Sex, Secrets, and Scifi, Pack Quite The Story Making Punch In "Dangerous Promise"

Title:  Dangerous Promise
(The Protector Series #1)
Author:  Megan Hart
Publisher:  Swerve
Release Date:  January 2, 2018
Rating: 5 Stars

A female bodyguard with enhanced abilities. A billionaire playboy committed to destroying people like her. A romance they didn’t expect…

Dive into the first book in the fantastic new Protector series set in the near future from New York Times bestselling author Megan Hart!

Nina Bronson used to be all human -- until the experimental surgeries and internal technology that saved her life and enhanced her as a soldier also forced her to leave the army for private service. Now she and her peers are facing slow, painful deaths unless their technology is upgraded, and the one man keeping those upgrades illegal and unavailable is an obnoxious billionaire. A man too gorgeous for his own good.

A man she’s supposed to guard with her life.

Ewan Donahue is the public voice speaking out against the enhancement procedures of injured soldiers. But when his lobbying leads to death threats, he needs someone to protect him around the clock. He doesn’t want to rely on an enhanced soldier—Nina’s tech goes against everything he stands for. But he really doesn’t want her to be beautiful like she is. Doesn’t want her to suffer like she will.

Doesn’t want to succumb to the searing desire he feels for her.

As a series of attacks on his life send them to a remote cabin, their close proximity brings them together in ways they never imagined. They know they must prevent the need simmering between them, resist each other at all costs. But when tensions are high and danger is close, passion burns hottest of all…

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’d 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?”

My Thoughts
This futuristic story of an ex-super soldier whose very tech puts her on borrowed time, and the billionaire that tech has made her able to protect.  Is one that holds so much more for readers than its romantic trappings would lead readers to allow.

Both leading lady, Nina Bronson, and leading man, Ewan Donahue, are alphas in their own right.  But Ewan's appreciation for, and attraction to, Nina's fighting prowess, speed, strength, and beauty is a refreshing twist; that one never tires of.
Said appreciation goes a long way towards ushering in the heated femdom romance that transforms this read from scifi chic to futuristic sexual fantasy of the most readable kind.

Balancing the heat, are the elements of danger presented by Ewan's predicament as a hunted man, Nina's personal war with the failing tech in her head, and the secret that lies between them.

Secrets it seems, are an underlying theme of this book.  Because it's secrets, or more to the point.  The need for keeping the secrets of the rich and powerful clients that Nina, and others like her serve.  That are at the heart of the war for the rights of "the enhanced".
Rights that Ewan is doing everything in his power to strip away.
Until...
He comes face to face with the one person charged with saving both his life and his heart.
Knowing that everything that he stands for could mean the end of hers.
This is a book that will turn you on while making you think.
It gives rise to questions like:

Who or what defines "humanity"?
If technology advances to the point of "enhanced humans", who has a say over how that tech is used?
Do our memories really belong to us?

This book is one that is well written, thought provoking, heart stopping, and sexy as all HELL!
An excellent start to a wonderful series.

Buy The Book Here!

All About Megan Hart

Megan Hart has written in almost every genre of romantic fiction, including historical, contemporary, romantic suspense, romantic comedy, futuristic, fantasy and perhaps most notably, erotic. She also writes non-erotic fantasy and science fiction, as well as continuing to occasionally dabble in horror.

For Megan Hart, the nutritionist, click here
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