The Muscle

by Amy Lane

  Grace swallowed and tried to remember the last guy he’d been with.

  No dice. A cock, a touch, the back room of a club—forgotten before the jizz had been tossed into a trash can.

  Well, his first real lover had been the guy to stick the needle in his arm, so there were worse things.

  “Fine,” he muttered, feeling out of sorts. Off-balance. “It’s your time.”

  “That’s sweet,” Hunter said dryly, laying his duster on the office chair and then sitting down to unlace his boots.

  “I’m not, you know.” God. Honesty. Grace was a great thief, but being subtle and silent was not his thing.

  “Not what?” Hunter set one boot aside and went to work on the other. Grace peered curiously over the edge of the bed and saw black cotton socks, high-end. The socks of a guy who spent a lot of time on his feet and needed to think about comfort.

  The boots were worn enough to be comfortable, new enough to take some damage.

  Everything about this man was practical and no-bullshit. What in the fuck was he doing in Grace’s hotel room?

  “Sweet,” Grace said, feeling helpless and trying to take charge of this situation. “I’m not sweet. I’m an asshole. Drop lovers like Kleenex—”

  “They’re not lovers if you drop them like Kleenex,” Hunter argued. “They’re flesh-covered dildos, and I’m not one of them, so knock it off.” With a grunt and a heave, he pushed himself backward on the bed, stretching out with his head on one pillow. Imperiously, he stretched out his arm and glared at Grace until Grace made himself comfortable, his head on Hunter’s shoulder, body fitted neatly alongside.

  He took a deep, experimental breath and tried to decide if he liked this or no—

  “Are you purring?” Hunter asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  “No,” Grace lied. Oh wow. This—this feeling here. This was amazing. His body started doing things Grace hadn’t given it permission to do, namely burrow deeper into Hunter’s amazing heat. Hunter dropped his arm and used it to roll Grace over so he was sprawled partially on top of Hunter’s lean, well-muscled body, and then he wrapped that arm around Grace’s shoulders, holding him tighter.

  “You okay?” Hunter asked.

  “Sure. Fine. Don’t move, all right?”

  Another move, this one putting Hunter on his side and Grace fully in his embrace.

  “Now we’re good,” Hunter whispered, dropping a kiss on the top of Grace’s head. “This is fine. You stay right here.”

  “I’m not sweet,” Grace said again, perilously near tears. His feet throbbed, and his adrenaline was letting down, and while that could have accounted for some of the excess… whatever this was, that damned honesty wouldn’t let him use it as an excuse. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because,” Hunter said softly. “Because I was going to wait for you to grow up a little, figure out what you wanted, before I approached you.”

  “I was getting there,” Grace sniffed.

  “Yeah?”

  “Haven’t gotten laid in three months. You think that’s normal?”

  “I’m honored,” Hunter said, and he sounded half-amused, half-sincere, but Grace wasn’t giving up this place where he could smell Hunter’s chest to study his face and find out.

  “What changed?” That was what Grace really wanted to know.

  “You, running away from a man with a gun,” Hunter told him, and his arm tightened convulsively. “We like to pretend that what we do isn’t dangerous. I think we’re all thrill junkies in one way or another. But—” He took a shuddering breath. “—I was scared. I’ve… I’ve lost people before, on ops. And suddenly I didn’t want to see what happened if I didn’t hold you first.”

  Grace’s breath caught. Gah! This was like seeing somebody naked. And he wasn’t ready. He usually didn’t even see the whole person anyway—just the cock! And here was Hunter, naked, honest, and no dick in sight.

  “I’m sorry,” he said wretchedly. “It must suck to lose somebody.” He couldn’t even fathom losing Josh or his family. Seeing Artur looking old and frail over the past twenty-four hours had shaken him badly. “Who was it?”

  “You’ve never lost anyone?” Hunter asked at the same time.

  “You’ve met all my people,” Grace told him, not wanting to talk about it.

  “Not your parents.”

