stay on coms since they’d left the airport.
He repeated the definition to Pixie-boy, whose eyes grew heavy-lidded and sultry.
“Unusual problems?” he repeated. “Like, say, being lonely on a Friday night?”
Six months ago, Grace would have made the date and snuck out of the hotel room for a quickie in any private corner.
Two years ago, he would have had Pixie-boy pull over at a gas station so Grace could blow him in the bathroom.
But right now, he’d just told this guy that he was part of a think tank, and he’d promised Josh he’d try not to be a dick to Hunter.
And Hunter was on the other end of the com.
“That problem’s not so unusual,” Grace told him tartly. “And I really am here on business.”
The driver’s sigh of disappointment was flattering.
But it didn’t give Grace nearly the feeling of warmth that Hunter’s soft exhalation on the other end of the coms did.
Game Faces, Everyone
“EASY, HUNTER,” Josh murmured, holding a cupped hand to his ear to mute his voice in the coms. They were in their own cab and had paid the driver to be as ahead of Grace and Artur’s as he could possibly get. Julia and Molly were in a car behind them by design, so hopefully Grace and Artur could be getting unloaded at the parking structure of the Westin Bayshore after they arrived, and they could miss each other.
Hunter shrugged his shoulders, scowling. That little shit of a taxi driver had been hitting on Grace. He’d taken one look at a sleeping Artur and pretty much asked if Grace’s ass was up for grabs.
And before Hunter could even say, “Head in the game, Grace,” Grace had….
He’d turned him down.
Not gracefully, no—but he’d made it clear he wasn’t available.
And Hunter was… what was the word? Uneasy. Hunter was uneasy with a Grace who wasn’t out to get a piece of ass at every opportunity.
Because while Grace may not have met Hunter before their first job together, Hunter had known Grace. Josh had talked to Hunter—vented a little, perhaps—because Hunter understood that having a friend like Grace was like having a squirrel on a leash. You never knew when it was going to double back and trip you going forward or, worse, climb a tree and leave you hanging.
So Hunter had gotten an earful of perhaps what weren’t Grace’s finest moments. The time came to mind when Grace was supposed to give Josh a ride home from the city but had been an hour late because he’d been getting the kind of facial not given at a reputable salon and had spent fifteen minutes trying to wash jizz out of his hair.
But Hunter had also gotten Josh’s worry, along with the fact that underneath their sometimes fractious relationship had been a whole lot of love.
“He always makes me laugh,” Josh had said one day over coffee. “I mean, I could be having the worst day, and it’s like radar. Grace will call up and say something stupid like, ‘I want to dye my hair like donut sprinkles,’ and I will show up at the salon to see what donut sprinkles look like in someone’s hair—and it was beautiful, by the way, though nobody but Grace could pull it off—and suddenly my day is better. He tells me about every sexual encounter he’s ever had. Not to gross me out, not to make me jealous, ’cause, God! No.”
“Then why?” Hunter had asked, fascinated in spite of himself. He’d spent six years overseas in some of the worst hellholes on the planet—and sixteen years growing up in a place where confessing his sexuality could have gotten him beat the hell up if he hadn’t been stronger, faster, and smarter than most of the kids gunning for him. He knew how to spot unhappiness in somebody—even someone rich and spoiled—without even needing a scope.
“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