Forbidden Stranger Page 12

  Aggie shook her head. “She hardly needs permission, does she? Don’t you think it’s more likely that once she has what she wants, she’ll simply begin to auction it off to the highest bidder? Prohibiting alcohol never stopped people from drinking it, outlawing guns never stopped a criminal from getting one, and keeping drugs illegal surely didn’t ever stop an addict. People want that tech, and they’re going to find a way to use it, no matter if it’s allowed or not. You might be making it for those soldiers, Mr. Donahue, but I can guarantee you the Dev woman doesn’t have the same sense of duty toward them. As long as she gets it for her son, she’ll be happy to sell it off to whoever else is willing to pay for it.”

  Ewan knew Aggie was right about all of that, but he still frowned. “Katrinka Dev can do whatever she wants and face the consequences of it. What she does has nothing to do with me. My concern is Nina. Only Nina.”

  Instead of looking irritated with him, now Aggie’s forehead creased in concern. “I know that, sure and enough. But she’s not the only one affected by all of this. You’ve seen the news, haven’t you? About Constance Riley?”

  He had been making sure to keep himself updated since Al’s first call. “My sources are saying she and the governor had been having an affair for the past three years.”

  “Oh, people will always gossip, won’t they? As if that woman hadn’t been through enough, they need to run her name through the garbage. All the judgment on her, and none on him.” Aggie tutted.

  “There’s no proof that what she did was related to the tech or any of the programming,” Ewan said. “It seems more likely it was a love affair gone bad.”

  Aggie shook her head. “Of course there’s no proof, and how could there be? She’s dead. There’s no way of knowing what drove her to take her own life, only that she did. But what about Chang?”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He drove his car into a bridge abutment.”

  Ewan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Damn.”

  “Dry roads. No traffic. Middle of the afternoon. There was no clear cause for it,” Aggie said. “He had a lovely wife and a brand-new baby at home. It wasn’t an accident, and he had no reason for it.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t an accident, and we don’t know his mental state. People are depressed in ways nobody else can see from the outside. We have no idea what was going on. That doesn’t mean he was influenced by the software.”

  Aggie looked grim. “And if he was?”

  “Our job is to keep Nina safe,” Ewan answered, his voice hard. “That’s my concern and my number one priority.”

  Aggie nodded after a moment, her mouth pursed. She smoothed her apron and looked away from him. If he’d disappointed her, Ewan told himself he didn’t care. What he’d said was the truth.

  “I want the best for her, too, Mr. Donahue.”

  “I know you do.”

  He excused himself to go to his room, where he logged in to access the ’net and pinged Al. She answered just before he expected the ping to go to her message box. Her platinum hair had been shaved to the skull, and her cheeks were even more hollowed than they’d been the last time he’d spoken to her.

  Her smile looked genuine, though, even if her gaze held shadows. “Hey, there.”

  “Chang,” Ewan said.

  Al’s smile faded. “What about him?”

  “He’s dead. Car accident.”

  Al’s brow creased. She pulled a vape cig from offscreen and drew on it deeply before letting the haze drift from her lips. “I hadn’t heard.”

  “Is it true about Riley?”

  “That she was fucking her boss? No idea. We weren’t close. The media will do anything to lay blame, though. Meanwhile he’s got an approval rating through the roof.” Al grimaced and lifted a glass of amber fluid at the screen. “It’s enough to drive a person to drink.”

  Her first comment might have been a dig at him, but Ewan didn’t rise to it. The whiskey in her glass looked good enough to make him go to the sideboard in his room and pull out a bottle for himself. He poured a shot and held it to the camera the way she had, then downed it with a grimace.

  “I see you’re also being driven to it. Is Nina all right? She has to be, or else you wouldn’t be looking so calm.”

  “Shiny fine,” Ewan said. The warmth of the liquor had spread through him, reminding him how long it had been since he’d had anything but wine, and that in limited quantities. “She’s improving, actually. How are you?”

  “My grandmother lived to be nearly a hundred, still made it up and down the stairs and walked her dog every day until she died. Yet she’d complain about aches and pains. The creak of her bones, she’d say. The stab of each breath from ribs that had gone brittle. I know how she feels.”

  Ewan shook his head. “You’re not old, Al.”

  “I’m not fishing for compliments,” Al shot back sharply. “I’m telling you that I hurt all over most days and in some places all the rest.”

  “I’m sorry.” Ewan decided against another shot and put the bottle away.

  Al looked as though she meant to argue with him about that, then sighed. Shook her head. “Tell me you’re close to getting that onedamned program out of all of us, Ewan. I want it to be you and not that harpy Katrinka Dev.”

  “You know about her, too?”

  Ewan could no longer be surprised. The media wasn’t reporting anything about Katrinka’s efforts at beating his team to finding a solution, but he couldn’t be surprised. She’d long been accomplished at manipulating the media. It had been a boon when she worked with him. If anything, he should be surprised that she hadn’t used her contacts and money to turn public opinion against him again.

  “She’s going to use Article 757.” Al bared her teeth for a moment in an expression that was nothing like a smile. “On her own son.”

  “She thinks she can help him.”

