Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,11

shadow of his former self.

Immediately, I took off my jacket and covered his groin.

He looked so very young and vulnerable. Pale, with a sunken chest, concave stomach, more skeletal than anything else; he had lost weight as well as muscle. His brown hair hung limp and greasy in his face, and the dark circles under his eyes could be taken for bruises at first glance. The man was not at all what I expected, and my heart gave a lurch that I didn’t like.

Bending down beside him, I shook him gently.

“Please, just leave me alone.” He whispered the pitiful plea. “I don’t want anything; I just want to sleep. It’s so hard to sleep in the hospital.”

I knew it was, with nurses checking on you all the time. And rehab was hard. I’d visited enough friends there, and had gone to check on many kids I’d seen end up in a myriad of different programs when I was a cop. My partners and, eventually, my captain had all complained that I was more concerned with helping than making collars.

“Why’re you even having a party if all you wanna do is sleep?” I asked, pushing his hair back, petting him gently.

“That’s nice,” he murmured, his voice cracking. “Don’t stop.”

I feathered my fingers through his hair, watching as he relaxed, the crease between his eyebrows smoothing out as he accepted my ministrations.

“Nicky,” I soothed him, “why’re all these people in your house?”

“They all just showed up,” he said, yawning. “I didn’t want to…disappoint…any…”

And…he was out.

Poor kid, he just wanted to curl up in his bed, but his space, his house, wasn’t safe. No one had created that for him—yet. It made sense, because all the people he’d hired, everyone there, in his home, took their orders from him, so if he was allowing the circus to be in his home, what could they do?

I got it then, what Mr. Sawyer meant about what he needed for Nick Madison. I wasn’t there to get Nick Madison clean; I wasn’t qualified to do that. The people in rehab had done their job. Technically, Nick was all detoxed. What he needed now was someone to keep him clean and sober, on the straight and narrow, and build him up until he could fly on his own. That I was qualified to do, because I was, in this instance, in my capacity as a fixer, a goddamn glorified babysitter.

I had no idea what he’d taken or drunk, but I could check with the bodyguards. My hunch was that he was sloshed but not drugged, because again, all he really wanted was a nap.

Standing, I charged back into the cabana.

“I hate to break this up,” I announced to everyone, “but the house is being raided for drugs. You all gotta go.”

There was a rush of movement then, and two guys grabbed the one behind Nick’s doppelganger, who would have fallen if one of them hadn’t stepped in and grabbed him. No one had realized that he had basically passed out standing up.

I directed myself to the bodyguard closest to me. “One of you guys needs to find who he belongs to and get him outta here.”

“Yessir.”

“The rest of you need to make sure the house is clear.”

“Yessir,” another of the bodyguards answered me.

“First, though, do we know what, if anything, Mr. Madison ingested?”

I got a laundry list of alcohol—bourbon, tequila, a few beers, champagne—so it made sense that he wanted to sleep.

Moving quickly to the open shelves where there were stacks of big, fluffy beach towels, I grabbed a couple and walked back to where Nick was, put my suit jacket back on, wrapped him up, put him over my shoulder in the caveman carry, and began the climb back up to the house.

The bodyguards were moving the stragglers along when Brent came jogging up to me.

“The cleaning crew will be here in another ten minutes.”

“Make sure they go down to the pool area and the cabana,” I told him. “Where’s his bedroom?”

“It’s down the hall off the kitchen, at the very end. It’s the one with the balcony.”

When I reached it, I found that the room behind the heavy double doors was not what I was expecting. The hardwood was covered in several large rugs in various shades of blue. There were huge frameless folding doors that led out onto a wide balcony, and three more large picture windows. I put him down on his side on the king-size bed and then went to make sure