical. A thing that had happened, meaning nothing. Her exact words.

He still hadn’t told her that he had the terminated contract signed and waiting to be sent off to ProtectCorps. She could quit if she wanted to, but she was still here. That had to mean something, even if the sex hadn’t.

After stopping so they could pick up some takeout food, the transpo had arrived at their destination—a squat, nondescript building. It announced the address in its flat, metallic voice, along with an admonition about the legalities and risks associated with being dropped off in this place. Ewan pressed his thumb to the control pad to unlock the doors, but the transpo wouldn’t let them out until Nina had done so, too, and only after they’d both read the waiver scrolling up on the screen.

She gave him a curious glance. “Safety measures, wow. Not what I expected.”

“I should have asked you first,” Ewan said at her hesitation. “We don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I wasn’t sure how you’d feel about it.”

“Whither thou goest.” Nina shook her head but said no more than that.

She pressed her thumb to the control pad, and the doors opened with a whoosh. She followed him out of the transpo and into the stark concrete entryway. Hands on her hips, she looked around at the barren site, then back at him with a wide grin. “Are you kidding me?”

In the past two decades, most zoos and aquariums had been privatized due to public backlash against the keeping of animals for entertainment. It meant that any place housing animals had to have extra security, all visitors had to make an appointment to get in, and it was so expensive that most people had to settle for virtual viewings, instead. Despite his recent work with conservation, preservation, and the return of previously almost-extinct species to native habitats, Ewan himself had never been to the NorthAm Aquacenter.

The Aquacenter had originally been built as an airplane hangar to house bomber jets. Christophe Hale, a man so rich he made Ewan seem like a pauper, had purchased the abandoned facility and turned it into a private aquarium full of exotic fish, including many species that had been on the verge of extinction. Hale had completed the aquarium over a course of a single year and stocked it with more live animals than had ever been housed in any facility in history, public or private.

“My sister hated this place, to be honest,” Ewan told Nina. “She loved animals, but she despised Christophe Hale because he insisted that animals were better off living in captivity, where they could be monitored and preserved, than in the wild.”

“I’m not someone who believes animals are being mistreated simply because they’re not in their natural environment, even if I did give you a hard time about the spiders,” Nina told him. “If anything, I’m well aware that none of these animals would still be alive at all if they hadn’t been born in this facility.”

“They have dolphins here,” he told her.

Nina smiled. “I know.”

“Have you ever seen a live dolphin?” Ewan asked as he and Nina waited for their thumbprints to open the Aquacenter’s first set of doors.

She shook her head. “No. I did a virtual dive once. It was glitchy and ran a loop over and over. Gave me vertigo, and I had to cut out early. They wouldn’t give me a refund, either. You?”

“No.”

“A first for you,” she murmured with a sideways glance at him. “And you’re sharing it with me.”

“Can’t think of anyone else I’d rather share it with,” he said and waited for her to give him a snarky comment about how sappy he was being.

She didn’t.

One of Hale’s infamous eccentricities had been his deep-seated but warring beliefs that animals were better off in captivity, even though they were also better off without any type of human interaction beyond observance. The dolphins here wouldn’t be trained to do tricks for food treats. In order to keep human interaction away from the animals, Hale had designed all the habitats to be cared for entirely by artificial tech, so the tour of the facility was self-guided. The two of them had to sign in to the flat-screen at the front doors, then wait in a stark lobby for a complete security scan. Nina laughed lightly under her breath.

“Guess it’s a good thing I haven’t been wearing my harness,” she said as the scan beeped a warning about a concealed weapon. She placed the knife from her boot into a holding locker with a shrug. The scan beeped again. With a sigh and a chuckle, Nina removed two more hidden knives and placed them in the locker.

This time, the scan came back clear. The next set of doors opened. Once inside, cool blue lighting and the soft noise of ocean waves greeted them, along with a series of lighted guidelines projected on the bare wall in front of them.

“More safety precautions,” Nina said aloud as the words grew brighter, then dimmed to reveal the next set of instructions. Her eyebrows rose as she looked at Ewan. “Do they really have to warn people not to put their hands in the shark tanks?”

Her giddy tone and the light in her eyes lifted Ewan’s heart, making him glad he’d brought her here. “Apparently.”

