The Muscle

by Amy Lane

  “My last boyfriend went up in flames,” he rasped. “Along with a car, a garage, and half a mansion with a coke-refining operation in the basement.”

  Grace’s eyes were going to pop right out of his head. “Oh, dear Gordon,” he said.

  “Well, Paulie and I didn’t know about the op in the basement.” Bitterness laced Hunter’s voice. “Nobody knew about that until the car blew up, and then the house went with it. And so did the client.” His voice hitched. “And so did….”

  “Your boyfriend,” Grace muttered, feeling awful for him.

  “Yeah.” Hunter blew out a breath that tickled the nape of Grace’s neck. “The forensics report said he was killed almost instantly—the concussion of the blast pretty much wrecked his internal organs. They needed dental records and DNA to ID him.” He shuddered, pulling Grace tighter. “I couldn’t.”

  “Augh!” Grace turned in his arms. “That’s so horrible. I’m so sorry.” His mouth worked, and he choked back on what he wanted to say, trying to be good, trying to be the sort of person Hunter could trust with this revelation, trying to be—

  “Spit it out,” Hunter said, leaning his forehead against Grace’s. “What are you trying to say?”

  Grace closed his eyes and took in everything—warm, wet man; sexy, sexy afterglow; the warm water pounding his back from the vast water pipes of a very expensive hotel, and stopped trying to be someone besides Grace.

  “Why?”

  “Why did someone plant the bomb? Because our employer was a bad man who….” Hunter’s voice trailed off for a moment. “Who apparently got some information that was way above his paygrade about two weeks before the bombing.” He frowned for a moment, and Grace could see him making connections. Then, before Grace could ask what he was thinking, Hunter pulled his attention back to Grace. “But that’s not what you were asking, was it?”

  “No,” Grace said, feeling like this whole conversation was above his paygrade. “I was asking why would you trust me with… with….” He rubbed Hunter’s wet chest and tried not to cling to the man when they were both slick and wet in the hotel shower. “With this? Why would you tell… tell me something this important! It’s like trusting… like trusting me in your house with your valuables when you just watched me crack someone’s safe. You know what kind of person I am—I’m irresponsible, goddammit! How am I supposed to take care of this! This hurts you, and I don’t know how to fix it!”

  His brow was scrunched, his throat ached, and he wanted to turn into water and flow down the drain, but Hunter’s arms around him kept him human, kept him there.

  “Grace,” Hunter rasped. “Baby. What do you think you’re doing now?”

  “Crying in the shower?” Grace sniffed. “It’s revolting. I wouldn’t want to date me.”

  Hunter chuckled gruffly. “You’re empathizing, sweetheart. Don’t hurt yourself. It doesn’t always feel good, especially when you start.”

  Grace buried his face in Hunter’s throat. “I’m sorry your last boyfriend got… uhm, blown up,” he said awkwardly. “Are you sure you want me now? Really sure? Because if I were you, I’d want someone totally different. Someone bug-eyed and serious with glasses and sensitive and shit. I just….” His voice threatened to break again, and he patted Hunter’s shoulder in an unconscious gesture of comfort. “I wish you didn’t have to have that in your heart.”

  “Me too,” Hunter said, starting that rocking motion again. “But you’re here, and you… you’re here without feeling sorry for me. And you don’t do the scary stuff—usually, you don’t do the scary stuff. Unless you’re running barefoot from guys with guns or BASE jumping off tall buildings.”

  “Who told?” Grace snuffled, feeling pathetic.

  “Grace, it was a month ago. We all saw it on the news and said, ‘Goddammit, Grace!’ and you said ‘What? You can’t see my face’!”

  Grace managed a rusty chuckle. “Josh was right behind me.”

  “Which is also how we know. You’re lucky we didn’t tell Josh’s parents.”

  Grace snorted. “We were… well, we were running an errand for Felix that Felix didn’t need to know about. Anyway, you were saying that I’m not the guy who beats up other people.”