  “A mother’s love,” Al said derisively, then gave him an assessing look. “You don’t think she can?”

  Ewan shrugged. “The kid’s brain is shot. But who knows.”

  “I guess if you’re motivated enough, you can do anything.”

  That was definitely a dig, and Ewan frowned but didn’t rise to the insult. “If you hear anything about Chang, will you let me know?”

  “You think it’s related to Riley?” Ewan didn’t have to so much as say a word before Al added, “You’re thinking about Hendricks.”

  “There’s no way of knowing why he took his own life.” Ewan’s jaw clenched, but he tried to show no emotion.

  Hendricks and Nina had been lovers, long before Ewan had ever met her. He couldn’t be jealous of that and certainly shouldn’t be jealous of a dead man. If Ewan couldn’t be charitable about the other soldier’s place in Nina’s life, he could at least say as little as possible about him.

  “Exactly. Maybe that bastard bitch of a program got activated. It’s inside all of us. We all have it. It’s just a matter of time.” Al took another slug of whiskey and another long drag on the vape cig. “I can’t even get drunk about it, how’s that for excremental? Can’t get drunk, but I sure as the void feel the hangover.”

  “I have my team working around the clock. They’ve made a few great breakthroughs. But you know I can’t get anything approved until they’ve run every digit of code through every single virtual tester. We can’t implement anything until we’re sure it’s going to work, and that takes time.”

  “Katrinka Dev doesn’t need to worry about that. She’s filling her son’s head with new programming as fast as she can, trying to see what works.”

  “Well, let her,” Ewan said angrily. “If she kills him, that will be her burden. Not mine.”

  “You could use me,” Al said.

  Ice formed in Ewan’s spine. “No.”

  Al looked grimly determined. “It’s not even Article 757, Donahue. I’m an adult and fully in charge of my own medical decisions.”

  “I can’t experiment on you
, Al. That’s out of the question.”

  “You can, if you wanted to. I’m allowed to decide for myself. Nobody could stop you from testing all of that on me.”

  “You didn’t even have the upgrades!”

  Al poured herself another slug of whiskey and held it up to look at the sloshing contents of the glass. She didn’t sip. She looked at him through the liquid.

  “Will that effect the testing?”

  “Yes, of course it will. Everything is based off the last upgrade,” Ewan said.

  Al gulped back the whiskey with a grimace and put the glass down out of sight. “I told you that I wanted to be able to choose, when the time came.”

  “And I told you,” he said, but gently, “that I’d support that. Whatever your decision would be, when the time came.”

  “The time came, Donahue. This is my choice. I want to be useful and help you figure out how to get that fucking program out of everyone. If that means I get the upgrades so you can test the next set on me to make sure it’s safe and works, then that’s what I want to do.”

  Ewan shook his head. “I can’t condone human experimentation, not even voluntarily. It could kill you.”

  “So will that program in my head, the way it’s killing everyone else. The way it might kill Nina,” Al said. “I know you don’t want that.”

  Ewan fell silent. He’d set the comm on top of the sideboard and paced now. He scrubbed a hand across his mouth to keep himself from shouting at her.

  “It could do worse, Al. It could not kill you.”

  “I want it to be my choice,” Al said. “I don’t want to sit around and wait for the sudden urge to off myself. All of it, my choice. I’ll speak for everyone when I say I think we all want it to be our choice. Nina would want that, too, if she knew she had one.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Ewan said.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Nina had woken early again, although if she’d suffered nightmares they’d faded on their own before she opened her eyes. The house was not dark but still quiet, everyone else sleeping, when she got up and dressed. She wasn’t thinking much about it, but she went to the attic and the easel with its brushes and paints. Turned half toward the window, so the light of dawn filtered over the blank canvas, Nina set everything up and stood, waiting for . . .

  Inspiration?

  She took a brush and held it at arm’s length, squinting down the brush end. Like she knew what in the universe she was doing. She chuckled at herself, shaking her head, then decided to simply start.

  “Here we go,” she muttered.

  The first few strokes of paint on the canvas felt wrong. The brush, unwieldy in her hesitant hand. The paint, too thick in globs, no delicate way to lay its path in anything resembling a picture. That was the problem, wasn’t it? She didn’t know what she wanted to paint in the first place. Nina didn’t know anything about art or painting techniques, or if she ever had, no muscle memory was kicking in to show her what to do. She could call to mind a few famous artists from history, but nothing about Dali’s surreal landscapes or Warhol’s cultural pieces seemed right to her. Fenwick had done some amazing work with watercolors, but Nina had only these tubes of paint and couldn’t begin to compare to that modern artist’s skills anyway.

  The sun had risen higher, sending more pearly light into the window. From here she could see the ocean and a hint of the cliffs. Since Ewan had helped her face her fears about the stone staircase, Nina had been thinking about the cliffs a lot. She still hadn’t dared approach them.

  But she could paint them.

  Looking out the window, she tried to recreate what she saw. Her clumsy hands steadied. A picture took shape of slanted ceilings, a view through a window. Except it wasn’t the sea or cliffs that slowly took shape on the canvas, it was a forest of dark green trees and mountains in the distance.