She laughed again, her eyes alight as she studied the words on the wall, then turned to him with a grin. Nina reached for his hand and linked her fingers through his, squeezing. The touch lasted only a few seconds, long enough to send Ewan’s heart thudding faster in the cage of his ribs. Nina would hear it and know how she’d affected him, but he didn’t try to calm himself. He wanted her to notice.

He wanted her, period.

The first room they entered contained a low saltwater pool splashing with artificial waves. Guests could lean over the edge of a curving platform to study the fish, crabs, and other sea life. More softly glowing holographic signs assured them that they could feel free to touch the animals, but that the Aquacenter wasn’t responsible for pinched fingers.

Nina rested her arms on the rim of the platform for a moment, then let her fingers trail in the water. The fish swarmed, nibbling at her fingertips but swimming quickly away. She looked at him.

“I guess Hale didn’t think crabs and stingrays were as important to keep away from people as some other kinds of animals,” she said.

Ewan read the lighted words projected into the air above the water. “This habitat looks as though it were altered a little after his death. Maybe someone else authorized the changes.”

“Do you ever think about that when you decide what to do with the Katie Foundation?” Nina glanced at him. “I mean, do you make sure that you’d do what she would do?”

“I try to. It’s hard to say what my sister would have done, unless she’d actually done it. But I try.”

“Her memory is important to you,” Nina said.

It was a sentiment that shouldn’t have needed to be stated aloud, but he nodded. “Yes.”

“You’ve done a lot in her name,” she added.

He hesitated before answering, wondering if she meant the enhancement tech, then decided it probably didn’t matter. “Yes.”

“You’re a man of firm convictions, Ewan Donahue. You know that?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I’m not sure everyone would agree with you on that one, but . . . thank you.”

Quietly, they both studied the ebb and flow of the artificial pool and its inhabitants. Hale hadn’t opted to pipe in music, so the only sounds were the splash of the waves and the softness of their breathing. Ewan let a small crab crawl over his hand before withdrawing it.

“This is amazing,” Nina said. “So beautiful.”

Ewan also leaned on the wall. “Watch out for sharks.”

“I’d punch a shark right in the nose,” Nina replied seriously. “No shark’s gonna mess with me!”

“Shh, don’t say that out loud here. The ghost of Christophe Hale will come after you,” Ewan warned through a chuckle at the thought of Nina fighting off a shark with her fists. He believed she could.

“Nobody else is here.” Nina looked around the room.

Ewan shrugged. “I bought all the appointments for today. I figured that way, we could take as much time as we wanted to and wouldn’t have to deal with anyone else.”

“Wow,” Nina answered with an impressed twist of her mouth. “That’s extravagant.”

“You can do anything when you have enough money,” Ewan said in a low voice.

Nina tilted her head at him, a faint smile on her lips. “Yes. Very true.”

She didn’t take his hand again as they walked through each exhibit, but that was all right. It was enough to walk beside her. To watch her face light with glee at the sight of the fish in their glass houses. To simply be with her, in the moment, enjoying this experience. Not fighting. Not angry. This was how it could have been all the time, if he’d only been honest with her from the start, he allowed himself to think briefly before shoving that idea aside.

When they’d finished with the shallow pool, they followed the tour through a corridor lined with rectangular tanks, each showing off a different species of aquarium fish that had once been popular as pets. Goldfish, betta, guppies. Schools of colored fish twisted and turned in mesmerizing patterns.

Nina paused in front of one tank. “My mother said that when she was a very little girl, you could go to carnivals and throw Ping-Pong balls into small glass bowls. If you did, you could win a goldfish and take it home.”

“I remember my mom telling me something similar. Crazy to think about that now, isn’t it? How different the world is, now?”

She glanced at him, her lips pursed. “That’s what the world does, Ewan. It changes all the time. Sometimes so fast you blink and it happened without you noticing.”

In the next room, Nina touched her fingertips to the thick, curving glass of the wall, behind which a pair of dolphins cavorted. The bigger one twisted, sending itself spiraling upward and out of sight. The smaller one blew a stream of bubbles and paused, floating, in front of the glass. “What do you suppose they think, when they look out here and see us?”

“The ones in that tank probably think we’re funny-looking dolphins.” He pointed to the softly glowing sign on the wall that explained how this particular set of dolphins had been raised as part of an experiment in psychology.