  “Yes,” Hunter breathed. “And I’m glad. Don’t worry, Grace. I don’t need someone with glasses and a college degree. I need someone who can keep up with me and has the same slippery grasp of the law that I do.”

  “And who won’t hurt you!” Grace interjected. This seemed important, and he didn’t think Hunter was getting his gist.

  “And who will try his best not to hurt me,” Hunter agreed soberly, turning the water off. Well, fine. It was running cold anyway.

  “I didn’t soap my hair,” Grace said peevishly.

  “Neither did I,” Hunter told him. “That’s fine. We can soap it tonight. Let’s go downstairs and have the buffet. I want cater-taters and ham like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Cater-taters?” Grace raised a questioning eyebrow and followed Hunter’s lead getting out of the shower.

  “Those fried potatoes you only get in places that have chafing dishes,” Hunter clarified. “Mmm.”

  Grace laughed, because Hunter was obviously making shit up, and toweled himself off roughly. “I’ll try, you know,” he said, surprised to find that he was the one returning to the scary topics.

  “Try what?” Hunter asked, standing naked and toweling off his hair.

  “Not to hurt you. I’ve never done this before. I may fuck up. I hate that. You can’t… you can’t fix some fuckups. I’ll worry.”

  Hunter gave a very deliberate exhale. “I’ll worry that you won’t be careful with your body,” Hunter said softly. “Death is the only fuckup you really can’t fix.”

  Grace whimpered and fled the room, forgetting he’d left his T-shirt and briefs on the counter.

  But there wasn’t far to go, really. An hour later, they were sitting down to breakfast at the hotel buffet, talking about everything from the ballet the night before to the op Hunter and Josh had run during the ballet, to the fact that Molly had managed to cajole Stirling out of his room to go on an outing. As they were chattering, Hunter kept giving Josh and Julia speculative glances, and Grace wondered what connection he’d made, what he was thinking that kept him so preoccupied.

  Finally, after watching Hunter down his third plate of “cater-taters” and mourning his own performance and the cat-burglar dieting necessities of eating fruit and lox when he wasn’t eating sugar, he elbowed Hunter sharply in the chest.

  “What?” Hunter snapped.

  “Tell them,” Grace ordered.

  “Tell them what?” Hunter’s eyes narrowed.

  “Tell them whatever is eating at you. It’s driving me batshit.”

  Hunter let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Afterward,” he said. “Grace, you may get to go play tourist a lot, but you know what? This is a luxury for me. Yesterday was like Disneyland, and today’s even better. Can we just… not espionage for eight hours?”

  Julia, who was sitting on the other side of the table, heard him and laughed.

  “Shall we make that a rule?” she asked everybody. “No espionage today?”

  Grace narrowed his eyes, thinking about how often he looked at things only in relation to whether or not he could break in, break out, or break the rules.

  “I’m not really sure that’s poss—” he started to say, just when Josh said, “Challenge accepted!”

  Grace stared at him in horror. “I’ll kill you,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “Then I’ll go to work on you.”

  Josh met his eyes squarely across the table. “You can do this, Grace,” he said. “You have more depth than you know.”

  For the second time that day, Grace fought the urge to run to the bathroom and hide in the ventilation ducts. By the time the spasm had passed, Molly was talking excitedly about the walking paths that lined the side of the great granite walls of Capilano Park, and how the tour bus
to Grouse Mountain was going to stop there so they could wander around.

  Grace perked up then. “Do they have zip lines?” he asked.

  “Zip lines?” asked a newly familiar voice, sounding wistful. “That sounds awesome.”

  They all looked up to see Lucius Broadstone standing at the head of the table, waving with what seemed to be uncharacteristic diffidence.

  “Mr. Broadstone!” Julia said, standing up and gesturing him to squeeze a seat up to the table. “Come join us.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I, uhm, was wandering through the lobby—the next flight for Chicago doesn’t leave until tomorrow, but I guess you all know that.”

  Julia cast him a coquettish look from under her lashes. “We do. We were planning to forget all our espionage and go be tourists. Would you like to join us?”

  And almost-billionaire Lucius Broadstone lit up a little. Apparently drifting around Vancouver alone hadn’t appealed to him either.

