The Muscle E-Book

Amy Lane

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

A Long Con Adventure A true protector will guard your heart before his own. Hunter Rutledge saw one too many people die in his life as mercenary muscle to go back to the job, so he was conveniently at loose ends when Josh Salinger offered him a place in his altruistic den of thieves. Hunter is almost content having found a home with a group of people who want justice badly enough to steal it. If only one of them didn't keep stealing his attention from the task at hand…. Superlative dancer and transcendent thief Dylan "Grace" Li lives in the moment. But when mobsters blackmail the people who gave him dance—and the means to save his own soul—Grace turns to Josh for help. Unfortunately, working with Josh's crew means working with Hunter Rutledge, and for Grace, that's more dangerous than any heist. Grace's childhood left him thinking he was too difficult to love—so he's better off not risking his love on anyone else. Avoiding commitment keeps him safe. But somehow Hunter's solid, grounding presence makes him feel safer.  Can Grace trust that letting down his guard to a former mercenary doesn't mean he'll get shot in the heart?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

Prologue—Broken Steps

Predatory Animal

Tension

Game Faces, Everyone

A Steep and Narrow Stairway

Change in Temperature

On Delicate Toebeans

Belling the Cat

Easy Feeling

Reckonings

Taking Flight

Letters Home

No Room on the Fence

Old Business

In the Normal

Traps and Pitfalls

Hallelujah

Let the Dance Commence

The Devil in the Dilemma

Between the Bars

Growing Up

Baby

Dance 10, Heist 3

Bowing Out

Choose your Lane to Love!

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About the Author

By Amy Lane

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Copyright

The Muscle

By Amy Lane

A Long Con Adventure

A true protector will guard your heart before his own.

Hunter Rutledge saw one too many people die in his life as mercenary muscle to go back to the job, so he was conveniently at loose ends when Josh Salinger offered him a place in his altruistic den of thieves.

Hunter is almost content having found a home with a group of people who want justice badly enough to steal it. If only one of them didn’t keep stealing his attention from the task at hand….

Superlative dancer and transcendent thief Dylan “Grace” Li lives in the moment. But when mobsters blackmail the people who gave him dance—and the means to save his own soul—Grace turns to Josh for help.

Unfortunately, working with Josh’s crew means working with Hunter Rutledge, and for Grace, that’s more dangerous than any heist.

Grace’s childhood left him thinking he was too difficult to love—so he’s better off not risking his love on anyone else. Avoiding commitment keeps him safe. But somehow Hunter’s solid, grounding presence makes him feel safer. Can Grace trust that letting down his guard to a former mercenary doesn’t mean he’ll get shot in the heart?

To Mate and Mary, obvs., but also to my teenagers. Perverse as cats, self-centered as toddlers—but also with great hearts, clever minds, and surprise talents. Grace is so very easy to love—and so are my children. They are also very entertaining.

Acknowledgments

MY EDITING team deserves ice cream.

Author’s Note

THERE IS a trickster god in nearly every mythology and every faith. A creature with power, whimsy, and a DGAF attitude that has, by turns, entertained us and kept us humble since the beginning of time. This series is, in its way, an homage to the trickster god—the creature who doesn’t work within the bounds of law and order but can, sometimes, even the odds when chaos seems overwhelming. Loki, Coyote, Gwydion, Ate`—the list goes on.

And now Grace.

May Grace be ever in your favor.

Prologue—Broken Steps

DYLAN LI sat on the worn and warped wooden floor in the fifth-story dance studio a little off the Loop in downtown Chicago. He hugged one knee to his chest and leaned against the mirrored wall behind him, watching Tabitha Marie Mikkelnokov dance the final scene of a student-written, student-produced contemporary version of Cinderella that she had choreographed.

She was sucking big balls at it too.

Normally Tabby was like a gymnast’s ribbon—her body moved through the air like silk. She was a tad too tall to make it in the big ballets, but the Aether Conservatory, the school Tabitha’s grandfather had put together with grit and most of his savings, had made it policy to take the dancers who worked hard, the ones who loved dance with all their soul, and to make allowances for things like standard height and even—on the odd occasion—ability. One of the best teachers at the Conservatory, Rudy, was a young man who would only ever perform with their adult education classes because his body was simply not that of a dancer, with tight sinews and slight congenital deformities that wouldn’t allow him the fluidity of movement a dancer needed.

Artur Mikkelnokov kept Rudy there because his heart was consumed with the dance, and he passed this passion on to his young students. They learned to love the joy and pain of it because Rudy did.

Tabby didn’t have such problems. Even with those extra inches, she could have performed in some of the top ballet troupes of the country, although she would not have gotten the lead because her partner would have needed to be nearly six foot three to stand even with her when she was en pointe. Aether was one of the first studios in the area to start considering how a dancer looked performing, how they made the audience feel, instead of how the dancer conformed to an almost impossible ideal of beauty.

Dylan—who stood shorter than her at five feet, seven inches tall—loved being partnered with her and loved watching her dance.

Except today, when an epileptic donkey would have been more graceful on the floor.

Dylan couldn’t take it anymore. “The actual fuck, Tabby,” he burst out in the middle of a plaintive violin solo.

Tabby whirled, coming down from a clumsy en pointe and almost stumbling to her knees. “Goddammit, Dylan!” she snarled. “I was trying to concentrate!”

Dylan leaned over to hit Pause on the sound system so the strains of plaintive violins stopped bouncing around Aether’s biggest practice room. “You were failing! The fuck is wrong with you? I’ve seen my housemates’ cats dance better!”

Tabby glared at him and then dropped her eyes. Dispiritedly, she padded across the platform to fall into a crisscross-applesauce sit-down at Dylan’s side.

“Sorry,” she said miserably, and then like she knew him—they’d been paired together since they were twelve years old—she leaned her head against his shoulder.

