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 of 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.
“Nice to see you again,” John said, calling back to the night before on the elevator. “Where’s the wife?”
“Sleeping in before a bit of shopping,” Josh told him. “You might see her out and about today.”
“Looking forward to it. We’d sit with you, but we need our java before we have our own meeting. You guys enjoy your day. It’s supposed to be fantastic! I understand Grouse Mountain is the place to be today.”
“We’ll have to check it out,” Josh said with feigned geniality, and the two men disappeared inside the shop, leaving Josh and Hunter to keep their pleasant expressions on their faces and only express their irritation sotto voce.
“Fuck,” Hunter said, masking his lips with his own coffee. “Stirling, you there?”
“Yeah—that was quick.”
“We’ve been made,” Josh said. “Good news is, they’re going back to the hotel to grab the package and make the drop, but we need replacements.”
“Aw, fuck,” Stirling muttered. “I gotta wake up my sister.”
“And my mom,” Josh said grimly. “And the rest of us get to entertain Artur today, and probably shop for them.”
“Aces,” Stirling said. “I’m taking off to go tell them now.”
“Roger that.” Josh put his coffee cup down and laughed at something Hunter might have said. They heard the earbud click again, and Josh said, “Okay, so about Grace.”
Hunter’s brain did a switchback and almost came off the rails. “I’m sorry?”
“He thinks anybody he really gets close to only wants him for how he looks. Either that or they’ll turn him away as soon as they find out who he really is.”
“Color me fucking surprised.” Hunter rolled his eyes and clutched his chest. “I’m going to have a heart attack and die from that surprise.”
“If you break my friend’s heart, I’ll make sure of it,” Josh said, and from any other twenty-year-old with no military experience on the planet, Hunter might think he was kidding. But this was Josh, and Josh didn’t fuck around. And Josh knew what Hunter had done in covert ops and knew how hard it would be to kill him, and had just promised to do it anyway.
He had Hunter’s complete and total attention.
“What do you need from me?” he asked soberly. Josh had pulled him from a dark place—a really dark place. Eight months after watching Paulie’s car explode, of seeing the person they were guarding go up in flames with him, Hunter had stopped taking jobs. He had money; he had an apartment in Chicago. What he hadn’t had was drive.
He’d gone back to school in an effort to keep the hours from ticking by, to keep all the should-have-dones and what-if-I’d-dones from taking over his life.
He’d only been thirty, and that was a hard way to live.
When Josh had shown up in time to watch Hunter taking out a would-be attacker in a dark parking garage—after setting up the sting to get the guy himself—he’d started out taking Hunter to coffee.