Fix It Up - Mary Calmes Page 0,45
odd.
Amazingly, he could read in the car.
“You can’t?”
“No, I get really carsick,” I confessed.
“Huh.”
He was quiet for a bit, admiring the desert scenery as we got on the freeway. “Are you going to fire Brent?” he asked out of the blue.
“I’m leaning that way,” I told him. “Unless you think something different.”
“I think Brent is not happy helping, you know?”
“No. What do you mean?”
“He wants to be a star.”
“Everybody wants to be a star.”
“No,” he corrected me. “Think about Phaeton. He––”
“He’s named after a kind of carriage. Do you know that?”
“Listen,” he said, chuckling, “Phaeton doesn’t want to be a star, not how you think, not like Brent does. Phaeton is all about having people ask, ‘Who dressed Nick Madison?’ ‘Who thought about having him wear that earring or that shade of lipstick?’ ‘He looks amazing, I wonder if whoever created that look could create one for me?’ He gets off on that reflected glory, of being an innovator and being the expert. Phaeton wants to be the spotlight; Brent wants to be in the spotlight.”
“That’s not going to work,” I told Nick. “He kept Isai from getting into the party, thus putting you in danger. I don’t see how I can keep him on after that.”
“Well, I will defer to your judgment since I already fired him once.”
“Maybe it’s your judgment that we should listen to.”
“No,” he said softly. “I didn’t want you in my house, in my life, and I’ve never been so wrong about a situation or a person.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” he said, unscrewing the lid from a bottle of water and passing it to me before he went back to reading something on his phone.
“What’s so interesting?”
“That would be an email from Kara.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What does she say?”
“She said that Derek, that’s her ex,” he informed me, “got the shit beat out of him last night.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Derek,” he said clearly, “is a mess today.”
“Really?”
“Mm-hm.”
“I guess some guys experience karma pretty quickly.”
“Karma?”
“Yeah,” I said with a shrug. “Guy tries to hit his girl but doesn’t succeed only because her friend intervenes. I’m thinking he got what was coming to him.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed. “Though technically he didn’t hit her, and the friend, me, didn’t get hurt too badly either.”
“But not for lack of trying, and only because you got outta there before he could do worse than scuff you up a bit.”
“That’s also true.”
“So yeah, I’m going with karma.”
“She also said that when Frost and the movers went over to her place this morning to get her stuff, Frost was expecting to have some words with Derek, but he was at the hospital having his broken nose set.”
“For the sake of argument, do you think it’s possible that Frost took exception to Derek trying to hit his friend and––”
“I think since Derek has about fifty pounds of muscle on Frost, the chances that they went toe-to-toe and Frost lived to tell the tale are pretty slim.”
“Ah.”
“That’s it? Is that all you have to say?”
“Yeah. Why?”
He made a purring noise then, and my cock liked the low rumbling sound far too much.
“What was that?” he gasped as we swerved, changing lanes for a moment, which was fine since we were the only ones on the two-lane highway, as far as I could see.
“Tortoise,” I said quickly, clearing my throat. “I saved its life.”
“Apparently so,” he agreed. “It’s lucky you have such quick reflexes.”
I kept my mouth shut.
“So anyway, Derek’s bodyguard, Vinnie––”
“Who is Derek again?”
“Derek Connelly,” he said, like that should have been enough.
“Who?”
“He’s a very famous DJ, as well as a record producer.”
I grunted.
“Anyway,” he said, drawing out the word, “Vinnie said––”
“Vinnie?” I repeated.
“Yes. Why?”
“Everybody you know has a weird name.”
He squinted at me. “How is Vinnie a weird name?”
“Whatever. Go on.”
“Well, Vinnie told Frost that he didn’t see anything.”
“Didn’t see anything when?”
“When Derek got beat up.”
“He’s not a very good fucking bodyguard, then,” I affirmed, changing lanes to pass a slow-moving minivan. “If he had been doing his job, he would have intervened.”
“Frost told Kara that he thinks Vinnie intentionally let Derek take a beating after Derek tried to hit her. Furthermore, Vinnie told Frost to apologize to Kara for him not being around when she showed up at the house last night.”
“He sounds like a good guy.”
“Yes, he does.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes.
“You have nothing else to say?”
“About what?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he mused, and I could almost hear his mind working. “Perhaps something about Derek taking a beating last night?”
“I