He looked at the top of her head, baffled. Her hair, toffee brown with tiny crinkles that were a result of her mother’s Russian ancestry and her father’s African-American family, sprang up from the usually merciless bun she pulled it back into and tickled his cheek.

“We’re doing this now?” he asked. Usually he’d be acerbic or teasing or even somewhat of an asshole, but this was Tabitha, and if he’d ever had a sister, he wouldn’t love his sister this much because she’d probably be too much like him. But Tabitha was earthy and honest, and she ignored seven-eighths of what came out of Dylan’s mouth and listened, instead, to the things he actually did.

He gave her tiny earrings every birthday—real gold or silver, real semiprecious stones—and she wore many of them in her ears every day. He never told her that he often stole them from the jewelry boxes of the girls who’d made fun of her in high school. His baby-thief training years, as it were. He would enjoy that little bit of irony all by himself.

“Yes,” she said, her voice clogged from tears she was obviously trying not to shed. “You are my emotional support animal, whether you want to be or not.”

He sighed and looped an arm around her shoulders. “Fine. Under duress.” He gave her a little squeeze, and she let out a laugh.

“Good emotional support animal,” she praised, and he dropped a kiss on the top of her head.

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong?” he asked softly.

“I can’t,” she said, and her voice broke.

He rocked her for a few moments and then asked, “You’re not pregnant, are you?”

“No!” She laughed through her tears, which looked really hideous, in fact, but he preferred it to the hopeless sobbing. “You ass, I am not pregnant! Jesus. Why would you ask that?”

“Because I want to keep dancing with you,” he told her, because, duh! “And I was sort of hoping you weren’t knocked up. You can call me your emotional support animal all you want, but we both know I’m a selfish bitch, so you can’t be all that surprised.”

She sputtered, wiping her face on the loose T-shirt that hung over her leotard. “Dear God, Dylan Li. The things that come out of your mouth. Don’t!” She turned to him with horrified eyes; he’d been known to blurt out uncomfortable things about his sex life at the merest provocation. “Don’t even go there,” she told him sternly. “If I have to hear about some guy’s come that tasted like cinnamon gum, I will vomit. I don’t have to be pregnant to have standards.”

Dylan chuckled appreciatively, although, point of fact, there hadn’t been a guy or a hookup or whatever for a couple of months now. He refused to dwell on why that was because then he might have to put a name to….

He wasn’t going to do it.

“Well, fine,” he told Tabby, suddenly grateful she had problems for purely selfish reasons. “I won’t tell you about cinnamon come, but you will tell me why you’re dancing like shit. We go live with this show in three weeks, babycakes. You can’t afford to suck donkey balls now!”

She let out a shaky breath. “Except it might not,” she whispered, and Dylan’s heart froze.

“What?”

“Oh, Dylan. It’s awful. My grandfather might lose everything. His lease on the studio, his performance contracts, everything. It’s not fair! And there’s nothing I can do about it. Nothing!”

Dylan took a few deep breaths and tried to center himself. “Aether Conservatory?” he asked, just to make sure. His parents traveled the globe, mostly looking after their financial interests in Hong Kong. Dylan had been left alone with nannies and housekeepers at a very young age. He tended to be destructive when bored or lonely, and only two things had kept him from flaming out in a big ball of drugs and id.

His best friend, Josh Salinger, was one of them, and dance—specifically dancing at Aether Conservatory—was the other.

“You will explain that,” he said to Tabitha, needing to hear the details.

The more she spilled, the longer she spoke, the more he realized that maybe the gods of chaos really were looking out for him.

Because Dylan Li, and his friendship with Josh Salinger, might be the only things to save the dance company that had saved his life.

Predatory Animal

After Paulie, Before Josh

“PAULIE!”

Hunter Rutledge woke up sweating, shaking, and cold. God. Fucking dream. Why? Why did he have to remember it? Keep remembering it for the past eight months?

Him and Paulie, outside their employer’s mansion in Arizona, scanning the dusty confines of the compound with restless eyes.

“Did he say why we’re going now?” Hunter asked.

Paulie shook his blond head grimly and arched a mischievous brow. “I know his timing could have been better,” he said dryly, and if Hunter had been anyone else, he would have smirked.

Paulie Claymore had a slender, tight little body and was one of the sweetest assholes Hunter had ever had the privilege to plow. He and Paulie had been off duty when the phone rang in their guest quarters. It had been their boss, telling them they were on emergency duty because the guys who were supposed to be on shift had gone into town for….

Yeah. There was no reason. The guys had just flaked.

Hunter had been a mercenary for three years after his six-year stint with the corps—bodyguard work mostly, with a few stretches of industrial security. He knew what good logistics were and he knew when things were fishy—and this was definitely fishy. But, well, he and Paulie had a job to do.

They’d been guarding Ronald Pinter, industrialist, ex-cattle-rancher, and entrepreneur, for the past three months, and the guy had “paranoid drug user” written all over him. Hunter hated the job. Pinter refused to tell his people what he was so afraid of, and every time Hunter saw him, with his wet eyes and red, runny nose, he expected Pinter’s brains to explode.

The job was sketchy, and after three months, Hunter wanted out. But first he wanted Paulie to come with him.

He and Paulie had been hired at the same time, both of them referred by a mutual military contact, and when they moved together, Paulie was like the extension to Hunter’s shoulder he’d always wanted. Off duty, they’d run evacuation logistics, beefed up Pinter’s security, and practiced their marksmanship as synced together as the parts of a well-maintained engine.

The sex had been inevitable.

Paulie had been willing, excited even, to hook up with another man on the job. Usually, he’d told Hunter, his hookups were guys he met in the club scene or people he dated through mutual friends. Being with someone who knew what he did—and what he was capable of doing—was a rush for Paulie, and he loved Hunter’s cock as much as Hunter loved his ass.

It wasn’t true love. It wasn’t even friendship. But Paulie was a brother-in-arms with a unique place in Hunter’s life, and he didn’t want to leave his fuckbuddy to the wolves.