  “They lost me,” he said. He couldn’t remember a time they’d been home for even a birthday. Maybe when he was a baby. There had been a picture of his parents, his mother stiff in a summer dress, his father wearing pressed “casual” clothes, and him in a perfectly chosen baby outfit. They’d been posed, in a studio, and he remembered his nanny telling him that he’d been sick that day, almost impossible to jolly into a smile.

  She’d been let go when he started school. He had some soft memories of a plump blond woman who had liked to sing church hymns to him as he slept. It was one of the reasons he liked the nickname “Grace.” Thinking about her, he liked to think he was Amazing.

  “Is that why you want the world to look at you?” Hunter mused, almost to himself. “Because your parents won’t?”

  “Whatever,” Grace huffed, although Hunter was most likely right. It didn’t take a super genius shrink to figure that one out. “Who did you lose? And how old are you? And where did you serve in the military? And why did you go mercenary when you got out? And why were you taking classes at the college? And did Josh really meet you in class, or were you running ops without me?”

  Hunter burst out laughing. “Wow! How long have you been holding that in?”

  “Two months,” Grace said shortly. “Five or so, if you count the time before I met you, when you were Josh’s friend.”

  “Oh,” Hunter said, drawing the syllable out like Grace had explained something to him. “You were jealous.”

  “I was not! Josh and I aren’t a thing.”

  “You are brothers, and I was taking attention away from you, and that’s a thing,” Hunter corrected.

  “I hate you,” Grace said passionately—and inaccurately, even he knew that. “I hate that you understand this stuff. Makes me feel like I’m doing a job naked.”

  “It’s okay if you’re naked,” Hunter murmured, running a hand up and down his back. Grace tried to resist the last bit of relaxation that threatened to overwhelm him, but he failed.

  Hunter Rutledge left him limp and languorous and at the same time banking a slow arousal in the pit of his stomach. How fair was that?

  “Just shut up,” Grace mumbled. “Just—”

  “Sh… it’s okay, Grace. I won’t desert you. Or hurt you. But we’re not going to jump into bed together, okay? I just needed you to know I cared.”

  “Why?” Grace demanded wretchedly. “We’re… coworkers.” He’d never really had a coworker, had he? Unless he counted the women and the straight guys he danced with. Except this… this was different—way different—than when Tabitha or Molly sat on his lap and cuddled.

  Hunter snorted softly, that caress up and down his back becoming more insistent. “Oh, princess, this is way more than coworkers. But to answer some of your questions…. I’ll be thirty-one next month, which makes me almost too old for you, so shut up. I was in the military for six years, special ops for the last three. I… I did not like what I was ordered to do.” He blew out a breath. “I guess I figured that as a hired gun, I could at least pick who I was working for.”

  “Why’d you stop?” Grace asked, and part of him wanted to let this caress go on and on, but part of him—the feral animal part—needed to keep poking, keep working, until he found the sore spot, the festering tooth, the old wound.

  So he could know that Hunter would snarl and strike or grow cold and leave, and this moment of warmth, of pleasure, of interest in Grace as a person would go away, like it pretty much did with everyone else.

  And sure enough, Hunter’s breath hitched. “I lost someone,” he said, and Grace felt like shit because the admission was obviously painful. “We
were working the same op, had been together for about a month. I thought we were just guarding a businessman. But two of his bodyguards blew him up, so he must have been more than that.”

  “Would you have quit?” Grace asked, because that didn’t sound like the man who’d been so stalwart for a kid he met at college. “If you’d known they were out to get him?”

  “I would have been on my fucking guard,” Hunter snarled, his entire body tensing up, and Grace—who had sworn he didn’t have a comforting bone in his entire body—petted his chest.

  “Sh…. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s okay. I get it.”

  “Get what?” Hunter asked suspiciously.

  “You wish he was here instead of me,” Grace said, and to his dismay Hunter jerked back and glared at him.

  “God, you’re stupid,” he muttered. “I mean, you can pick a lock or climb a ventilation shaft or a thousand other things, but you’re really fucking stupid.”

  And Grace usually would have railed against that. He wasn’t stupid! He was fucking brilliant! He had the test scores, he had the grades, he had every teacher in his life petting him and telling him he was pretty.