Nina leaned in to read it, glancing at him over her shoulder. “The experimenters built a house that could be flooded up to five feet in depth, allowing the dolphins to swim and interact with their human ‘roommates.’ The dolphins were spoken to as though they were children, treated as part of the family, and subsequently, trained to respond to human speech with their own language.”

She looked again into the tank where the graceful animals were now swimming in underwater barrel rolls. “Do you think they believe their parents abandoned them? Or did they move out on their own, like they went off to college or something? Do the experimenters visit?”

“They went to prison, I think. For unlawful animal experimentation. At any rate, I’m sure Hale banned them from coming here. They wouldn’t be able to get past security.” Ewan stepped closer to the glass to look inside it. One of the dolphins swam closer, its mouth opening in what looked like a grin.

“That seems cruel. They were taken away from their family. No wonder that one looks so sad.”

He’d never known her to be sentimental, but she wore it well. “I thought it looked like it was smiling.”

“You can smile when you’re sad.” Nina put a hand flat on the glass. “So beautiful.”

In the blue-green light, wavering and soft, Nina was the beautiful one. Her dark curls, tied at the nape of her neck, hung over one shoulder. Her smile curved. Her eyes, the color of excellent whiskey, gleamed as she looked at him.

“Why did you bring me here today, Ewan?”

He spoke without having to think, not even for a second. “Because I’ve spent plenty of time making sure your stomach is fed, but I haven’t done much to make sure anything else is satisfied. I thought you’d like this. It’s something not many people get to experience. I wanted to share it with you.”

“That might be one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said to me,” Nina told him after a few seconds. “One of the nicest things anyone’s ever done. Thank you, Ewan. That means a lot.”

Nina didn’t trust herself to say anything else to him, not without a hitch in her voice. She turned her attention back to the dolphins in their tank. “This is so much better than a virtual viewing.”

“You don’t have to stay,” Ewan said after a moment.

Nina didn’t answer at first, her gaze fixed on the dolphins now circling each other as though they were dancing. “I’m not ready to go yet.”

Ewan touched her shoulder so she’d look at him. “I didn’t mean the Aquacenter.”

“I know that.” She smiled a little, wishing all of this didn’t have to be so hard. That might be what made it worth everything, in the end. That none of it had been easy. Right now, all she could do was take it one step at a time.

They watched the swimming dolphins in silence for a few minutes. Earlier, she’d been foolish enough to take his hand. She wanted to do it again now but didn’t, even if the memory of how his fingers had felt linked in hers wouldn’t go away.

Ewan had hired her this second time, not because of any real threats to his life, but as a way to bring her back to him. She’d stayed originally because she was stubborn. Now, Nina wasn’t entirely sure of her reasons, but one thing she did know—just because there weren’t currently any threats against Ewan’s life, that didn’t mean nobody was out to harm him. Nina thought about the girl Betts at the lab, and her suspicious reaction to the alleged vandalism.

“You first hired me to protect your life from people who wanted to kill you,” Nina said quietly.

“Yes. And you did. More than once.”

She glanced at him. “You hired me this time for different reasons.”

“Yes,” Ewan admitted after a hesitation. “That’s why I’m telling you now that you don’t have to stay with me.”

“Do you think you’re not in danger anymore?” The dolphins had gone away from the glass, so she and Ewan started moving toward the next exhibit.

This room was full of floor-to-ceiling glass tubes, some with bubbles constantly rising in soothing waves. Others, softly lit from the inside with bioluminescence. The biggest tubes had jellyfish in them. The room was designed so viewers wove their way through all of the tubes, like walking through a field of trees.

“I guess, considering what I do, I might always be in danger of some kind of threat,” Ewan said.

Nina paused between two giant tubes of jellyfish. She studied them. They moved constantly. “I don’t know very much about jellies, but I imagine their lives must be pretty peaceful, don’t you think? I mean, they eat. They reproduce. Do they sleep?”

“I have no idea,” Ewan said, by her side.

“Do they love?”

She reached to snag his sleeve. She didn’t tug him closer, but moved herself instead. One, two, three steps until she could kiss him. Their last embrace had been rough and almost brutal; this time, Nina was conscious about making sure she offered, but did not insist.

