but Hunter’s arms around him kept him human, kept him there.
“Grace,” Hunter rasped. “Baby. What do you think you’re doing now?”
“Crying in the shower?” Grace sniffed. “It’s revolting. I wouldn’t want to date me.”
Hunter chuckled gruffly. “You’re empathizing, sweetheart. Don’t hurt yourself. It doesn’t always feel good, especially when you start.”
Grace buried his face in Hunter’s throat. “I’m sorry your last boyfriend got… uhm, blown up,” he said awkwardly. “Are you sure you want me now? Really sure? Because if I were you, I’d want someone totally different. Someone bug-eyed and serious with glasses and sensitive and shit. I just….” His voice threatened to break again, and he patted Hunter’s shoulder in an unconscious gesture of comfort. “I wish you didn’t have to have that in your heart.”
“Me too,” Hunter said, starting that rocking motion again. “But you’re here, and you… you’re here without feeling sorry for me. And you don’t do the scary stuff—usually, you don’t do the scary stuff. Unless you’re running barefoot from guys with guns or BASE jumping off tall buildings.”
“Who told?” Grace snuffled, feeling pathetic.
“Grace, it was a month ago. We all saw it on the news and said, ‘Goddammit, Grace!’ and you said ‘What? You can’t see my face’!”
Grace managed a rusty chuckle. “Josh was right behind me.”
“Which is also how we know. You’re lucky we didn’t tell Josh’s parents.”
Grace snorted. “We were… well, we were running an errand for Felix that Felix didn’t need to know about. Anyway, you were saying that I’m not the guy who beats up other people.”
“Yes,” Hunter breathed. “And I’m glad. Don’t worry, Grace. I don’t need someone with glasses and a college degree. I need someone who can keep up with me and has the same slippery grasp of the law that I do.”
“And who won’t hurt you!” Grace interjected. This seemed important, and he didn’t think Hunter was getting his gist.
“And who will try his best not to hurt me,” Hunter agreed soberly, turning the water off. Well, fine. It was running cold anyway.
“I didn’t soap my hair,” Grace said peevishly.
“Neither did I,” Hunter told him. “That’s fine. We can soap it tonight. Let’s go downstairs and have the buffet. I want cater-taters and ham like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Cater-taters?” Grace raised a questioning eyebrow and followed Hunter’s lead getting out of the shower.
“Those fried potatoes you only get in places that have chafing dishes,” Hunter clarified. “Mmm.”
Grace laughed, because Hunter was obviously making shit up, and toweled himself off roughly. “I’ll try, you know,” he said, surprised to find that he was the one returning to the scary topics.
“Try what?” Hunter asked, standing naked and toweling off his hair.
“Not to hurt you. I’ve never done this before. I may fuck up. I hate that. You can’t… you can’t fix some fuckups. I’ll worry.”
Hunter gave a very deliberate exhale. “I’ll worry that you won’t be careful with your body,” Hunter said softly. “Death is the only fuckup you really can’t fix.”
Grace whimpered and fled the room, forgetting he’d left his T-shirt and briefs on the counter.
But there wasn’t far to go, really. An hour later, they were sitting down to breakfast at the hotel buffet, talking about everything from the ballet the night before to the op Hunter and Josh had run during the ballet, to the fact that Molly had managed to cajole Stirling out of his room to go on an outing. As they were chattering, Hunter kept giving Josh and Julia speculative glances, and Grace wondered what connection he’d made, what he was thinking that kept him so preoccupied.
Finally, after watching Hunter down his third plate of “cater-taters” and mourning his own performance and the cat-burglar dieting necessities of eating fruit and lox when he wasn’t eating sugar, he elbowed Hunter sharply in the chest.
“What?” Hunter snapped.
“Tell them,” Grace ordered.
“Tell them what?” Hunter’s eyes narrowed.
“Tell them whatever is eating at you. It’s driving me batshit.”
Hunter let out a sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Afterward,” he said. “Grace, you may get to go play tourist a lot, but you know what? This is a luxury for me. Yesterday was like Disneyland, and today’s even better. Can we just… not espionage for eight hours?”
Julia, who was sitting on the other side of the table, heard him and laughed.
“Shall we make that a rule?” she asked everybody. “No espionage today?”
Grace narrowed his eyes, thinking about how often he looked at things only in relation to whether or not he could break in, break out,