  She worked on it for a few hours before her rumbling stomach alerted her to the passing of time. Stepping back from the canvas, Nina laughed again at herself. A creak on the staircase behind her made her sigh and shake her head. Ewan, she thought. Well, she wasn’t going to be too embarrassed about the painting.

  “I never claimed to be an artist,” she said before he made a sound.

  He paused at the top of the stairs with his hand on the half wall before moving all the way into the office. “And yet you almost finished an entire painting. How did it make you feel?”

  “Better,” she admitted with a rueful grin. “I wouldn’t have believed it, but I guess you were right. Thank you.”

  “May I?” Ewan gestured toward the canvas.

  Nina stepped aside so he could look at it. “My masterpiece.”

  She’d been joking, but something about the look on his face faded the smile off her lips. She watched him look at the painting, then out the window and back to the canvas before he met her gaze. He looked solemn, but with a hint of something else deeper in his eyes.

  “What were you painting?”

  “I started to paint the view from this window,” Nina said. “But then I started on this instead. I think . . . I think it might be where I grew up. It feels like that.”

  “Do you remember where you grew up?”

  “I remember this place.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was true. Giddiness filtered through her, twisting her lips into a grin that felt more hysterical than happy. “I remember this place, Ewan, I do!”

  In the next moment she was in his arms. They were both laughing as he squeezed her, his big, strong hands running down her back. There was something like a dance in the way they moved together.

  She kissed him again, this time not like on the beach where it had been passionate and full of heat. This time, she kissed him slowly. Sweetly. Her eyes closed and her mouth open.

  She could have told herself she meant it as a thank-you for the gift of the paints, brushes, and canvases, but she couldn’t convince herself of that. She kissed him because she wanted to taste him again. She wanted to feel the heat of his breath on her face, of his palms on her back. Nina tipped her head back to let the kiss deepen and smiled at the sound of Ewan’s low groan.

  Nina opened her eyes. “Mmm.”

  “Nina,” Ewan said. “That was . . .”

  “Bombtastic? Galactic?”

  He stepped back. “All of that. Yes.”

  “But you don’t want me to kiss you again.” She saw it on his face, and embarrassment made her turn away.

  “Not because the kiss was bad,” he said hastily.

  “Because you’re my boss?”

  “That’s a good reason, but . . . no.”

  She turned. “What, then? Tell me, please, because I’m not imagining this thing between us, am I? This tiptoeing tension? It’s not all in my head, Ewan, is it?”

  “No, Nina. It’s not. But I can’t do this with you.” Ewan drew a long, deep sigh and blew out the breath through the lips she’d just so stupidly kissed.

  She nodded as though she understood, even though she only half did. “Sure. I get it. It’s weird. You’re my boss. And I’m so messed up, I couldn’t blame you for not wanting to get into something with me.”

  She was in his arms again so fast that she stumbled and would have fallen as he pulled her next to him, if he wasn’t holding her upright. His fingers dug a little into her upper arms until he pulled her even closer.

  “Don’t you ever say that,” Ewan said, so fiercely that it both scared her and sent a small, vibrant thrill all through her. “There is nothing wrong with you. Not like that.”

  She thought he might kiss her this time, but although Ewan leaned close so that the gust of his breath traced patterns over her waiting mouth, he held back at the last moment. His grip loosened. He let her go. With reluctance, true, but he did release her.

  “I can’t,” he said. “I want to, but I can’t.”

  Nina could think of only one reason why a man who wanted a woman would resist what she was so clearly offering. “You have someone else.”
>
  Ewan’s brow furrowed. He gave his head a scant shake, then seemed to change his mind. His expression, twisted in confusion, smoothed.

  “Yes. But it’s complicated.”

  “I feel like it always is,” Nina said with a sigh. She searched his gaze. “Did you break up?”

  Ewan nodded. “Yes. A few times. Always my fault.”

  “You . . . love her?”

  “I love her more than I have ever loved any woman. More than I will ever love anyone else,” Ewan told her.

  A string of emotions ran through her, each indistinguishable from the rest. Unsettled, Nina drew in a breath against the onslaught. She braced for pain in her head, for blankness, but none of that happened.

  “She’s a lucky woman,” she said.

  Ewan barked out a harsh laugh that pained her, since it was so clear he disagreed. “I was the lucky one, and I managed to screw it up, over and over.”

  “Did she . . . love you?”

  “She did.”

  “Does she still?” Nina asked.

  Ewan gave her a small, sad smile. “I don’t think so.”

  “Maybe she could again, if you had the chance to make things right with her,” she offered, even though the idea that Ewan had someone else only embarrassed her for going after him the way she had. Envy pricked at her, too, but she tried to shove it away.

  She looked up to see him staring at her. His gaze held hers. Lingered.

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  Awkwardly, she nodded and turned her attention back to the canvas. Keeping her tone deliberately light, she said, “Thank you again for the paints and supplies. I promise this new hobby won’t interfere with the work.”

  “Nina . . .” Ewan coughed, then cleared his throat.

  She turned slightly to look at him, a question on her face. He ran a hand through his hair then put both hands on his hips. He cleared his throat again.

  “Forget about the busywork.”