Ewan sighed into her mouth as one hand slipped beneath her hair to cup the back of her neck, his fingers tickling the skin bared above the scooped neckline of her shirt. The kiss deepened. They moved closer, their bodies fitting perfectly together. She put her hands on his waist.

Ewan broke the kiss and pressed his forehead to hers. Eyes closed. He drew in a sigh and let it out softly. “Nina.”

“I want to forgive you,” she whispered and closed her own eyes, so that the soft mutter of the bubbles in the tubes and the shifting light casting shadows through her eyelids could soothe her. “I want to, Ewan. So much.”

“But you can’t?”

She opened her eyes and pulled away enough so that she could meet his gaze. She took his face in her hands. Her thumbs stroked the bristles along his jaw. She traced his lower lip with a fingertip and jerked it back with a startled giggle when he nipped it.

“I want to,” she repeated.

Ewan nodded as though her answer was no more than he’d expected. “I never wanted to hurt you, Nina. I hope you believe that.”

“I believe you never wanted to. But you did.”

He sucked in a breath as though her words had stung him, but she couldn’t be sorry she’d said them. It was the truth, no getting around it, and it would serve neither of them to pretend otherwise. Ewan nodded again after a second, perhaps having rethought whatever protest he’d been considering.

Nina kissed him again, a little harder this time, and if it was because she wanted to hurt him, that was because she knew he would like it. Her body pressed to his again, also harder this time. More insistent. Her fingers dug a little into him just above his hips, and she thought about sliding up his shirt, tugging it free of his pants, to get at his bare, smooth skin beneath. He’d be warm. Firm. Her hands almost ached with the desire to touch him that way, but she kept herself still.

“There are cameras here,” she murmured into his mouth. Without human staff, there had to be a very sophisticated security system including visuals. “Right?”

“I’m sure there are . . . ask me if I care . . .” His hands roamed over her back. One came around the front to slide up and over her breast.

Her body reacted at once, her nipple peaking tight and hard under his palm through the soft material of her shirt. She didn’t gasp, but only because she bit back the sound. She spoke around giddy laughter. “We’ll end up streaming on the viddy gossip channel.”

“Again,” Ewan said through a series of nibbling kisses, “ask me if I care.”

Her laughter rippled up and out of her as smoothly as the air bubbles in the glass tubes surrounding them. “I care. I have a reputation to consider.”

“Are you saying you’d be embarrassed?” Ewan kissed her deeper, both hands moving up to cup her breasts now as he walked her backward toward a small, shadowy nook and pressed her against the wall.

Nina turned her face as Ewan mouthed her jaw and neck. With a shiver, she whispered into his ear, “Mortified.”

He nudged his face against the curve of her shoulder as his heated breath caressed her. She turned her face into the soft brush of his hair and took in the particularly delicious and unique scent of him. No lover had ever smelled so delectable to her, and she took in a long, slow breath to savor him.

“Can’t say that I blame you. I really have nothing going for me. I’m surprised you’re not sick to your stomach right now at the very sight of me.”

She laughed again and wound her fingers into his hair to tug his head back so he’d look her in the eyes. “It’s been a struggle. A couple times I almost had to run off, but I managed to hold it back.”

“You’re amazing,” Ewan said, but this time it didn’t come out sounding like a joke. His smile softened, as did his gaze. He brushed a kiss over her lips, then shifted a little with a glance between them. “I need a minute.”

Nina loved that a few kisses could affect him that way. It made her want to touch him again, this time maybe to pinch a little. She wanted to watch him jump, to see his eyes go heavy lidded and his lips part on a gasp he wouldn’t be able to hold back. She wanted to reach between them and stroke him until he was thick and solid, rigid in her fist.

She hadn’t been serious about being embarrassed, but the security cameras were certainly real. The last thing Ewan needed was a series of viddy stories coming out featuring him in a shadowy clinch with her. If nothing else, it would bring unwanted attention back his way, maybe even from one of those groups that had been so determined to end his involvement with the Enhancement Repeal Act.

No matter how angry she’d ever been with him, no matter how betrayed or how little she felt she could trust him, nothing could change the fact that Nina would always protect him from any harm as long as she could.

“Let’s go home.” Nina didn’t miss the way his eyes blazed at the offer. She took his hand, squeezing their fingers together. “You can embarrass me there.”