The Muscle Page 6

  “He wants to make sure I’ll stay his friend,” Josh said simply. “His parents didn’t really… love him, I guess. He’s so smart. And such an asshole without meaning to be. He needs to make sure there’s people in his life he can’t drive away.”

  “He said no,” Hunter said now.

  Even after arriving—a little ahead of Grace and Artur—and hauling ass up to their hotel room, which was, thankfully, only two floors below and kitty-corner to Artur and Grace’s suite, Hunter was still fixated on this. Maybe it was the echoes of that long-ago conversation still ringing in his ears. Maybe it was the way Grace had been looking at him across the aisle on the airplane.

  As if his good opinion mattered, and Grace was afraid of losing it.

  “Why would he do that?” Hunter muttered, mostly to himself.

  Josh let out a breath. “I don’t know. Because he’s on the job?”

  “Maybe the guy wasn’t that cute,” Stirling said, piping up in that surprising way he had, not bothering to look over his own laptop. Hunter could forget Stirling was in a room until he had something to say.

  Hunter’s scowl unknitted, though. “Naw,” he muttered, dismally aware that his Midwestern accent had leaked through. “Guy even sounded cute. I think Josh is right. Grace is concentrating. This is for someone he cares about.”

  “Dance Master,” Grace said on their coms, surprising them all. “We’re here. If you check us in, I’ll get our luggage.”

  There was a moment, the sound of someone yawning, and then Artur’s voice, slightly groggy. “Of course. Let me cover the cab and give you money to tip—”

  “I can get it,” Grace said, his voice surprisingly humble. “Get us checked in. I need a nap too.”

  Hunter cocked an eye at Josh, who shrugged. “Like a cat,” he said, almost apologetically. “Good thing is, he can go from sleeping to zoomies in less than a heartbeat.”

  “And then he stays stuck on zoomies for at least the next three years,” Stirling muttered.

  “Only when chasing flies,” Grace said into the com, and Hunter masked a smile.

  “No flies here,” he said. “It’s the frickin’ Westin.”

  “Us cats will always find flies to chase,” Grace said through a yawn. “Zoomies are our favorite hobby.”

  “Well, don’t forget to take your earbud out during your other favorite hobby,” Josh muttered.

  “I thought you heard I wasn’t doing that this trip!” Grace protested, sounding legitimately hurt.

  Josh looked blank for a moment, and then his eyes widened. “I was talking about sleeping, jackass! Unless you want to hear us talking to each other—”

  “Yes, that’s fine. I’d rather know what’s going on,” Grace said without pausing. “I’ll sleep on my back and won’t smash your precious electronics. No worries.”

  Hunter looked sharply at Josh. “Why would he do that?” he mouthed.

  Josh grimaced and then mouthed back, “He doesn’t want to be alone.”

  Hunter sucked in a breath and said just loud enough to be detected by the earbud, “We gotcha, Grace. Surveillance is a go.”

  At that moment, a light came on across the corner from theirs, in one of the rooms two floors below. Hunter watched as the shades were drawn from the windows, and Grace pressed up against the glass, obviously searching them out.

  Hunter sighed and stepped forward, purposely revealing his location when being stealthy and hidden was one of his most valuable skills. Grace spotted him, gave a huge smile, and waved madly, and Hunter gave a small twitch of his hand in return.

  “See?” Grace said smugly into his com. “I knew you liked me.” And then, obviously to someone off coms, “Coming, Dance Master. I’ll set up your bags.”

  The lights in the room next to Grace’s came on, and Hunter stepped back into the shadows.

  Yeah. Shit. He liked the guy. If only he could avoid strangling him with his own toe shoes, his life would be gravy.

  STIRLING NAPPED, curling up on a pillow in the corner instead of the bed. Josh made sure he had a throw, tender as a mother hen, and then rejoined Hunter on surveillance.

  Hunter gave Stirling a look and then glanced back at Josh, who was sitting behind his com unit.

  “Anxiety,” Josh mouthed, masking his own yawn. Hunter wondered at that; Josh had always been a pretty busy guy. He’d seemed tired this last week. Maybe he had a boyfriend?