  But not this man. This man had praised him for the things he’d done right and had never, until now, told him he’d fucked up.

  “Why?” he asked in a small voice.

  “Because it doesn’t work like that!” Hunter told him, and he sounded so distressed Grace found he was petting him again. “I miss Paulie, sure, but that’s not the lesson I got out of that!”

  “Oh,” Grace said, confused. “What… what was the takeaway again?”

  “I don’t want it to happen to you!”

  Grace never got scared—ever. But with Hunter’s words hanging in the air, his skin flushed hot, cold sweat prickled along his back, and his breath came quickly, in pants, as it hadn’t done when he’d been running down the damned stairwell. He started shaking all over, freezing, and only Hunter’s arms around his shoulders made him feel any better.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled, not sure what he was sorry for. “Sorry. So sorry. I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry….”

  God, Hunter’s warmth, his strength, his safety. For this moment, suspended in time, it was all Grace wanted in the world.

  Eventually the shaking stopped, and Grace was left limp and drained, fully dressed on top of the covers. Hunter started stretching, and Grace remembered that he was probably going to go back to his own room and catch a nap before getting up early to run around the streets with Josh and be all commando and shit. And Grace was going to—what? Get ready for a formal dinner that Artur was really looking forward to? Go to see the ballet?

  Because that’s what Hunter did—the important stuff. Grace apparently stole the same gem as often as necessary to get their shit done.

  Grace was expendable, right? Wasn’t that who he always was?

  Instead of leaving, though, Hunter gave a soft groan and pulled him tight up against Hunter’s surprisingly broad chest, crushing him, but Grace didn’t mind.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Hunter grumbled in his ear. “Be safe. You feel so good in my arms right now, Dylan. Don’t throw yourself down the wrong elevator shaft because you think nobody will care when you land.”

  Grace nodded, still shaken. He wanted to ask how Paulie had died. He wanted to make sure it was something that could never happen to him.

  He wanted, just once, to tell Hunter about the night he’d almost died, but in that sudden silence, he realized he couldn’t.

  He may not have understood everything Hunter Rutledge was trying to tell him, but he was pretty sure that one thing he’d almost done would be pretty unforgivable.

  He whimpered, clinging to Hunter’s shirt. God. This was wonderful, and they weren’t even naked. Would the wonderfulness go away if they took off their clothes? Would it be just as wonderful?

  Oh wow. Would it get better?

  Grace couldn’t risk it. He lay there and allowed himself to be held and soothed, allowed himself to be cared for, and plotted, not feeling guilty in the slightest that he was actively scheming for how to make it happen again.

  Quiet fell, and Grace grew closer and closer to sleep. When Hunter moved, Grace shamed himself forever by whimpering and clinging to his shirt. “No, please?”

  “Don’t worry.”

  Hunter reached over Grace’s body then and grabbed his own earbud from the bed stand, popping it in as he leaned back and made himself comfortable on the bed again.

  “Mine?” Grace asked, and the rumble in Hunter’s chest indicated that wasn’t going to happen.

  “Sleep,” he murmured, setting an alarm on his watch. “I’ll wake you up before I go. Do you need to take off your—”

  Grace was already kicking his yoga pants down to his feet. He paused with his fingers over the zipper of the hoodie, though, glaring narrowly at Hunter.

  Hunter’s lean mouth quirked up at the corners. “If you take it off to sleep, I promise not to take it back.”

  Grace couldn’t help it. He grinned, then sat up and unzipped it, folded it neatly, and put it on top of his luggage without ever leaving the bed. Hunter stood and pulled back the covers, taking his trousers and overshirt off before climbing into bed and patting the spot next to him.

  Grace hummed and wriggled back. He’d never spooned before. Who spooned when you were trying to get out of the room before the rubber hit the road?

  Hunter slid his hand possessively around Grace’s waist and splayed his fingers across Grace’s flat abdomen. Grace’s body gave a tremendous throb, bigger than the ache in his feet or the confusion in his brain and the exhaustion in his bones.

  He whimpered a little and arched his hips, and Hunter’s breathy chuckle told him Hunter had noticed.