  “Really?” he asked, and she patted his arm.

  “Of course. We’re going to go play as soon as we settle up the bill. If you’d like to change into something a little more….” She waved her hands at his tailored slacks, dress shoes, and polo shirt, and he grinned.

  “A little more appropriate,” he filled in, and she nodded.

  “Of course. We’d love to have you with us.”

  “Thank you,” he said, the sincerity in his voice unassailable. “My lady, you are a queen among women.”

  She laughed throatily, and Grace suddenly wished she could find the sort of man who could take all that beauty and charm and love her as she deserved to be loved. It wouldn’t be Lucius, apparently, but that didn’t mean he didn’t appreciate a pretty woman being kind.

  And Julia turned the conversation to the brochure in her hand, talking about their schedule and the things they wanted to do, and Grace found himself becoming as enthralled as Lucius.

  Maybe he could survive the day after all.

  Old Business

  HUNTER HAD to valiantly hide his smirk at Grace’s disappointment. The paths at Capilano Park were enjoyable, but compared to what Grace did for fun, they were like someone expecting to race NASCAR ending up on one of those motorized tracks for kids.

  “I still say they’d be more fun without the guard rail,” Grace complained, about fifteen feet ahead of Hunter as he ran across the suspension bridge for the umpteenth time.

  “And I’d say you are showing off,” Artur said, grasping the side rail toward the entrance of it. “You’re not twelve anymore.”

  Grace’s steps immediately slowed, and he ducked his head humbly. “I’m sorry, Dance Master.”

  Hunter’s heart pinged a little. The bridge was bigger—and more stable—than it looked in the pictures. Still, for anybody with balance issues or height phobias or who wasn’t a rock climber or daredevil on principle, it could be frightening.

  “Come here,” Hunter said, catching up to him and pulling him to the side of the bridge. “Look over the edge. It’s cool.”

  The suspension bridge at Capilano Park was one of its main attractions. Originally built out of hemp rope and logs in the late 1800s, it had been replaced by cable and wire, and finally by this engineered creation of nylon-coated cable and sturdy synthetic planks. It spanned the gorge of the Capilano River, and the view—deep and verdant green—was both a little vertiginous and highly tranquil.

  Grace peered over the edge moodily, and as Hunter put his hand in the small of Grace’s back, he could feel some of the “go” gentle into “breathe.” Perhaps this was part of Grace’s problem with relationships. He needed people who understood that the “go” was not about them. It was all about the hamsters in Grace’s own body, and how sometimes Grace needed to put them on their wheels and let them raise hell.

  And sometimes, a little bit of breathing would chill them right out.

  “It is,” Grace said, wonder suffusing his voice. “Why didn’t I notice that before?”

  “You mean the other twenty times you crossed this, going from the Forest Walk to the Cliffwalk?”

  Grace took another deep breath, and Hunter let his hand rise and fall with his torso.

  “Well, I’m not allowed to take anything from the gift shop,” Grace muttered glumly.

  “You’re not a kleptomaniac,” Hunter told him, hoping this was true. “You have too much professional pride to risk your reputation on tchotchkes you can easily afford.”

  “Do they mean as much if they’re not stolen?” Grace asked, giving Hunter the side-eye.

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  Grace blew out a breath. “I have lots of money,” he said nonchalantly. “I give most of it to the Conservatory—” His eyes grew wide and he looked over his shoulder to where Artur had accepted Lucius Broadstone’s arm for assistance crossing the bridge. “Don’t tell. Only Josh knows—he helped me make a budget. But I steal more, because….” He shrugged. “The giving is easy. The dancing for Artur is easy. Artur gave me so much. It needs to mean something.”

  Hunter’s heart did more than ping this time. It cracked. “I think all Artur wants from you, Grace, is for you to be happy. Have you ever considered that?”

  Grace wrinkled his nose. “You people and your ‘Grace needs to be happy’ bullshit. Grace doesn’t deserve to be happy. Grace is lucky if he doesn’t break people’s hearts by breathing.”