Fucking is where they’d been when they’d gotten Pinter’s call.

They were barely dressed now. Hunter could still smell Paulie on his skin, still feel the silk of his body gripping Hunter’s cock.

Still remember Paulie’s ecstatic smile as Hunter slid into his ass.

And Hunter was having a hard time getting his head in the game. Where in the fuck did the other team go again? Chancellor was in his fifties, hot in a silver fox sort of way, and Creighton was built like a gorilla—Hunter regarded them with intense dislike, but they seemed to be Pinter’s favorites. Lacking in humor, both of them, but they had a sort of brutish, impersonal competence that made them easy to work with. But not trustworthy—and definitely not friendly. Hunter was just as glad Pinter had taken a liking to the two of them, giving them the plum assignments and the trips to Cabo and giving him and Paulie time to get busy.

“We should put him into the car while it’s in the garage,” Hunter said seriously. “You go fetch him and start the engine. I’ll keep lookout by the gate.”

Paulie nodded and winked. “Taking point, as always.”

Hunter nodded soberly. He didn’t engage in a lot of banter or play, but he enjoyed that Paulie did. And Paulie’s boyish smile hid the heart of a tried-and-true soldier. “Protecting my people,” he said, smiling slightly when Paulie gave a little hop as he turned toward the garage.

Hunter pulled out his radio and called the gatehouse to tell them to be ready for the limo to pull through and got only static in return. His stomach churning, he jogged the two hundred yards or so to the small building that stood guard between the two lanes of the driveway to see why Stanley wasn’t answering.

He was twenty yards away from the gatehouse, searching for the retired cop’s jowly face through the white-bordered window, when he realized that all he could see was a crimson stain against the back wall.

Fuck!

He pulled out his radio again and hit Paulie’s code. “Paulie, they’re inside. Double-check everything. The gatehouse has been compromised. Dammit, Chancellor and Creighton must have set us up!”

Hunter had no idea why—hell, he really didn’t know his employer’s occupation beyond “retired tech magnate.” All he knew was that a month ago, Pinter had taken the four of them to Chicago. Paulie and Hunter had waited with the car inside a parking garage while Creighton and Chancellor had gone to some sort of public function on Navy Pier, after-hours. Pinter’s behavior had gotten more and more erratic since that trip—and the nose candy had been flowing like water.

Then two weeks ago, Creighton and Chancellor had escorted Pinter to a swank hotel in Guadalajara for a good meal and a trip to a strip joint. They’d come back two days later with a tan. When Hunter had asked if they knew why they’d taken the trip, both guys had shrugged, not even curious.

“He did something,” Chancellor, the silver fox, had said. “He went downstairs without us and came back, put a thing in his suitcase, and said it was time to party. So we went and partied, hookers on him.”

Charming.

Chancellor didn’t remember anything else, not even what the thing was that Pinter had put in his suitcase. All Creighton could talk about was the hookers. The hookers grossed Hunter out, frankly, because Creighton sounded like he’d treated them like shit, and ever since then, Pinter had been even more weasel-eyed than before. Hunter’s instincts had been screaming GTFO at top volume.

But Paulie had wanted to wait it out. This had been an easy gig—Fat City, he’d called it. He was so excited not to be tramping through a desert or a jungle, and he had a guy and was getting some on a regular basis. Why would he want to leave now?

And Hunter? God help him, he hadn’t had a real boyfriend since he’d left the military for mercenary work. If they could get clear of this job, perhaps find a different gig, a better one, maybe he and Paulie could actually talk—maybe even connect emotionally and not just physically. But they had to be in a place that didn’t make his intestines itchy, where he and Paulie didn’t have to hook up on the down-low.

Or be prepared to see a sweet old retired cop’s brains splattered against the gatehouse wall.

“We’re loading into the limo now,” Paulie said over the radio. “Pinter’s a wreck. Had to fish him out of a bowl full of blow. Fucking Jesus!”

“I’ll be by the gatehouse. Standing by.”

Hunter watched as one of the doors of the four-car garage attached to the side of the house opened, his eyes moving constantly, gut muscles pulled practically to his spine. Oh, he didn’t like this, didn’t like this—

Flames first.

Orange and billowing, blowing out of the garage with the force of the concussion that hadn’t yet rocked him.

By the time his feet had started to move, the blast was tearing through the garage, through the back portion of the house, through his soul.

There wasn’t enough left to identify in the end, although DNA had confirmed both Paulie and Pinter. But that’s not what Hunter saw in his dreams. In his dreams, he saw skeletons, scorched and shaking, sitting in the burned-out husk of the limousine, jaws locked open in an endless scream.

That had been eight months ago, and Hunter was beginning to realize he wasn’t ever going to shake that vision, not even in sleep, and his class on computers in criminal justice wasn’t much of a motivation to roll out of bed. But Hunter had depended on routine and order to get him through the last eight months, and today was no different. He sat through the lecture, making the occasional note about something that had been changed from when he’d gotten a similar course in the military, then all but sleepwalked back to the parking structure that held his car.

Where he saw another one.

God. These fuckers. So transparent. Watching their victims—usually females but sometimes a smaller, skinnier male who looked defenseless—waiting for a chance to strike. Sometimes it was just a purse snatching or a mugging, but others? Hunter was pretty sure he’d stopped something else entirely when he took those guys out.

Because when he saw them, he always took them out.

This guy was following a pretty college girl, the hood of his navy blue sweatshirt pulled over his face, his hands in his pockets. Hunter was positive he had a weapon in there, and that made it even better.

These guys were proving to be what really got Hunter out of bed. He started tracking the predator through the garage on the heels of the girl, who was dressed fashionably but impractically in a miniskirt and boots, her thin wool coat pulled as far down as it could go. Hunter wondered if it was a waitressing uniform and felt bad for her. Any man who thought that was a good idea in Chicago in the winter should be forced to wear a Speedo to work. He watched her get into the elevator, the predator at her heels, and called, “Hold that door!”

