by Amy Lane
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Prologue—Broken Steps
Predatory Animal
Tension
Game Faces, Everyone
A Steep and Narrow Stairway
Change in Temperature
On Delicate Toebeans
Belling the Cat
Easy Feeling
Reckonings
Taking Flight
Letters Home
No Room on the Fence
Old Business
In the Normal
Traps and Pitfalls
Hallelujah
Let the Dance Commence
The Devil in the Dilemma
Between the Bars
Growing Up
Baby
Dance 10, Heist 3
Bowing Out
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Copyright
The Muscle
By Amy Lane
A Long Con Adventure
A true protector will guard your heart before his own.
Hunter Rutledge saw one too many people die in his life as mercenary muscle to go back to the job, so he was conveniently at loose ends when Josh Salinger offered him a place in his altruistic den of thieves.
Hunter is almost content having found a home with a group of people who want justice badly enough to steal it. If only one of them didn’t keep stealing his attention from the task at hand….
Superlative dancer and transcendent thief Dylan “Grace” Li lives in the moment. But when mobsters blackmail the people who gave him dance—and the means to save his own soul—Grace turns to Josh for help.
Unfortunately, working with Josh’s crew means working with Hunter Rutledge, and for Grace, that’s more dangerous than any heist.
Grace’s childhood left him thinking he was too difficult to love—so he’s better off not risking his love on anyone else. Avoiding commitment keeps him safe. But somehow Hunter’s solid, grounding presence makes him feel safer. Can Grace trust that letting down his guard to a former mercenary doesn’t mean he’ll get shot in the heart?
To Mate and Mary, obvs., but also to my teenagers. Perverse as cats, self-centered as toddlers—but also with great hearts, clever minds, and surprise talents. Grace is so very easy to love—and so are my children. They are also very entertaining.
Acknowledgments
MY EDITING team deserves ice cream.
Author’s Note
THERE IS a trickster god in nearly every mythology and every faith. A creature with power, whimsy, and a DGAF attitude that has, by turns, entertained us and kept us humble since the beginning of time. This series is, in its way, an homage to the trickster god—the creature who doesn’t work within the bounds of law and order but can, sometimes, even the odds when chaos seems overwhelming. Loki, Coyote, Gwydion, Ate`—the list goes on.
And now Grace.
May Grace be ever in your favor.
Prologue—Broken Steps
DYLAN LI sat on the worn and warped wooden floor in the fifth-story dance studio a little off the Loop in downtown Chicago. He hugged one knee to his chest and leaned against the mirrored wall behind him, watching Tabitha Marie Mikkelnokov dance the final scene of a student-written, student-produced contemporary version of Cinderella that she had choreographed.
She was sucking big balls at it too.
Normally Tabby was like a gymnast’s ribbon—her body moved through the air like silk. She was a tad too tall to make it in the big ballets, but the Aether Conservatory, the school Tabitha’s grandfather had put together with grit and most of his savings, had made it policy to take the dancers who worked hard, the ones who loved dance with all their soul, and to make allowances for things like standard height and even—on the odd occasion—ability. One of the best teachers at the Conservatory, Rudy, was a young man who would only ever perform with their adult education classes because his body was simply not that of a dancer, with tight sinews and slight congenital deformities that wouldn’t allow him the fluidity of movement a dancer needed.
Artur Mikkelnokov kept Rudy there because his heart was consumed with the dance, and he passed this passion on to his young students. They learned to love the joy and pain of it because Rudy did.
Tabby didn’t have such problems. Even with those extra inches, she could have performed in some of the top ballet troupes of the country, although she would not have gotten the lead because her partner would have needed to be nearly six foot three to stand even with her when she was en pointe. Aether was one of the first studios in the area to start considering how a dancer looked performing, how they made the audience feel, instead of how the dancer conformed to an almost impossible ideal of beauty.
Dylan—who stood shorter than her at five feet, seven inches tall—loved being partnered with her and loved watching her dance.
Except today, when an epileptic donkey would have been more graceful on the floor.
Dylan couldn’t take it anymore. “The actual fuck, Tabby,” he burst out in the middle of a plaintive violin solo.
Tabby whirled, coming down from a clumsy en pointe and almost stumbling to her knees. “Goddammit, Dylan!” she snarled. “I was trying to concentrate!”
Dylan leaned over to hit Pause on the sound system so the strains of plaintive violins stopped bouncing around Aether’s biggest practice room. “You were failing! The fuck is wrong with you? I’ve seen my housemates’ cats dance better!”
Tabby glared at him and then dropped her eyes. Dispiritedly, she padded across the platform to fall into a crisscross-applesauce sit-down at Dylan’s side.
“Sorry,” she said miserably, and then like she knew him—they’d been paired together since they were twelve years old—she leaned her head against his shoulder.
He looked at the top of her head, baffled. Her hair, toffee brown with tiny crinkles that were a result of her mother’s Russian ancestry and her father’s African-American family, sprang up from the usually merciless bun she pulled it back into and tickled his cheek.
