Broadstone glared at him. “Ask why you’re trying to destroy my company!”
Grace blinked at him, unimpressed. “Mister, I was this many minutes old when I met somebody from Peoria. Why would we give a cow’s shit about your company?” He looked at Hunter. “Is there, like, a back way we can get into the hotel? I would really love it if we didn’t have to deal with security after that exit.”
Hunter gave a disgusted sniff. “That was hella sloppy. I can’t believe that happened.” He glared at Broadstone. “Why in the fuck did you chase him?”
“Because he ran!” Broadstone argued. “Jenkins told me Mikkelnokov’s friend had caught him and was giving chase—in his bare feet!”
Grace smiled, pleased with himself in spite of the aching in his toes. “I beat him. And you. Fucking amateurs.” Then, to Hunter again, “Why aren’t we moving?”
“I’m afraid if we move, this asshole will chase you again!” Hunter gave Broadstone a shove, and Broadstone gave him a dirty look.
“You would have chased him too. You know it.”
“I would not!” Hunter snapped, shoving Broadstone around toward what was apparently the back entrance of the building.
“No?” Grace asked, absurdly stung.
“Well,” Hunter amended, giving Grace a quick look from under thick sandy-brown lashes, “I would have known what to do with you.”
Grace grinned but kept his eyes on his battered toes so he didn’t stub one again. “You called me baby,” he murmured.
“What?” Broadstone asked, but that hadn’t been for him.
Hunter just grunted. But Grace snuck a look at him. A tiny flush was riding his pale cheeks in the cold.
Change in Temperature
HUNTER COILED against the hotel room wall in his usual position, with one eye on Lucius Broadstone, whom he still didn’t trust, and part of his attention focused on the running water in the bathroom, where Grace had gone to wash his feet.
His bleeding feet.
Hunter’s professionalism had gotten him in and out of some of the world’s most violent hotspots. He did not stop for personal reasons; he did not let himself be distracted; he got in, got the job done, and got out.
Period.
The. End.
But halfway across the lush green grass of the Westin Bayshore Hotel, he’d been tempted to just hamstring Broadstone (and seriously, what a fuckin’ name) and swing Grace up in his arms like a romance heroine so he could cart the man away to get some first aid.
But Grace wasn’t a damsel in distress. He was a mostly grown man whose little acrobatic trick at the end of that chase had literally knocked Hunter’s breath out of his body. Damn, son—that wasn’t for the weak or the stupid or the faint of heart.
Hunter spent a lot of time honing his body, making it the most effective weapon in his possession. He didn’t like guns. That didn’t mean he couldn’t use them, but he didn’t like them, and—particularly when he was around civilians in what was supposed to be a mostly covert op—didn’t carry them. Oh yeah, he knew they were out there. That’s why the Kevlar had been built into his leather jackets. But if there was a sniper’s rifle trained on him that he didn’t know about, no .38 was going to save his life, and it just might kill someone who’d been going about their day.
Keeping himself fit and hard and ready to play at a moment’s notice was Hunter’s best bet at keeping himself—and his team—alive. And by God, he could appreciate the hell out of someone who dedicated himself to his craft the way Grace’s lithe body was dedicated to dancing.
He’d damned near tap-danced up a potential enemy and served him to Hunter on a silver platter.
Hunter approved.
But Grace had also gotten hurt, and while Hunter had plenty of scars on his own body, he wasn’t okay with Grace having scars on his.
And the reason he wasn’t okay with Grace and scars hadn’t beat him over the head until just this moment: he didn’t like to imagine Grace in pain.
Also, hidden behind training and layers of scar tissue guarding his own heart, Hunter liked to imagine all of that smooth, tawny skin bare and graceful and….
Intimate.
Hearing Grace muttering to himself as he slept had been both mortifying and titillating. Mortifying because Hunter felt like a first-class predator, listening where he wasn’t wanted, and titillating because Grace was a walking contradiction, a vocal, irritating, unpredictable mayhem machine with no moral compass and an almost alien disposition. For a little while, Hunter had gotten to observe Grace when he hadn’t been preening or parading or showing off his formidable physical skills, and he’d been….
Vulnerable.
Gah!
And now he was hurt.
With an effort, Hunter dragged his attention back to Lucius Broadstone, who, it appeared, was not an assassin, or even muscle. He was just a businessman tired of losing his shirt to his competition.
“So,” Broadstone was saying, “once a quarter, like clockwork, when my department heads report to me about what’s in development, we do a search to see if any of the proposed projects have been put into production with any other firm. Doubling up happens—a lot—but if someone’s been working on, say, a wheelchair that responds to eye movement on a lightboard that could fit onto spectacle frames, we want to know so we can either decide whether to catch up with that or let the other guy pass us by and put our energy elsewh—”
“Is somebody?” Grace called from the bathroom.
“Sonova—” Hunter glared at the partly closed door. It would figure the little shit was still on coms.
“Is somebody what?” Broadstone asked politely, looking around from his perch on Stirling’s desk chair to see who had spoken.
Grace called out again. “Is somebody making a wheelchair that responds to eye movement on a pair of glasses?” and he was loud enough that everybody in the room winced because of the feedback into their earbuds.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Josh muttered. Artur—who apparently had been dragged into the hotel room by Julia and Molly, no longer working under pretense—massaged the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
“Grace!” Hunter growled. He looked apologetically at Josh, who shook his head.
“You go get him,” Josh said. “I need to hear this.”
“Uhm, yes,” Broadstone said, nodding. “At least it was something we’ve been refining. But why would he want to know that? It has nothing to do with what I was saying.”
“Because I thought it would be cool!” Grace called from the bathroom, right when Hunter, exasperated to the point of seriously considering spanking the impossibly crazy damned thief, cried out, “Grace! Dammit!”
Josh gave Hunter a level look. “Go talk to him,” he said. “We’ll fill you in.”
“I don’t get to listen to the club meetings anymore?” Hunter was… well, stung, that was the word. Hurt. Immeasurably.
“Yes!” Josh snapped. “Any other minute of any other day, you would be in the clubhouse!”
“Then what?”
Josh cupped his ear, because they both knew it dampened the sound, and Hunter—and Stirling, Julia, and Molly—did the same. “You called him baby,” Josh murmured. “And he’s never been anyone’s baby. Go fix it.”