Fix It Up
How will a man who doesn’t believe in fairy tales ever hope to recognize when he’s found the love of a lifetime?
Locryn Barnes knows what it means to be a fixer for Torus Intercession. Torus is the place that people in need turn to for everything from bodyguards to chaperones, and God knows Loc is the kind of man who’d rather play human shield against a bullet than spend even a moment of his life as a glorified babysitter. Which is why he tells a prospective client, in no uncertain terms, that he’s not the right fixer for the job when Torus is tapped to play what amounts to a life coach for a spoiled, burned out, fresh-out-of-rehab rock star.
Nick Madison has been living on the edge since he was seventeen—drugs, booze, men, women . . . you name it, Nick has done it. Now, at twenty-six, aimless and on the verge of losing everything, he can’t seem to give a damn. When he wakes up one afternoon, hungover and strung out, to find a stranger in his house ordering everyone around like he owns the place, Nick is sure he’s woken up in his own little corner of purgatory. When he realizes why Locryn Barnes has invaded his life, Nick is determined to prove he doesn’t need anyone’s help, least of all from the walking, talking definition of infuriating.
Through weeks of recovery, of rebuilding his life and facing his past, Nick comes to realize that Loc is not the enemy. Nick has met every challenge and is finally ready to spread his wings and fly, but not alone, which means another daunting challenge to face. Now, Nick needs to convince the fixer that the rock star is his happily-ever-after. Which could prove to be Nick’s biggest challenge yet.
One
Nothing good ever came from change. People coming and going out of my life, that was the worst, and I’d had enough of that as a kid with my mother. Not that she wasn’t wonderful, and not that I didn’t love free-spirited, goddess-worshipping Sherri Barnes, but I had never wanted to go through people or, more specifically, men, like she did. The reality, though, was that we were exactly alike, except I didn’t marry them. That whole thing was beyond me.
Case in point, the guy I had been screwing at Torus Intercession, where I worked, had gone out on a job and fallen for his client. He fell hook, line, and sinker and was now, first off, the sheriff of a tiny town in Montana—a fate worse than death—and second, was now helping the man raise his kids and—and—he got married.
Seriously. Married. What the hell?
Another guy I worked with, who I hadn’t been fucking, had also gone out on a job, in Vegas of all the ridiculous places, and he too ended up falling in love and getting married. Who did that?
I felt like I was in some weird alternate dimension where everyone just said “I do,” like my mother usually did after one good date. Shit like that happened in books and movies, but not in real life. You were supposed to find out things first, make sure the other person had good credit or hadn’t jumped bail or didn’t have any overdue library books. And even more perplexing than the quick coupling was the strain it put on other people. What about those left behind? What about the people left trying to replace someone who was good in bed or, even more importantly, a trusted colleague? I had told my boss that losing people was definitely not good for the rest of us and didn’t promote his whole “oneness with the universe” crap. Not that I’d said crap, but I was fairly certain that leaving that word out while sounding both annoyed and pained had still driven my point home.
At Torus Intercession, we were fixers. We specialized in a kind of intervention, which meant getting all up in our clients’ business, and alignment, which went along with his other tangent about always leaving a situation better than how we found it. We were skilled in what my boss, Jared Colter, called syzygy. My mother had known, without me explaining, what it meant.
“Oh how wonderful, sweetheart,” she had crooned over the phone. “Natural alignment and balance in all things. Your new boss sounds heavenly.”
He was not.
Jared Colter, though seemingly steady and solid, had this directive that when we worked a job, whatever the situation we found ourselves in, we had