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