  But right now Hunter nodded. He’d figured. Stirling and Molly Christopher had been in a number of foster homes before being adopted by their parents—enough so that while not related by blood, they’d been so inseparable in the foster home that the Christophers had refused to separate them in adoption. They’d apparently had seven good years as a family before the elder Christophers had been killed in a suspicious boating accident, but Hunter got it. After having your security so savagely ripped away—again and again and again—getting it back wasn’t easy. That Josh had gravitated to Stirling and Molly as friends didn’t surprise Hunter either.

  There was something about Josh that saw the good in broken people. Hunter himself was a prime example.

  Together they were quiet for a moment, and Hunter took the time to differentiate Stirling’s gentle breathing from Grace’s over the coms.

  Then Grace began to mumble. Nothing intelligible, although it sounded like he was giving someone hell in dreamland. The soft murmurs rose and fell, because apparently Grace couldn’t be quiet even in sleep.

  Hunter threw Josh another look. “The actual hell?” he murmured.

  Josh shrugged. “Since our first sleepover in the second grade,” he told Hunter. “I figure it’s sort of a release valve for all the people he didn’t piss off that day.”

  Hunter pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut, but when he opened them, the murmuring was still going on over the coms. He refrained from looking at Josh’s porcelain-doll beauty again, because sadly, nothing would have changed. He would continue to be faithful as Josh’s friend, but as together and supernaturally poised as that boy was, he would never hold the fascination that Grace did for Hunter.

  After an hour of relative quiet—broken only by Molly and Julia popping in from the room next door to tell them they were going shopping and by Grace’s occasional sleep monologue—Hunter saw something and stiffened.

  “Josh,” he hissed. “Over there.”

  Josh pulled out a pair of small binoculars, concentrated where Hunter was looking, and let out a low whistle. “That’s not the regular light, is it?”

  “No, it is not.”

  Artur Mikkelnokov had not drawn his blackout curtain, only the outer gauzy shade. Looking into the room from their position, they could see a small light emerging from somewhere in the suite. Was it a closet? And it was bobbing furtively through the room.

  “Infrared,” Hunter rasped, and because Josh was competent as fuck, he slapped the infrared glasses into Hunter’s hand without a hiccup.

  Hunter looked again and saw two distinct heat signatures in the room, one of them prone and unmoving and the other one apparently going through Artur Mikkelnokov’s suitcase.

  “Grace,” Hunter said, quietly at first because it was easy to forget that he wasn’t the stealthy prowler in the room.

  “Amm, ormble, dpurbble, snoorp….”

  “Grace!” Hunter snapped, trying to penetrate the thickness of sleep.

  “Portable bifocular finkdoodles!” Grace gasped breathlessly.

  “Grace, there’s someone in Artur’s room. Don’t you two have connecting doors?”

  “On it,” Grace murmured, alert just like that.

  Hunter watched for a moment as Grace’s heat signature paused at the doors, and then his actual training kicked in.

  “Grace, wait! What if the guy is…?” And before he could say “armed,” Grace slid through the doors.

  “Shit, gun,” Grace snapped, and Hunter threw the infrared binoculars at Josh and tore out of the hotel room like a hound of hell.


  A Steep and Narrow Stairway

  GRACE LIKED to fancy he was a cat burglar by trade, à la Cary Grant (thank you, Josh, for making him watch To Catch a Thief when they were kids). Cat burglars were smooth. They were slick. And they didn’t do weapons. Who needed a gun when you were dead sexy and got the jewels before anyone knew they were even in a thief’s scope, right?

  So seeing the gun was a shock. Enough of one that Grace didn’t look past the weapon to the person holding it. Instead he dropped into a fluid roll, ending up chest to chest with the intruder, inside their one-armed reach and too close to hit.

  Then he grabbed the guy in a bear hug and yanked him backward, away from Artur and into Grace’s room.