She did, thank God. Maybe she felt sorry for him in his short leather coat with no gloves. He gave her a brief smile and pushed the button one floor up from hers.

When she got out, Hunter subtly placed himself in front of her would-be assailant, blocking him, and wasn’t surprised when he felt the point of a knife at his waist and heard a harshly whispered, “Out of my way, asshole,” as the doors closed.

In one clean move, Hunter broke the guy’s nose with an elbow shot, and then, still using his elbow, went to work on his ribs, his liver, his kidneys, and anything else within reach. The door opened with a ding just as the guy fell to the floor, and to Hunter’s horror, a young man wearing black slacks, black boots, black fedora, and a black sweater under a black leather coat slid in, arching an eyebrow at the groaning mugger on the floor of the filthy elevator, holding his ribs.

“Nice work,” he said. “I was waiting for Shaundra when she got out. She said you’d blocked this perp.”

Hunter’s eyes went wide. “You were—”

“This guy’s gotten three girls this month,” he said, jaw hardening. “One of them was Shaundra’s roommate. Apparently he likes miniskirts and boots—fucking perv.” The kid shook his head. “And he’s brutal. Lots of blood and tearing with this one. I hope he gets a fencepost up his ass. Anyway, nicely done. You want to help me drop this asshole in front of the local precinct?”

“He’s seen my face,” Hunter rasped.

The kid—God, how old was he?—dropped to his haunches, pulled out a small canister, and cold-bloodedly pepper sprayed the guy in the eyes, ignoring his scream as he stood up, wiped the canister down with an astringent wipe he’d pulled out of his pocket, and then went to work on his fingers. “Forgot the gloves. Goddammit. Anyway, good luck trusting him to identify anybody now. Here—they’ve got his DNA on file and the precinct’s around the corner. If we cut through the bottom of the garage, we can drop this sack of shit and retreat.”

“And then what?”

The kid grinned, a hint of Peter Pan in his smile, even though he had small, perfect masculine features with sloe-dark eyes.

“Then I take you out to coffee.”

And that had been how Hunter had met Josh Salinger, a young man who would never be his lover but would definitely change his life.

After Josh Salinger showed him Grace

HUNTER LIKED the shadows. He liked leaning against a wall or a doorframe or even sitting on the floor next to the couch, where people wouldn’t see him.

When people couldn’t see him, they couldn’t account for what he might do, and when they couldn’t account for what he might do, he had the advantage.

Right now, he was leaning in the corner between the wet bar and the wall, with a perfect view of the couch, conversation pit, and television in Josh Salinger’s parents’ basement.

Of course, Josh Salinger’s parents—all three of them—had money, lots of it, so the basement was three times the size of any apartment Hunter had ever lived in and was comfortable as hell, with giant cutouts of every sport known to Chicago decorating the Chicago-red wall behind the couch. The furniture was red leather, the carpet was Cubs blue, and while it could have been an incredibly tacky sort of space, the gleaming bar and tiled kitchenette area, as well as the massive audio/visual setup, made it utilitarian and practical too.

The practicality was the sort of class Hunter could really get into.

He’d been invited to live upstairs in the mansion itself, and though he’d taken a room, he’d kept his loft in one of the high-rises off Wacker. Most of his apartment had been converted into a workout space anyway. His room at the Salinger mansion felt more like home.

And here, in this covert corner of his home, he listened to Grace’s friend spill her problems to Josh Salinger’s Uncle Danny as if the slender little man could make all the world’s ills go away.

For his part, Danny “Lightfingers” Mitchell—who went by Benjamin Morgan at the moment—listened, his sober, tip-tilted hazel eyes alight and mouth pulled up at the corner as though a comforting smile was only a breath away.

“So, darling, Grace tells us—”

“Grace?” The girl, Tabitha, frowned at Danny, who gave a little nod to Dylan Li.

Who preened.

“It’s what we call him,” Danny told her. “God knows why. Boy could destroy a china shop with one go-round, couldn’t he?” Danny spoke with a trace of a European accent, often slipping into a faux Irish brogue, but he could swear like any kid from the Jersey shore when put to it.

Tabby smiled and went to wipe her eyes on her shoulder, but Felix Salinger, Josh’s father and the love of Lightfingers Mitchell’s life, beat her to the punch with an offered linen handkerchief—probably monogrammed.

Well, Josh’s family was loaded to the gills, but from what Hunter could see, they’d earned it.

“Dylan said you all could probably help me.” She looked around the den, seeming to notice the number of faces she didn’t recognize, and frowned. “I’m afraid I don’t understand how, though.”

“We’re good at solving problems,” Danny said mildly, and Hunter snorted to himself. “We sort of host a think tank for special friends if they need a little bit of help.”

Actually, they were a bunch of con men, mercenaries, and thieves. But that didn’t mean they weren’t nice people.

Tabby sniffled and clung to the handkerchief. “It’s not a little help I need,” she said. “It’s a lot of help.”

Danny patted her knee. “Oh, honey, how about you let us decide. But first, tell your Uncle Danny all about it.”

Tabby nodded miserably and proceeded to outline a story of greed, protection, smuggling, and extortion that might have made their toes curl and their eyes grow wide if everyone in the room hadn’t seen a lot worse at some time in their lives.

Still, as corruption went, this one ranked up there.

TABITHA’S PARENTS were scientists and, like Dylan’s parents, had spent much of their lives abroad, doing research for an environmental defense fund to solve the pollution problem of the world’s freshwater supplies. Tabitha had been raised mostly by her maternal grandfather since she was seven, and she’d come to love Aether Conservatory as much as Grace did. Given what Hunter had seen of Grace’s dedication to dance, that was possibly more than life itself.

In the early days of the Conservatory, Artur Mikkelnokov had been scrambling for pennies, and a very wealthy family had offered their patronage to help get him off the ground. All they’d asked for in return was for Artur to bring gifts to their friends abroad whenever he traveled.