  And with that, he broke away from Hunter’s soothing hand and stalked—lightly, of course, so as not to disturb Artur—across the bridge.

  Hunter watched him go with a sigh. So much of the morning had been pleasant. The tour bus through Vancouver had been fun. Hunter, who had seen much of the world as a security threat that needed to be navigated, had spent the past year looking at it as an adventure. Going on an adventure with people who reveled in them was novel—and somehow more than that.

  Hunter had spent much of his life as the outsider, the point man, the guard. He’d trusted the people who had his back because they’d all been following the same orders or getting paid by the same guy.

  This was different. He trusted the people on the bus because they were kind to him when they had no reason to be, and because they were helping Artur simply because they could. Getting tagged by Josh to do things with these people because they all wanted to see some justice in the world felt like getting another chance to join the human race.

  And they were fun—and funny—and the family snark had been in full force. Grace and Hunter had sat together, and while Grace wasn’t so much for hand-holding—which was fine, Hunter wasn’t either—their thighs had pressed together easily, and Grace’s forays into the conversation had been pointed and hilarious. Watching Grace and Josh and Molly flitter from one activity to the other in the park had been amusing. Hunter loved a good workout. He even enjoyed rock climbing. But watching the three of them, dragging a reluctant Stirling behind them as he followed a little more invisibly, was a delight.

  He’d gathered before that the four of them had gone to high school together, and as college students had been involved in drama productions and other adventures—some of them possibly not so legal. But Hunter remembered being young and on leave, how he and the other young recruits had run through a marketplace in Kabul, equally excited. On one hand, the thought made him feel unbearably old, but on the other, seeing this glimpse into Grace, unguarded and at play, made him feel very privileged.

  And also a little out of his depth.

  He’d had boyfriends, but most of them had been like him. Worked hard, played hard, trained hard. Paulie hadn’t been his first relationship with someone in his pack—the old adage of not sticking your wick in the company pool had never made sense to him. He was on ops for months at a time. If he was with a guy who could make the downtime a little less boring—and the up time a little less high stakes, because he didn’t sleep with a guy if he didn’t trust him to have his back—why shouldn’t he?

  But Grace was different. Grace wasn’t a traine
d soldier. Hunter had been respecting Grace as a special ops worker, but that wasn’t who he was.

  Grace was a college kid—but older, somehow.

  Grace was a thief, and bloody brilliant at it too. Any guy who slept with his own lockpicks and could do that thing Grace had done when he’d run up Lucius Broadstone’s body was damned impressive. But he wasn’t acquisitive. He wasn’t greedy. Hunter had been pretty sure Grace stole for the pleasure of it, and to be a complete and total asshole for whatever reason was driving him at the time.

  But not now. Not after what Grace had just said about stealing something because… how had he put it? It needs to mean something.

  Hunter thought about his first assessment of Grace as a bored rich kid and realized that of all the bored rich kids he’d known—and he’d guarded a surprising number of them in his mercenary days—none of them had worried about gifts or possessions that “meant something.”

  Maybe Grace, for all his backward logic and amok moral compass, was on to something important.

  He knew how meaningless possessions really were. The care of stealing something gave it value. The last job they’d pulled had involved jewelry and objets d’art, and one of the things Danny had emphasized over and over had been that even the copies had value because they added to the story of the original.

  Somehow Grace, with all his feral intelligence, had learned something about material things that every other lost rich kid he’d ever known had missed.

  The story had value. The effort had value. The attention and care—that was expensive. It was like… like….

  Hunter’s mind flashed to the night before when he’d listened in covertly as Grace had been watching the ballet. He’d heard Grace’s caught breaths and certain sotto voce commands to the stage. “No, no—she’s still alive. Don’t—don’t take the poison! Why couldn’t she have woken up sooner? No!”

  It occurred to him now that the ticket to the event itself had been worthless—but the performance had been Grace’s everything.

  That’s what Grace valued. The performance, the dance of story that went with the objects he stole. Being with his friends was important. Helping Josh’s parents was important.