  Face-to-face, the man—definitely a man, although small and neatly built, like an acrobat or a dancer as well—had a mask on, although Grace could see flashes of pale skin around the eyes, with their big surprised eyeballs practically protruding from the eyelids and mask, colorless in the dark.

  “Can’t… breathe…,” the guy choked, and Grace slammed him against the hallway wall, and again, and again, until the gun shook loose and thunked on the floor.

  The sound startled them both, and Grace loosened his hold for a fraction of a second.

  The intruder dove for the gun, and Grace—well, he was closer to the door than the window.

  He might have tried to climb out the window.

  Instead he hauled ass for the door and rocketed down the hall in his bare feet, every step a missile-fueled grand jeté.

  He heard the thundering footsteps of his pursuer and dodged for the ice machine and the stairs beyond so he wouldn’t end up pinned against the elevator doors.

  Hunter’s voice crackled in his ear. “Grace, can you hear me? Grace!”

  “Yeah, yeah, I can hear you,” Grace muttered. He was in outstanding physical shape, and his feet were used to punishment. He could probably run down the stairs singing “Whiskey in the Jar” at the top of his lungs. “What do you want?”

  “Where are you?”

  “On the stairwell. He’s about two floors behind me—shit!” A shot zinged down the stairwell, plenty wide, but Grace saw plaster dust. He threw himself over the railing and hit the landing about eight feet below, continuing to run.

  “Is he shooting at you?”

  “You sound panicked,” Grace observed clinically. “Why do you sound panicked? I’m the one he’s shooting at!”

  “Shut up and run! I’ll have the second-floor door open. Get there!”

  “Great,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Only eight more floors to go.”

  “Grace!”

  “Fine!”

  Grace kept going, his bare feet far quieter than what sounded like a herd of elephants behind him. He passed a light switch at the seventh floor and hit Off as he ran, and, blessedly, herd-of-elephants guy decided not to shoot again.

  “Six,” he murmured. “Five.” His legs weren’t strained per se, but he was feeling as though he was beginning a thoroughly satisfying workout. “Four.” For kicks, he went over another landing, wincing when he caught his toe on a rough patch of the metal stairs. Well, he was showing off.

  “He still behind you?” Hunter asked in his coms.

  Grace paused. The herd of elephants had slowed down a tad, and Grace could hear somebody breathing hard. Ha! That’s what you got for not having Artur Mikkelnokov as your dance master! You got weak, that’s what you got, and slow! Artur, desperate to keep Grace from spinning out into his own unpredictable head, had worked him into exhaustion for three years, until Grace had figured out what he was doing and promised very fervently that it wasn’t necessary anymore.

  By then, Grace had discovered lockpicks and sneaking into people’s houses to get revenge when they were complete dicks, and he’d discovered that Josh had a very specific set of skills to help him out.

  He and Josh had started supplementing the dance conservatory’s coffers with the proceeds of their little adventures, and Grace had asked Artur, very politely and respectfully, to maybe tone down the seven-day exhaustion so he could “work for the employers” who kept donating to Artur’s beloved school.

  Artur, satisfied that Grace wasn’t going to self-destruct again, had agreed—and Grace had kept himself plenty fit learning how to climb elevator shafts in high-rises and BASE jumping off rooftops in Chicago.

  All of that served him well now as he saw the open door and zoomed straight for it, feet flying on the roughened stairs.

  “Don’t stop,” Hunter said into the coms. “Keep going back up the elevators to check on Artur.”

  Grace did what he said and was halfway through the lobby when he heard a muffled grunt from Hunter, and Josh’s chortle.

  “And the quarterback is toast!” Josh cried. “Oh my God—clotheslined so hard! Hunter’s binding his wrists—”

  “Shit!” Grace hissed, skidding to a stop as he neared the elevators. A white guy with dark hair was coming out of the elevator that went up to floors twelve through sixteen. He was dressed in black slacks, a fitted black turtleneck, and what looked like a black balaclava on his head.

  Grace would put money down that it was a ski mask.

  He met the guy’s eyes—an arctic hazel color—and watched as the man adjusted his stance from walking to charging.