Artur, sometimes with Tabitha or other students, had taken cheerfully wrapped gifts and left them with hotel concierges in Vienna, Italy, the Ukraine, Iran. Anywhere Artur’s dancers were invited to perform, Artur’s patron seemed to have a friend.

“It was like… magic!” Tabitha said guilelessly, at which point Hunter fought to keep his own face expressionless. He was good at that. Paulie used to call him bombproof, but not everybody in the Salinger household had been specialty fighters in close-contact combat.

He looked around casually and noticed everybody in the room, including Josh’s mother, blinking very, very hard to keep their eyes from widening with incredulity.

“Magic,” Julia Dormer-Salinger said neutrally. “Imagine that, Felix. The coincidence of it all.”

Felix Salinger, who was Julia Salinger’s ex-husband as well as Uncle Danny’s beloved, gave an imperceptible nod. “Amazing,” he said dryly. “Unprecedented.”

Danny sent them both dirty looks and then turned back to Tabitha and urged her to go on.

“It was a good system,” Tabitha said in complete innocence, “until the elder Mr. Kadjic passed away and left his nephew in charge.”

“Andre?” Danny asked, his eyes sharpening.

“Sergei,” she corrected. “Do you know him?”

Danny shook his head, making eye contact with Felix. “Not personally, no,” he said with meaning. “But I’ve had dealings with his cousin, Andre. He is… unpleasant.”

Tabby nodded. “Grandfather says the older gentleman, Vlad, was really kind. He gave me gifts and made sure Grandfather never had to take time away from his work to deliver the packages. But… but as soon as Sergei came along, it was different. Grandfather was suddenly making three and four trips a month. The Conservatory didn’t suffer because so many of Grandfather’s old students were now instructors, but it wasn’t good for his health. The last time Sergei was in our home, I asked him if, perhaps, Grandfather could retire from the gift-giving business, that he was exhausted. And Sergei… he came on to me, and….” She shuddered. “And he… I forget how he phrased it, but he asked me if I wanted to take over Grandfather’s job. He was touching my cheek, and I hated it, and Grandfather overheard him and shouted, ‘Nyet! Stay away from her or I won’t do your filthy work anymore!’”

She took a deep breath and Danny let her, looking mildly surprised. “Do you know what he was talking about? Filthy work?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I didn’t then, but as soon as Kadjic was gone from our house, I asked Grandfather. He said that he hadn’t realized it until Vlad had passed away. Vlad had been so kind, to both of us, you see? Apparently for Vlad he’d been passing stolen goods—they kept calling them jewels, but….” She shrugged.

“You don’t think they were jewels?” Danny asked. “The packaging could mask a lot of sparklies.”

Tabitha nodded, but her eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I know you must think we’re terribly naïve,” she said, and everybody in the room—Josh Salinger and his parents, Stirling Christopher and his sister, Molly, Hunter, and even Good Luck Chuck, their munitions expert and driver—all shook their heads.

“No!”

“Naw.”

“Oh, honey, not at all!”

“Not to speak of.”

“Of course not!”

“Duh! Jesus, Tabby, haven’t I taught you better than that?”

Everybody stared at Grace in disbelief, and Hunter, forced out of his stoic mask, covered his mouth so the little shit wouldn’t know Hunter found him amusing.

“Grace,” he said mildly, which worked nine times out of ten to help Dylan Li control his wayward tongue and rabbit-hopping mind.

This was, apparently, the tenth time.

“I’m serious!” Grace snapped, and the amber eyes meeting Hunter’s were sparkling with irritation. “I’ve tried to teach her better! There are assholes out there who will take advantage of you. You know that!” He looked at Josh in supplication. “So do you. Jesus, Tabby. We wanted to keep you safe because we know the world isn’t! All those lectures we gave you—how could you not know you were smuggling diamonds for a Russian mobster?”

A shocked silence ensued, and Hunter covered his eyes with his hands.

As usual, Danny saved the day. “Well, yes,” he said, smiling in that completely disarming way that made him such a first-rate con man. “That was a bit careless of your grandfather, sweets. It’s true. But I think what Grace—erm, Dylan—is saying is that it’s going to be very hard to say no to Sergei Kadjic now, isn’t it?”

Tabitha nodded miserably. “Grandfather didn’t know this, but most of those performances we’d been asked to do had been sponsored by friends of Vlad’s. He hadn’t just sponsored the dance troupe—he’d paid for the performances exclusively to give Grandfather a chance to carry the packages without rousing suspicion.”

Hunter reassessed the girl, who was pretty, with tawny skin and an elegantly narrow face. She had been naïve because her Grandfather had protected her, but she was by no means stupid.

And Danny saw it too. “And that is why you think it’s more than diamonds,” he said shrewdly.

She nodded. “Diamonds are valuable,” she said, “but even a big, well-cut gem isn’t enough to cover the cost of moving a dance troupe across the world and staging a performance in a decent venue while still turning a profit. I….” She looked around at all of them unhappily. “I’ve seen enough spy movies, you guys. I think it’s something more, but I don’t know what.”

Danny hummed thoughtfully, and the rest of the group waited. Hunter knew how to keep his body still, but his eyes moved restlessly from face to face, assessing.

Chuck Calder’s big frame took up most of a large stuffed chair. He slouched, legs out and crossed at the ankles, as though he couldn’t think of anything more relaxing than tracking down a mobster to make him stop trafficking in stolen jewels, and his green eyes—a complement to the dark red-brown of his hair—crinkled up in the corners to prove it. Chuck had been in the military—and he’d been a getaway driver and safecracker once he got out of it. Not much bothered Chuck, but he did love a good chase.

