night or you have another person to be. You don the wig, that person has to answer the door until the job’s over.”
Molly let out a sigh. “Fine, fine, lesson learned. It’s a good thing it’s Vancouver and it’s seventy-five degrees outside. If I’d chosen to do this in August, I’d totally forfeit the job to get this thing off my head.”
They departed while Grace was muttering, “It wouldn’t suck so bad if she didn’t have a fuckton of hair under it. She should let people pretend that is the wig and then put a wig on and disappear.”
“Grace, darling,” Julia murmured, coming to sit beside him, “what are you so interested in?”
“This box is not an ordinary jewelry box,” Grace said, frowning. “See that?”
“Hinges,” Julia said promptly.
“Yes, but what’s that on the other side of the box that also looks like hinges?”
“Oh!” Her breath caught, and Hunter bent over to take a closer look.
“You are an elephant in front of the sun,” Grace snapped at him as his shadow loomed large. “This room has barely enough light to not kill us all. Get out of the way.”
“Okay, okay, ok—”
Grace took a very deep breath and remembered Hunter’s sweetness as he’d been doctoring Grace’s feet. He looked up to meet Hunter’s gray eyes and felt like shit. “And I am sorry for being an asshole. Pull out your phone or something and you can look at it too.”
A smile flitted across Hunter’s lean mouth, and he pushed a button on his phone and shined the light on the box so Grace could see. The position put him at Grace’s shoulder, the heat from his body radiating comfortably out. Grace found he was leaning back against Hunter’s thigh and chest, trying to cling to some of that warmth as he worked.
“Contacts,” Hunter said, which was, of course, why Julia had gasped. He glanced up, eyes searching first Grace’s, then Julia’s. “The kind that could trigger an alarm or even a bomb. What happens when the contact is broken without the magic password?”
“We don’t know,” Grace said, frowning. “Stirling, don’t suppose you’ve got a portable X-ray machine in your luggage.”
Stirling grunted. “What am I, an amateur?”
With that, Stirling went to the closet and started rooting around. He came back with a little handheld device that had a wide circular shield on one end and a handle on the other with a trigger.
He also had a dongle, which he plugged into his computer. After a little bit of tapping about—and some explanation, which Grace ignored, because duh—he turned one of his monitors around, showing a blank screen.
“Okay—let’s see.” Stirling fiddled a little, obviously in his happy place, and then aimed the X-ray gun at the box as Grace was holding it.
“Wait!” Grace cried, suddenly in the now. “You’re going to shrivel my balls!”
Stirling stared at him. “With an X-ray gun?”
“There’s radioactive Godzilla stuff in there! You’re aiming it right at my balls!”
“It’s only the smallest amount of X-rays—”
“I like my balls!”
“Okay, okay, okay!” Hunter grunted. “Hang on a minute, Stirling. I’ve got this.” He went to the entryway for his jacket and paused before going into the closet for a different, slightly longer, oxblood-colored duster-style coat. “Here, Grace. Put this on your lap. You’re right—it’s Kevlar. It’s not lead, but it should keep your balls safe.”
Grace looked at him suspiciously, because he’d never heard of the X-ray–repelling properties of Kevlar.
“Are you putting me on?” he asked.
“Well, even if the Kevlar doesn’t do it, the leather will,” Stirling soothed. Hunter laid the coat over Grace’s body, where it sat, smelling like leather and sweat and man—specific man, Hunter—while Stirling set the package up on one of the tails to Grace’s side and took the X-ray with the coat as a backdrop. A couple of clicks, some hums from the laptop, and the blank screen was now eerie blue light against a black background.
“Ooh,” Grace said, knowing his mouth was drawn into cupie-bow and not caring. “Sparkly.”
“You don’t even know that,” Hunter chided. “For all you know, it’s a rock!”
“No,” Stirling murmured, adjusting something on the monitor. “It’s most definitely a gemstone of some kind. Possibly man-made.”
“It’s very bright,” Julia said. “I… dammit. Of course Danny would be offline now. Stirling, love, could you forward that to Danny and Felix? There’s something… odd about that. Do you see those lines there? The dark lines in every facet?”
“It’s like somebody wrote on the diamond in black pen,” Grace said, and his thief’s heart grew outraged. “Who