  Grace backpedaled furiously, fighting the tide of people waiting to board the elevators like a demented salmon.

  “Abort! Abort! Abort!” he shouted into his com. “Bad guy coming!”

  He pushed his way past a family of at least twelve tourists, all of them looking in wonder at the elevators that went to different sections of the hotel. When he’d cleared them, he took a moment to spin on his heel and run.

  Again.

  The Westin Bayshore sat on a little spit of land directly next to the marina, but once Grace was down the pathway and across the street parking lot, he could use the line of trees along the road for cover. He sprinted down the lawn, the sun bright as noon at six in the evening, keeping the marina to his right.

  “Grace!” Hunter snarled. “Where are you?”

  “Running along the marina!” Grace panted, and yes, he was a little winded now.

  “I’m swinging around from the other side,” Hunter told him, his own breaths harsh. But then, Hunter had been beating people up and hog-tying them too. That was why he was there! “Is he behind you?”

  Grace risked a look behind him. His pursuer was muscular and fast—as fast as Grace—but he had shoes to protect his feet and hadn’t run fourteen flights of stairs before their chase began. “Gaining!”

  “Keep running, baby,” Hunter muttered, and a tiny part of Grace wanted to stop, clutch his chest, and twirl. Baby? Hunter had called him baby? But he heard a footfall behind him and had to put his whole heart into staying three steps ahead of the guy who probably did not have his best interests at heart.

  Grace put on a burst of speed and heard muffled swearing behind him. Ouch! Fuck! He didn’t even want to look at his big toe; he’d felt the tree root when he’d slammed into it. Goddammit! He pulled all his discipline together, tried to pretend each running step was part of a dance, and still heard his pursuer gaining.

  He risked a glance up, wondering how high the tree branches were. He could leap pretty high, right? Nobody had to run away on a two-dimensional plane if they could leap pretty high!

  He’d just sighted the low-hanging branch on the last tree in the line when he realized he’d need a lift up—dammit, only one step—to get to the branch, which was maybe twelve feet off the ground.

  Then he heard the guy behind him panting a little, slowing down a tad, and had a wonderful, awful idea.

  “Hang on, Grace,” Hunter muttered into his coms, and Grace didn’t have the breath to spare to tell him that was exactly what he had in mind.

  He couldn’t do this like a gymnast—he was a dancer. He took one grand jeté into a pirouette, stopped at 180 degrees, and used the extra momentum to propel him forward
, directly at his pursuer. Jeté, jeté, leap. Foot to knee, foot to groin, foot to chest, foot to shoulder, and he neatly ran up the body of the man chasing him, using his last step to leap up to the branch, catch hold of it, and swing to burn up the energy of the jump.

  The tree shook, shedding pine needles and moisture from the recent rain on his head, and he looked downward.

  His would-be assailant staggered a few feet forward and turned around, obviously trying to figure out what in the fuck had just happened, when Hunter appeared out of nowhere and tackled the guy like a football dummy.

  Grace shifted his weight, trying to keep the rough bark of the tree from digging into his palms, and waited patiently while Hunter knelt on the guy’s back and secured his wrists with zip ties. For his part, the almost-assailant was either too dazed or too afraid of the police to do much more than grunt and struggle—right up until Hunter applied a specific amount of pressure to the guy’s shoulder with his thumb.

  Then he whimpered a little before giving up and going limp, which was fine with Grace. Asshole.

  Finally Hunter stood fluidly and looked up. “You ready to come down now?”

  “I don’t know. Did you want to do some more with the bad guy? Get him flowers? Chocolates? Cook him dinner?”

  He watched Hunter fight against a smirk. “Bad guys don’t even get lube,” he said starkly. “Now, do you need any help or not?”

  “You’re not going to lay down your jacket for my bare feet?” Grace said, joking mostly, but damn, his toe stung. And dangling, with his feet below him, was sending all the blood rushing there; he could feel every scrape, every cut, every bruise from the last frantic ten minutes, and all of it was starting to throb.

  He was surprised to see Hunter frown up at him and grimace. “Yeah, all right.”