Josh Salinger, audio-visual whiz kid, competent actor and dancer, and college dropout, sat on the arm of the couch next to Uncle Danny, arms crossed, a look of still concentration on his pale, almost pixieish face. Josh had been born into the grift, as it were. Felix and Danny had been scoping out the Dormer mansion in Rome for a way to give payback to Hiram Dormer, who was a raping, coercive bastard. In the middle of the grift, Hiram’s daughter—Josh’s mother, Julia—had begged for their help, con men or not. In the end, Julia had married Felix as a way to keep herself and her child safe from her abusive millionaire father, and Felix and Danny had agreed to it because they wanted to protect Julia. For the three of them, hiding the relationship between Felix and Danny from her father, as well as keeping Josh and Julia in a little bubble of safety, had proved to be con-man graduate school for all involved—Josh included.

Stirling Christopher, computer hacker and AV-set theater designer, sat on the floor under the wet bar, arms wrapped around his knees, gray-green eyes focused intensely on the people doing the talking. If someone was to accidentally look at him—and most of the crew tried to avoid that because they knew attention made Stirling uncomfortable in a crowd situation—he would have turned his face away. His skin was pale brown, and he liked to wear black. That meant he blended into the shadows even more seamlessly than Hunter did, which made Hunter a tad jealous. He would have given a lot for Stirling’s level of invisibility.

Just as Hunter had the thought, he saw Danny catch Stirling’s eye and wink before looking off into the distance again. A shy smile flirted on Stirling’s lean mouth, and Hunter’s chest warmed a little. That was Danny’s greatest gift—making people feel good. Hunter had seen him use it to get a mark to walk right into a box the mark had crafted all by herself, but when he was using it on family, it was all about the kindness.

Stirling’s foster-sister, Molly, sat on the love seat, her long legs pulled up to her chest like Stirling’s, her riot of orange hair pulled up to her crown and left to spill down. Molly’s only disappointment in working for her brother’s crew was that every last one of the men were gay, which meant they were all competing for the same pieces of ass.

Molly was the first to admit this was not much different from theater, where she used her talents as a costume designer and performer, but she still lamented the lack of available men.

Felix Salinger and Julia Dormer sat side by side on barstools behind the couch where Danny was consoling Tabitha. Julia—as elegant, blond, and swanlike as her son was petite, dark, and pixieish—kept an ongoing silent conversation with her ex-husband, and Hunter figured that they were as close as most brothers and sisters were by now. He’d seen her act just as familiar with Danny, and he’d been a little envious of the three of them and the family they’d forged out of necessity and—even Hunter could see it—love.

Hunter had served in the military. He knew how to use weapons effectively, but his body was an even more insidious weapon. Nobody expected him to pull death out of thin air, but he had, frequently, in some of the most brutal parts of the world.

But physical violence was personal violence; nobody wanted to get too close to a man who could kill them with a shrug of his shoulders. Until Josh Salinger had recruited Hunter for this “think tank” of theirs, Hunter had always felt very much alone, even when he’d been part of a unit.

But ever since that moment in the parking garage, when Josh had looked at Hunter with that pixieish face and that sober adult attention, he had, well….

Roped him in, pretty much like the con man Josh had been raised to be.

Hunter, still raw from the loss of Paulie and still bewildered as to what Ron Pinter had been involved in that could have resulted in such a disastrous consequence, had needed that calm, that leadership.

Josh Salinger’s easy company and easy acceptance of a personal code of ethics—as opposed to one that was a little easier on the bureaucracy—had been the balm for Hunter’s soul. But he hadn’t sparked Hunter’s interest. Hunter might not have been in love with Paulie, but he’d been attached to him, and he didn’t trust easily. He’d been pretty sure that part of his life would take years to heal.

And then Josh had introduced Hunter to his friends, including his best friend since grade school, Dylan Li.

Grace.

Grace, who was, even as Tabitha spoke, swaying slightly on the couch, his sinuous, ribbon-thin body always graceful, never still.

Grace had driven Hunter absolutely batshit from that first meeting months ago. Every predator knew to keep still.

Everything that moved as much as Grace was preparing to run.

Grace was, in fact, prey.

But wily prey. If Hunter had been on the job, he doubted he would have carried out a contract on Grace yet, because the man never quit moving.

And the longer Hunter spent watching him ripple, stretch, pirouette, and vibrate his way from one side of the world to the other, the less Hunter thought he could have carried out a contract on Dylan Li period.

That wasn’t the kind of predator Hunter felt like when he was around Grace.

And now, as Hunter studied everybody in the room, he found his attention returning again and again to that lithe, dancing body. Grace’s shoulders were turned toward Tabitha, and his attention—always hard to pin down—only strayed every so often. Now and then his rippling hands made an abortive pass at her shoulder, her arm, or her hair.

He wanted to pet her.

He really cared for this girl. Not as a lover, obviously, but as a sister. As a friend. However, his attention was starting to spook her, particularly as she spoke about Sergei Kadjic and the increasingly impossible position the mobster was putting her grandfather in.

“I think,” Danny said into the ruminative quiet, “that we’re going to need more information.”

“You can’t help me?” Tabitha asked, her voice pitching on a wail that told Hunter she’d been at the breaking point, and if Grace’s offer of help didn’t pan out, she might well and truly snap.

“Of course we can!” Danny told her, glancing around the room to make sure everybody was on board.

Everybody was definitely on board. Hunter knew he, for one, was growing bored. Their last caper—or rather their first caper, the one that had reunited Felix and Danny after a ten-year separation—had been nearly two months earlier, and Chicago was not quite out of the volatile spring season that tended to put everybody’s teeth on edge.

Hunter could swear the occasional hits of bright sunshine brought out the extra-rank BO in every man he passed. That must have been it, because he hadn’t gotten laid since… well, since Paulie.

Either way, Hunter was pretty sure it was all Grace’s fault that nobody in the damned city smelled good enough to fuck except the dreamy, otherworldly man sitting on the couch, making his long-boned hands swim like otters through the air.

Danny smiled at them all beatifically, as though thinking they were all the sweetest children, wanting to help their sister find a lost toy.