“We’re doing this now?” he asked. Usually he’d be acerbic or teasing or even somewhat of an asshole, but this was Tabitha, and if he’d ever had a sister, he wouldn’t love his sister this much because she’d probably be too much like him. But Tabitha was earthy and honest, and she ignored seven-eighths of what came out of Dylan’s mouth and listened, instead, to the things he actually did.
He gave her tiny earrings every birthday—real gold or silver, real semiprecious stones—and she wore many of them in her ears every day. He never told her that he often stole them from the jewelry boxes of the girls who’d made fun of her in high school. His baby-thief training years, as it were. He would enjoy that little bit of irony all by himself.
“Yes,” she said, her voice clogged from tears she was obviously trying not to shed. “You are my emotional support animal, whether you want to be or not.”
He sighed and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Fine. Under duress.” He gave her a little squeeze, and she let out a laugh.
“Good emotional support animal,” she praised, and he dropped a kiss on the top of her head.
“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly.
“I can’t,” she said, and her voice broke.
He rocked her for a few moments and then asked, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
“No!” She laughed through her tears, which looked really hideous, in fact, but he preferred it to the hopeless sobbing. “You ass, I am not pregnant! Jesus. Why would you ask that?”
“Because
I want to keep dancing with you,” he told her, because, duh! “And I was sort of hoping you weren’t knocked up. You can call me your emotional support animal all you want, but we both know I’m a selfish bitch, so you can’t be all that surprised.”
She sputtered, wiping her face on the loose T-shirt that hung over her leotard. “Dear God, Dylan Li. The things that come out of your mouth. Don’t!” She turned to him with horrified eyes; he’d been known to blurt out uncomfortable things about his sex life at the merest provocation. “Don’t even go there,” she told him sternly. “If I have to hear about some guy’s come that tasted like cinnamon gum, I will vomit. I don’t have to be pregnant to have standards.”
Dylan chuckled appreciatively, although, point of fact, there hadn’t been a guy or a hookup or whatever for a couple of months now. He refused to dwell on why that was because then he might have to put a name to….
He wasn’t going to do it.
“Well, fine,” he told Tabby, suddenly grateful she had problems for purely selfish reasons. “I won’t tell you about cinnamon come, but you will tell me why you’re dancing like shit. We go live with this show in three weeks, babycakes. You can’t afford to suck donkey balls now!”
She let out a shaky breath. “Except it might not,” she whispered, and Dylan’s heart froze.
“What?”
“Oh, Dylan. It’s awful. My grandfather might lose everything. His lease on the studio, his performance contracts, everything. It’s not fair! And there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing!”
Dylan took a few deep breaths and tried to center himself. “Aether Conservatory?” he asked, just to make sure. His parents traveled the globe, mostly looking after their financial interests in Hong Kong. Dylan had been left alone with nannies and housekeepers at a very young age. He tended to be destructive when bored or lonely, and only two things had kept him from flaming out in a big ball of drugs and id.
His best friend, Josh Salinger, was one of them, and dance—specifically dancing at Aether Conservatory—was the other.
“You will explain that,” he said to Tabitha, needing to hear the details.
The more she spilled, the longer she spoke, the more he realized that maybe the gods of chaos really were looking out for him.
Because Dylan Li, and his friendship with Josh Salinger, might be the only things to save the dance company that had saved his life.
Predatory Animal
After Paulie, Before Josh
“PAULIE!”
Hunter Rutledge woke up sweating, shaking, and cold. God. Fucking dream. Why? Why did he have to remember it? Keep remembering it for the past eight months?
Him and Paulie, outside their employer’s mansion in Arizona, scanning the dusty confines of the compound with restless eyes.
“Did he say why we’re going now?” Hunter asked.
Paulie shook his blond head grimly and arched a mischievous brow. “I know his timing could have been better,” he said dryly, and if Hunter had been anyone else, he would have smirked.
Paulie Claymore had a slender, tight little body and was one of the sweetest assholes Hunter had ever had the privilege to plow. He and Paulie had been off duty when the phone rang in their guest quarters. It had been their boss, telling them they were on emergency duty because the guys who were supposed to be on shift had gone into town for….
Yeah. There was no reason. The guys had just flaked.
Hunter had been a mercenary for three years after his six-year stint with the corps—bodyguard work mostly, with a few stretches of industrial security. He knew what good logistics were and he knew when things were fishy—and this was definitely fishy. But, well, he and Paulie had a job to do.
They’d been guarding Ronald Pinter, industrialist, ex-cattle-rancher, and entrepreneur, for the past three months, and the guy had “paranoid drug user” written all over him. Hunter hated the job. Pinter refused to tell his people what he was so afraid of, and every time Hunter saw him, with his wet eyes and red, runny nose, he expected Pinter’s brains to explode.
The job was sketchy, and after three months, Hunter wanted out. But first he wanted Paulie to come with him.
