Molly grimaced.“Or my skin or my internal organs.”
“Now you’re getting the picture,” Chuck said seriously.“I’m going to give us ten minutes here, ten minutes to find a way to scuttle the ship and then jump off the back when it blows.Danny said it had to be spectacular, so—”
“GTFO,” Molly said.“I hear you, Chuck.”
Chuck smiled at her fondly.“That’s my Molly girl,” he said.In a gesture of tenderness, he tapped her cheek with his knuckle.“Keep your skin on your body, precious—it’s where it belongs.”
And with that, he gave a fierce chin nod to Liam and Hunter, and Molly ducked her head out.
“Can you really rig this thing to blow in ten minutes?”Liam asked, following Hunter, who thankfully seemed to have a better memory than Liam when it came to directions.
“I can scuttle this ship in five minutes,” Chuck said grimly.“The trick is going to be rigging it to scuttle and then getting to the top deck to leap before it goes.”
At that moment they heard shouting, and Hunter said, “Showtime,” before pulling his knife out of a sheath at his belt.
Nobody wanted to fire a gun on the inside of a ship, when bullets could bounce or hit things that would make steam pipes explode.
But that didn’t mean they had to be nice to the people currently racing toward them with their hands full of things like mallets and giant pipe wrenches either.
Liam pulled at the dagger in his belt, positioned his baton, and crouching a little behind Chuck, got ready to pull cleanup duty.
They had nine minutes to go.
JOSH ANDHunter were really going to start checking Grace’s luggage before they left any place they stayed for longer than a minute.If Grace had stolenhalfthe things he’d babbled about to Kadjic over the last twenty minutes, he was not only going to have an Interpol Red Notice posted in his name, he was going to be wanted by a number of private art patrons who were almost as powerful and far more ruthless than countries.
And the truly frightening thing was, JoshknewGrace wasn’t lying, because Gracesuckedat lying, and he also knew the only reason Grace was babbling about all the—oh my God.Whenhad he had a chance to get at the Queen’s jewel closet in London?Holy fucking shitballs!Josh was going to have to talk to Molly about that one, becauseforeign policywas established by what Camilla decided to unearth from the jewel trove, and Grace had stolen a tiara once rocked by Princess Anne.
And the only reason Grace was telling Kadjic about Princess Anne’s asymmetrical tiara, once worn in the only magazine spread to actually make her both pretty and desirable, and how Grace had wanted it for himself, because helovedlooking pretty and desirable and how his boyfriend was going to go secretly nuts about that when Grace wore it to bed (oh dearGod!) was because Grace wasavoidingtelling Kadjic about the job at the Louvre and Colombia, which were the two things he’d had a personal stake in, and also not dropping a dime on the rest of the family.
Grace wouldn’t rat them out if he could at all help it, but at this point, Josh was fully aware Grace might not be able to help it.
“Calm down,” Josh murmured through comms.“Grace, my man, if you end up telling these people about what you do in bed, you will never get your dignity back.”
“I have no dignity,” Grace said, and it would have been a non sequitur, but at this point, he’d told them about the decision to turn his hair white, what his favorite ballet was, and how many lead dancers he’d blown before he settled down with his totally monogamous boyfriend.They were way beyond non sequiturs at this point.
“I have noticed,” Kadjic said, sounding irritated and baffled.“Has it occurred to you that things might go easier on you if you simply stayed silent?”
“Mister,youkidnappedme.If you hadn’t wanted to know about the time I rescued all the frogs from biology class you should have kidnapped somebody else.”
“That is a lie,” Kadjic said.“That is from American television.Nobody truly does that.”
“Sadly not,” Josh murmured, more to calm Grace down than to answer Kadjic.
“I didn’t know they were already dead,” Grace said glumly.“I opened the boxes and shouted, ‘Hop away, little buddies!’and they just sort of slithered out, looking pathetic with their little hands in the air.And then they started to melt, because they were all frozen, and they just… you know.”Josh could picture Grace, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he did his best impression of a dead frog.
Not one of their finer moments, no.Josh had felt stupid for not looking up how frogs were shipped to the biology teacher.He’d been fully okay with the assignment, but Grace… he just never knew when Grace’s enormous heart had been going to engage.Apparently frogs had done it.
“Why are you telling me this?”Kadjic asked, clearly as bewildered as the rest of the world when faced with a tornado.
From elsewhere in the car, Josh heard an odd sound.It was like a bear… burping?
“Oh my God,” Grace said in wonder.“Mister, is your hired musclelaughing?”
“Vlad!”Kadjic barked.“What—”
And the sound got bigger and louder as the guard—who probably didn’t speak English well—processed the story.“Hop away, little buddies!”he hooted.“Hop away!”
Josh half expected Kadjic to rant, to rave, to grab Grace by the throat and threaten his life somehow, but he underestimated the man.
