leaned back and made himself comfortable on the bed again.
“Mine?” Grace asked, and the rumble in Hunter’s chest indicated that wasn’t going to happen.
“Sleep,” he murmured, setting an alarm on his watch. “I’ll wake you up before I go. Do you need to take off your—”
Grace was already kicking his yoga pants down to his feet. He paused with his fingers over the zipper of the hoodie, though, glaring narrowly at Hunter.
Hunter’s lean mouth quirked up at the corners. “If you take it off to sleep, I promise not to take it back.”
Grace couldn’t help it. He grinned, then sat up and unzipped it, folded it neatly, and put it on top of his luggage without ever leaving the bed. Hunter stood and pulled back the covers, taking his trousers and overshirt off before climbing into bed and patting the spot next to him.
Grace hummed and wriggled back. He’d never spooned before. Who spooned when you were trying to get out of the room before the rubber hit the road?
Hunter slid his hand possessively around Grace’s waist and splayed his fingers across Grace’s flat abdomen. Grace’s body gave a tremendous throb, bigger than the ache in his feet or the confusion in his brain and the exhaustion in his bones.
He whimpered a little and arched his hips, and Hunter’s breathy chuckle told him Hunter had noticed.
“Don’t worry,” Hunter whispered. “It’ll happen.”
But not now. Now Hunter was mic’d, and if they went at it like banshees, all of their friends and family would hear them—not to mention Artur, who was in the next room.
Grace let out a disconsolate sigh and thought wistfully that a quick bang would be exactly the thing to get him to fall asleep.
And then he was asleep.
Reckonings
JOSH DIDN’T give Hunter any shit as he slid back into the command central hotel room to shower and change, and even though Grace’s earbud had still been on the dresser as he’d left, Hunter was grateful.
Josh waited, in fact, until they were both caffeinated and fueling up on breakfast wraps outside a coffee shop across the street from the Times Square, watching the morning activity on the tree-lined boulevards of Vancouver.
“Stirling,” he said lowly, “is the gem on the move?”
“No, sir,” Stirling replied with a yawn. “I’ve got the alarm set. I’m going back to bed for an hour. Text my cell if you need me online.”
“Feel you. Have your sister bring you coffee.”
“Roger that.”
And as soon as they heard the click of his earbud going offline, Josh looked at Hunter with eyes that were way too old for a kid younger than Grace.
“I almost wish you’d had sex,” he said, then grimaced. “Not that I wanted to hear that, but it might have been better for all involved.”
Hunter tried not to flush. “Sex would have been easy,” he said, thinking about the sweetness of Dylan Li’s lithe, muscular body. Yeah, he’d been acting virtuous while they’d been lying in bed having sweet conversation and thinking deep thoughts, but Hunter had a healthy sexual appetite, and Grace…. Grace hit all his physical attraction buttons. Because who didn’t like strength and flexibility in a lover, right? But also fluid movement and stunning cheekbones and a delicate chin with a masculine jaw and….
Gah!
“Yes,” Josh said, still looking at him. “Sex would have been easy. And yet….”
Hunter cleared his throat and shifted in his seat. “He’s more than an easy lay,” he muttered.
“I think so,” Josh said, taking a sip of his coffee and letting his eyes roam to the Times Square before watching another plane take off from the marina. “He’s my best friend. My brother.”
“So you’re telling me I should have fucked him and left?” Hunter asked, not getting it.
“No,” Josh said, looking at him like he was a silly child. “I’m telling you that his care and feeding is labor intensive. And I’m not saying that to scare you off. I just want to let you know what you’re getting into.”
Hunter tried and failed to contain his smirk.
“I mean besides his ass!” Josh said, burrowing into his leather jacket a little more deeply, like the chill was getting to him. He had a fine-gauge black wool cowl around his neck, something that screamed money but not too loudly, and his dark brown eyes scanned the area with the same restless precision that Hunter used. For the billionth time, Hunter wished that it could have been Josh he’d been crushing on these last few months—Josh with the bearing of a young