He and Paulie had been hired at the same time, both of them referred by a mutual military contact, and when they moved together, Paulie was like the extension to Hunter’s shoulder he’d always wanted. Off duty, they’d run evacuation logistics, beefed up Pinter’s security, and practiced their marksmanship as synced together as the parts of a well-maintained engine.
The sex had been inevitable.
Paulie had been willing, excited even, to hook up with another man on the job. Usually, he’d told Hunter, his hookups were guys he met in the club scene or people he dated through mutual friends. Being with someone who knew what he did—and what he was capable of doing—was a rush for Paulie, and he loved Hunter’s cock as much as Hunter loved his ass.
It wasn’t true love. It wasn’t even friendship. But Paulie was a brother-in-arms with a unique place in Hunter’s life, and he didn’t want to leave his fuckbuddy to the wolves.
Fucking is where they’d been when they’d gotten Pinter’s call.
They were barely dressed now. Hunter could still smell Paulie on his skin, still feel the silk of his body gripping Hunter’s cock.
Still remember Paulie’s ecstatic smile as Hunter slid into his ass.
And Hunter was having a hard time getting his head in the game. Where in the fuck did the other team go again? Chancellor was in his fifties, hot in a silver fox sort of way, and Creighton was built like a gorilla—Hunter regarded them with intense dislike, but they seemed to be Pinter’s favorites. Lacking in humor, both of them, but they had a sort of brutish, impersonal competence that made them easy to work with. But not trustworthy—and definitely not friendly. Hunter was just as glad Pinter had taken a liking to the two of them, giving them the plum assignments and the trips to Cabo and giving him and Paulie time to get busy.
“We should put him into the car while it’s in the garage,” Hunter said seriously. “You go fetch him and start the engine. I’ll keep lookout by the gate.”
Paulie nodded and winked. “Taking point, as always.”
Hunter nodded soberly. He didn’t engage in a lot of banter or play, but he enjoyed that Paulie did. And Paulie’s boyish smile hid the heart of a tried-and-true soldier. “Protecting my people,” he said, smiling slightly when Paulie gave a little hop as he turned toward the garage.
Hunter pulled out his radio and called the gatehouse to tell them to be ready for the limo to pull through and got only static in return. His stomach churning, he jogged the two hundred yards or so to the small building that stood guard between the two lanes of the driveway to see why Stanley wasn’t answering.
He was twenty yards away from the gatehouse, searching for the retired cop’s jowly face through the white-bordered window, when he realized that all he could see was a crimson stain against the back wall.
Fuck!
He pulled out his radio again and hit Paulie’s code. “Paulie, they’re inside. Double-check everything. The gatehouse has been compromised. Dammit, Chancellor and Creighton must have set us up!”
Hunter had no idea why—hell, he really didn’t know his employer’s occupation beyond “retired tech magnate.” All he knew was that a month ago, Pinter had taken the four of them to Chicago. Paulie and Hunter had waited with the car inside a parking garage while Creighton and Chancellor had gone to some sort of public function on Navy Pier, after-hours. Pinter’s behavior had gotten more and more erratic since that trip—and the nose candy had been flowing like water.
Then two weeks ago, Creighton and Chancellor had escorted Pinter to a swank hotel in Guadalajara for a good meal and a trip to a strip joint. They’d come back two days later with a tan. When Hunter had asked if they knew why they’d taken the trip, both guys had shrugged, not even curious.
“He did something,” Chancellor, the silver fox, had said. “He went downstairs without
us and came back, put a thing in his suitcase, and said it was time to party. So we went and partied, hookers on him.”
Charming.
Chancellor didn’t remember anything else, not even what the thing was that Pinter had put in his suitcase. All Creighton could talk about was the hookers. The hookers grossed Hunter out, frankly, because Creighton sounded like he’d treated them like shit, and ever since then, Pinter had been even more weasel-eyed than before. Hunter’s instincts had been screaming GTFO at top volume.
But Paulie had wanted to wait it out. This had been an easy gig—Fat City, he’d called it. He was so excited not to be tramping through a desert or a jungle, and he had a guy and was getting some on a regular basis. Why would he want to leave now?
And Hunter? God help him, he hadn’t had a real boyfriend since he’d left the military for mercenary work. If they could get clear of this job, perhaps find a different gig, a better one, maybe he and Paulie could actually talk—maybe even connect emotionally and not just physically. But they had to be in a place that didn’t make his intestines itchy, where he and Paulie didn’t have to hook up on the down-low.
Or be prepared to see a sweet old retired cop’s brains splattered against the gatehouse wall.
“We’re loading into the limo now,” Paulie said over the radio. “Pinter’s a wreck. Had to fish him out of a bowl full of blow. Fucking Jesus!”
“I’ll be by the gatehouse. Standing by.”
Hunter watched as one of the doors of the four-car garage attached to the side of the house opened, his eyes moving constantly, gut muscles pulled practically to his spine. Oh, he didn’t like this, didn’t like this—
Flames first.
Orange and billowing, blowing out of the garage with the force of the concussion that hadn’t yet rocked him.
By the time his feet had started to move, the blast was tearing through the garage, through the back portion of the house, through his soul.