Given Hunter had no idea how many laws they were about to break, he still couldn’t resist that tug of praise, of gentle approval, that Danny, Felix, and Julia seemed to emanate. It didn’t matter that he’d been raised by good heartland people who still liked hearing from him at Christmas but would never know much else about him. What mattered was that these people seemed to think he’d done a good job raising himself, and he was a valuable member of their team.

He didn’t get it, and he wasn’t sure he ever would.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take one more hit of that gentle approval-flavored Kool-Aid and love it.

“What do you have in mind, Uncle Danny?” Josh asked, his head cocked as though he were taking notes.

“Well, some reconnaissance first,” Danny said thoughtfully, looking over his shoulder for Felix’s nod. Tall, blond, as noble as a lion, Felix Salinger ran a highly successful cable news network. But Hunter had seen him manipulate people like chess pieces and had to admit the guy, like Danny, had the heart and soul of a true con man. Danny turned his attention back to Tabitha, but not without first giving Felix a secret little smile that made Hunter’s chest ache.

They were a little older than the rest of the crew—old enough for Felix to have claimed to have fathered Josh at an appallingly young age—but their love was apparently eternal.

“So, darling,” Danny said, his voice dripping reassurance. “When is your grandfather’s next trip?”

“Next week,” Tabitha whispered. “I know it’s got to be for Sergei because our show is so close to performance date. He’s not taking any dancers this time—there haven’t been traveling performances since his uncle died. But Grandfather is leaving us in the charge of an assistant director and the assistant choreographer right before showtime. It’s… he wouldn’t do that if he didn’t have to.”

“Hm. Bad form to leave the cast and crew to themselves before opening night, isn’t it?” Danny frowned when Josh nodded the affirmative. “What kinds of threats is Sergei making to Artur to keep him toeing the line?”

Tabitha swallowed and gave Grace a sideways look. “He’s threatening to set Grandfather up to take the fall. He’d be imprisoned, and the Conservatory would be shut down. I think… the way Sergei touched me that night….” She shuddered. “I think there’s been some innuendo about hurting me, and maybe some of the other dancers.” Her glance at Grace turned apologetic. “I was dancing so badly last night because Grandfather told me to tell you to watch your step. He was trying to laugh about it—don’t walk under ladders, stay away from black… cats….”

She trailed off as the two house mascots came chasing into the downstairs den in a tumble of playful black fur.

Abruptly she giggled.

“Oops,” she said, her cheeks dimpling into a smile that Hunter could appreciate. He scooped up the dervish nearest himself and scratched it behind its ears. Cary Grant—the older cat who’d been Chuck’s originally but had been adopted by the house—drooped automatically into an ecstatic purr.

Without a word, Hunter walked to the couch and dropped the creature into Tabitha’s lap. She cooed and started to rub the cat’s ears, and the cat—shameless attention whore that he was—went in for the whisker rub against her palm.

Tabitha’s desperation, her tremulous voice, her fear, melted to manageable levels.

“Thank you,” she said, her smile charming and poised. Probably her usual state.

Hunter nodded, and she smiled up at Uncle Danny and continued.

“So as I was saying, I think Grandfather wanted me to warn Dylan to be careful, but he didn’t want me to….” She bit her lip, then carried on. “He didn’t want me to say anything about Kadjic, because that could get him hurt—or arrested—and he didn’t see any way out.”

Danny nodded. “Hm. Tabitha, does your grandfather ever take people on his trips, now that they’re no longer done under the cover of the dance troupe?”

Tabitha thought about it. “Sometimes,” she said. “Last year he took me to Paris with him. He told me it was a last-minute trip, since we were on vacation and all, but he had to drop off a package at a hotel again. So I think he was making the best of a bad situation.”

“Mm.” Danny chewed on his lower lip. “How’s young Dylan for this next show, my dear? I mean, really, how much practice does he actually need?”

Tabitha gave Grace a disgusted eye roll, and the snotty little shit actually preened. “He’s fine,” she muttered. “He could learn the show cold in a day and perform it flawlessly in a week. We’re eight weeks in. The hard part is keeping him interested enough to listen for his cues.”

Grace gave a benign smile. “I’m a prodigy,” he said with no repentance.

Hunter scowled at him, and Grace scowled back.

“I am too!” Grace argued, as though that look had come with words attached.

Hunter raised an eyebrow.

“Fine! I’m being a brat. I’m just saying, I could probably miss a week to go do—” Grace looked at Danny. “—whatever it is you want me to do.”

Danny’s smile held more than a tiny bit of Peter Pan mischief in it. “Oh, my dear boy. The things I could name.” Danny turned back to Tabitha. “Do you think if you asked, your grandfather could take Grace with him? It’s not entirely necessary, but we’re going to need Grace to… run some errands with our friends in the city, and it would help if he wasn’t constantly trying to hide the fact that he was there from Artur.”

“But you don’t even know where he’s going!” Tabitha said, baffled.

Very quietly, Molly started chanting, “Please let it be Paris. Please let it be Paris. Please let it be Paris!”

Tabitha gave her an apologetic shrug. “I’m sorry. It’s Vancouver. His cover story is that he wanted to check out the Queen Elizabeth Theatre and see if we could perform there.” She nodded as though this were of utmost importance. “It’s supposed to be very grand!”

Alas, Molly was obviously disappointed. “Really? Our first chance to travel, and it’s to Vancouver?”

“I love Vancouver!” Julia exclaimed. “Shopping, culture, theater—it’s all very urbane.”

Molly gave her a suspicious look. “Vancouver?”

“Oh yes. The food is to die for. You can eat out in downtown Vancouver every day of the year and still not visit the same place twice. And the stores! Granville Island, Gastown. There are some wonderful tiny souvenir shops and high-end fashion boutiques—”

“Fashion boutiques,” Molly said quickly. She was currently wearing a gauzy forest-green skirt topped with a sleeveless jacquard vest in palest cream. With her riot of sunset hair—replete with a few ringlets dyed in mermaid blue—she looked like a bohemian fairy princess, and she’d designed all those clothes herself.