  “Don’t worry,” Hunter whispered. “It’ll happen.”

  But not now. Now Hunter was mic’d, and if they went at it like banshees, all of their friends and family would hear them—not to mention Artur, who was in the next room.

  Grace let out a disconsolate sigh and thought wistfully that a quick bang would be exactly the thing to get him to fall asleep.

  And then he was asleep.

  Reckonings

  JOSH DIDN’T give Hunter any shit as he slid back into the command central hotel room to shower and change, and even though Grace’s earbud had still been on the dresser as he’d left, Hunter was grateful.

  Josh waited, in fact, until they were both caffeinated and fueling up on breakfast wraps outside a coffee shop across the street from the Times Square, watching the morning activity on the tree-lined boulevards of Vancouver.

  “Stirling,” he said lowly, “is the gem on the move?”

  “No, sir,” Stirling replied with a yawn. “I’ve got the alarm set. I’m going back to bed for an hour. Text my cell if you need me online.”

  “Feel you. Have your sister bring you coffee.”

  “Roger that.”

  And as soon as they heard the click of his earbud going offline, Josh looked at Hunter with eyes that were way too old for a kid younger than Grace.

  “I almost wish you’d had sex,” he said, then grimaced. “Not that I wanted to hear that, but it might have been better for all involved.”

  Hunter tried not to flush. “Sex would have been easy,” he said, thinking about the sweetness of Dylan Li’s lithe, muscular body. Yeah, he’d been acting virtuous while they’d been lying in bed having sweet conversation and thinking deep thoughts, but Hunter had a healthy sexual appetite, and Grace…. Grace hit all his physical attraction buttons. Because who didn’t like strength and flexibility in a lover, right? But also fluid movement and stunning cheekbones and a delicate chin with a masculine jaw and….

  Gah!

  “Yes,” Josh said, still looking at him. “Sex would have been easy. And yet….”

  Hunter cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “He’s more than an easy lay,” he muttered.

  “I think so,” Josh said, taking a sip o
f his coffee and letting his eyes roam to the Times Square before watching another plane take off from the marina. “He’s my best friend. My brother.”

  “So you’re telling me I should have fucked him and left?” Hunter asked, not getting it.

  “No,” Josh said, looking at him like he was a silly child. “I’m telling you that his care and feeding is labor intensive. And I’m not saying that to scare you off. I just want to let you know what you’re getting into.”

  Hunter tried and failed to contain his smirk.

  “I mean besides his ass!” Josh said, burrowing into his leather jacket a little more deeply, like the chill was getting to him. He had a fine-gauge black wool cowl around his neck, something that screamed money but not too loudly, and his dark brown eyes scanned the area with the same restless precision that Hunter used. For the billionth time, Hunter wished that it could have been Josh he’d been crushing on these last few months—Josh with the bearing of a young lieutenant and the features of a Romantic poet. Who wouldn’t love that? Josh was most definitely Hunter’s type. Every boyfriend he’d ever had reminded him of Josh. But no.

  Hunter had to crush on the completely illogical, wholly unpredictable Grace, and Hunter was going to take his dirty joke innuendos where he could get them, thank you.

  But he wasn’t going to turn down help, either. “Then what did you mean?” he asked soberly.

  Josh’s eyes sharpened, and he sat up a little straighter. “Text Stirling,” he said. “See if the package is on the move.”

  Hunter saw their targets too, and after hitting a few notes on his watch, he murmured, “How do you want to play this?”

  “Tell him I’m a client,” Josh said, lifting his coffee to his lips again and sipping with cool appreciation.

  So Hunter signaled to Tazo and Piotr as they were crossing the street to the coffeehouse, feigning as much surprise as he could muster.

  “John,” Hunter said, nodding and not bothering to get up. “Yeah, told you I had an early meeting. Jay, meet John Tazo and Piotr Verhoeven—we work in the same business.”

  Josh nodded and saluted them with his coffee cup. “Nice meeting you,” he said pleasantly but with that mildly blank face that any client would use when they’d been interrupted in the middle of dealings that might not be legal.