He’d have to stand watch there and see if Jenkins came out of the marina again. If he took off in a boat, well, Hunter couldn’t have followed him anyway.
“Hunter,” Josh snapped out into the earbud. “Where are you?”
“Watching for Jenkins. He’s meeting someone on a boat in the marina—can’t see which one.”
“Great. Okay, keep watch. Check your text.”
Hunter pulled out his phone and saw Moving to Times Square. Will text you rooms.
Hunter blinked. “Goddammit.”
Explain later. Lucius is going to stay in Artur’s room tonight. You and Grace get to room with me and Stirling. The women get their own because girl parts are gross. Sorry about that.
“Goddammit,” Hunter muttered again—and texted it too.
Yeah, life’s a cockblock. You’ll recover.
Hunter let out a sigh. It’s not that. Or not only that. Queen-sized beds, Josh. They’re tiny.
Stirling curls up like a kitten. We’ll be lucky if Grace doesn’t keep us up all night muttering. There’s the real danger. Give it another hour and then bail. I have the feeling Jenkins has an escape planned if he’s in the marina, and we’re not equipped to have you follow. Keep us posted. See you in an hour.
See you.
Hunter huffed out a breath and resumed his post moodily. Josh was probably right. Whatever Jenkins had done back in the hotel—and nobody was talking on coms, which gave Hunter a very bad feeling—odds were good he had his escape well planned.
They needed to see who this guy worked for and what his connections were before they tracked him down. Anyone who’d shoot at an innocent man in a stairwell and chase down the guy he’d been planning to rob was no one to fuck with.
And odds were good they’d be dealing with Jenkins again.
In the Normal
THEY HAD about an hour after situating themselves in the Times Square before Hunter returned, meeting them in “the boys’ room” as Julia had begun to call it even as they’d been walking, luggage in tow.
Grace had been carrying his bags and Artur’s, but that Lucius guy, who couldn’t seem to leave them alone, had flagged down a taxi so Artur didn’t have to walk the distance. He’d also helped carry some of the other luggage, including Julia’s and Molly’s. They seemed to have bought out half of Vancouver, in spite of the fact that this was a work trip. Grace couldn’t believe it.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like clothes—he bought a new wardrobe whenever he put highlights in his hair. He still had a closet full of his magenta phase. He just didn’t understand random shopping for nothing that ended up netting you a whole other suitcase. It was like a gift or something. Grace was impressed.
But he was also disappointed. He’d been thinking about this night as his and Hunter’s last night together. They’d have more rockin’ sex, and then Hunter could tell him they wouldn’t be doing this when they got back to Chicago because blah blah blah, they were coworkers and blah blah blah vacation, and Grace would tune him out anyway because he didn’t want to hear it, even though he knew it was coming.
He’d really wanted to have the time before he and Hunter went back to being….
What?
When he hooked up with guys from the dance troupe, they’d go back to being fellow dancers. No harm, no foul, whatever. But Grace and Hunter worked different jobs. Would he and Hunter be able to hook up again the next time they went out of town?
He just… just… didn’t want to not hook up with Hunter again. He didn’t want to hook up with anyone else right now. Just….
Fuck.
Fucking bugs.
He’d gone up the stairwell after he split off from Hunter, and Josh and Stirling had come down to meet him. But they didn’t need to go that far.
Michael Jenkins hadn’t closed the circuit board by the stairwell door completely, and Stirling had traced the wires he’d fiddled with to their rooms.
He’d tapped into the security feed for their hallways, for their rooms, and had added audio to the rooms themselves.
They’d been bugged.
The minute they’d seen that, they’d quit using the coms, except for Josh’s epically long text with Hunter, and they’d moved.
Grace had texted Josh that they could leave the bugs there, and he and Hunter could make whoever was listening wish they’d never seen a bug, but Josh had looked him in the eye and said, “Do you really want what you and Hunter do alone to be the property of anyone who sneaks into your room?”
Grace scowled at that. That thing that he and Hunter had done the night before wasn’t a tchotchke. It wasn’t a diamond or a hair straightener. It couldn’t be put in someone’s pocket or given away. That didn’t belong to anybody but Grace and Hunter, and dammit all anyway!
“I hate people,” he announced, genuinely pissed, and Josh gave him a sympathetic look.
And it didn’t hit him until they were slogging from one hotel to the next that Josh had given him a sympathetic look and not a snarky one, not an I-told-you-so look and not anything that would piss Grace off. Josh had given him a sympathetic look because Josh apparently understood something about Grace and Hunter that Grace wasn’t ready to face up to yet.
Or he hadn’t been until they’d gotten to the room, which seemed tiny to have four grown men in it, and Grace found himself hanging Hunter’s coat—the one Grace had stood on, that first day—carefully in the closet.
Hunter’s coat. It needed to be wiped off and cleaned and oiled and cared for. Grace didn’t know how to do any of those things, but he could at least hang it up and shower and then sit on the bed and out of Stirling’s way as he set up a makeshift system with Josh as quickly as they could.
Sort of sit on the bed.
When Josh looked up at him, he was in the lotus position, on his shoulders, with his neatly folded legs flat and facing the ceiling and his head dangling over the edge of the bed.
Josh had seen him do this before, and his upside-down visage didn’t even twitch.
“Feeling unsettled, are we?”
“I wanted a last night.”
“Last night of what? Vancouver? It’s not going anywhere.”
Grace scowled at him.
“Neither is Hunter. You idiots live in my parents’ house.” His voice went high as he mimicked a melodrama. “Oh, Hunter, whatever shall we do? We live a whole three rooms away from each other, and we’ll never feel each other up again!”
“I hate you,” Grace muttered, embarrassed. “That’s not what I was thinking.”
Stirling snorted and continued hooking up his computer.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Grace asked, although from Stirling, it was practically a paragraph.
“It means,” Josh translated, going back to the electronics, “that I’m pretty sure Hunter is prepared to carry this on when we get back to Chicago, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t.”
“I’m too me,” Grace said, hating himself. “He’s probably tired of me.”
It was Josh’s turn to snort. “Have you seen him? He could probably run a marathon tomorrow and then an obstacle course while he shoots bad guys. I think you’re overestimating your capacity to be a pain in the ass.”