“Vancouver is the cutting edge of the West Coast,” Julia told her, eyes twinkling, and while it may very well have been true, Hunter had to appreciate the way Julia helped smooth over Molly’s disappointment.

“Vancouver,” Molly said, nodding as though she’d had ultimate confirmation. “We can go.”

“So glad you approve,” Danny said blandly. He looked back to Tabitha. “So, do you think you could convince Artur to take Grace with him?”

“Well, yes,” Tabitha said, looking around the room. It was almost as though she were trying to figure out what everybody was doing there. “I just don’t know why everybody else would want to—”

Danny patted her hand. “Don’t worry, darling. There will only be a few of us—we need to see who is collecting these packages, right? And what’s in them.”

“You can’t steal them!” she said, her voice panicked. “If the person on the receiving end doesn’t get their… their”—she waved her hands excitedly—“their whatever it is, Sergei’s going to be upset. There’s no telling what he’ll do!”

“No, no, no, no,” Danny told her, his voice like butter. “Don’t worry, honey. Nobody will ever know we were there.”

THERE WERE more questions after that—travel plans, Artur’s habits, places he liked to go when visiting another city. Danny tried to press Tabby on Sergei a bit more, but she hadn’t known anything, and Danny had moved on so quickly, she’d hardly noticed he’d tried. After another half hour, Tabitha drooped visibly, and Julia escorted her upstairs to rest in a guest room.

Julia gave them all an arch look over her shoulder as they were leaving, and Hunter, who could speak fluent nonverbal, had no problem interpreting that to mean “Don’t you idiots make any permanent plans while I’m gone.”

They disappeared, and the entire group—Hunter included—visibly relaxed. Grace and Danny both stood up and stretched, Grace doing something elaborate and showy that involved kissing his kneecaps because he could and Danny simply raising his hands above his head and reaching for the sky.

Hunter’s eyes were on Grace, mostly, and the long, sinewy lines of his legs to his hips, from his hips to his shoulders. He moved like air, or like smoke, but Hunter had seen him in tight clothes—he knew the muscles that supported all that flexibility, and he wanted to touch them.

But he didn’t want them to be gone the next morning.

“Okay, children,” Danny said, moving toward the wet bar. “I will take suggestions and observations at this moment. What do you have for me?”

“He’s been a mob mule for how long?” Chuck asked, voicing everybody’s question with his usual succinctness, and Hunter blinked hard, trying to snap his mind to the job.

“We’ll have to ask Grace,” Felix said. “Grace, how old is the Conservatory?”

“Mm… thirty years, I think.” Grace closed his eyes, stood straight, and then arched over backward and did a complicated ripple thing with his hands coming out from his chest. He straightened and reached for the sky, and Hunter found himself staring again.

Dammit.

Grace looked over his shoulder, toward Danny and away from Hunter, and Hunter found he could breathe—and concentrate on the job too, which was a definite plus.

“So thirty years.” Danny blew out a breath. “Vlad Kadjic was… well, he was nothing like his nephews, that’s for certain. Andre may be an animal, but he’s got rules. I don’t know much about Sergei—but I’m expecting he’ll be worse than Andre. The ones on the bottom of those dung heaps often are.”

“Will they expect Artur to be loyal?” Felix asked, hands casually in his pockets as he leaned against the bar. “And yes, I want orange juice too.”

Danny got behind the wet bar and started scooping ice from a freezer underneath. “No, yes, and it doesn’t matter,” he answered, and Hunter could hear the rustle of rolled eyeballs go around the room. “Don’t look at me that way. What I’m saying is that no, Sergei won’t expect Artur to work for him out of loyalty, hence the veiled threat to Tabitha. Yes, he’ll expect the threat to Tabitha to work, and the threat to the Conservatory too, because these are things that Artur Mikkelnokov loves, and they are both particularly vulnerable. And it doesn’t matter, because he’ll either (a) work Artur to death because he doesn’t give two shits about him, or (b) have him killed because working people to death creates enemies but killing them outright creates silence and fear. No, Grace,” Danny added, dumping straight orange juice into two tall glasses, “it’s just as well your friend asked for help now. We’ve got some time before Sergei decides to start killing people and burning things down.”

There was a collective shudder, and Hunter—who had always respected Danny—grew to respect him a little bit more for not sugarcoating things.

Danny saw his regard and smiled, downing a swallow of orange juice. “Hunter, you have something to say?”

Hunter nodded slowly, uncoiling from his position against the wall, remembering he was among friends—a thing he’d never really had before he met Josh Salinger, but one he was beginning to enjoy.

“We need to know what they’re trafficking,” he said slowly. “Tabitha is right. It’s got to be more than precious gems or gold.” He narrowed his eyes at Danny. “How high up was Vlad Kadjic? Was he, I dunno, a big enough mobster to fund a coup?”

Danny sucked air in through his teeth. “If you’re asking if he was into industrial espionage or spy work, I have no idea.” He bit his lip. “I expect Felix and I can do some digging.” He aimed a look at Stirling. “You wouldn’t want to help when we need it, would you?”

Stirling nodded, making eye contact with Danny and only Danny. “Sure. Anything else?”

Felix turned to Stirling, keeping his voice low so the kid wouldn’t startle. “Talk to Tabitha and see if you can get a list of some of the places and dates Artur made deliveries. I know when I make a business trip, something happens in that vicinity within a day or two. It’s only in my field—broadcasting or communications—but there’s a ripple to my visit. Take a look at the timelines and figure out what ripples these little packages are leaving. And if you’re not done by the time they leave for Vancouver, be prepared to bring your little show on the road, because I have the feeling we’ll need you in Vancouver too.”

Josh went to speak up. “But—”

Hunter could see it, but only because he was standing across from Felix. Felix raised an eyebrow at his son, and Josh nodded. Ah, Felix would be addressing the obvious hole in the plan later.