No quick fix torus inter.., p.1
No Quick Fix: Torus Intercession Book One, page 1
No Quick Fix
Mary Calmes
Mary Calmes Books, LLC.
Contents
Acknowledgments
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
A note from the author
Also by Mary Calmes
About the Author
No Quick Fix
Copyright ©2019 Mary Calmes
http://marycalmes.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of author imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.
Cover art Copyright © 2019 Reese Dante
http://reesedante.com
Edited by Desi Chapman
Line Edit/Proofing by Lisa Horan
Proofreading by Jenni Lea
Assistant Jessie Potts potts.jessie@gmail.com
Created with Vellum
Acknowledgments
It’s funny that it’s called self-publication when there is a whole group of talented people behind you helping in the process. I have amazing support from friends, fellow authors, and of course my wonderful readers. Thank you all so much from the bottom of my heart. My life doesn’t work without you.
No Quick Fix
A retired SEAL is about to face his toughest assignment yet. As a nanny…
Fixer. Bodyguard. Advocate. Brann Calder is expected to play all these roles and more as a member of Torus Intercession, a security firm guaranteed to right what’s wrong. In the military, catastrophe was his specialty. Five months out of the service, Brann is still finding his way, so a new assignment might be just what he needs. Unless it includes two things sure to make a seasoned, battle-trained veteran nervous: life in a small town, and playing caregiver to two little girls.
Emery Dodd is drowning in the responsibility of single fatherhood. He’s picked up the pieces after losing his wife and is ready to move on now, hopeful that his engagement to a local patriarch’s daughter will not only enrich his community but will grant his daughters some stability too.
The only thing standing in Emery’s way is that he can’t seem to keep his eyes—and hands—off the former soldier he’s hired to watch his girls until the wedding.
Emery’s future is riding on his upcoming nuptials, but being with Brann makes him and his family feel whole again. Too bad there’s no way for them to be together.
Or is there?
One
My Thursday had gone right off the rails, and it was all because I was late.
I was the last guy into the office on the third floor of the Scoville Square building in Oak Park, and when I reached my desk and flopped down into my chair, very hungover and in dire need of far more caffeine, it took a moment before it hit me how quiet it was. Normally the office was noisy. Normally if I showed up at eight forty-five in the morning, wearing a pair of aviator sunglasses and my Cubs baseball cap, not bothering to take either off at the door, I would have caught some serious shit. The fact that no one said a word meant only one thing—I was already dead.
“Crap,” I muttered, girding myself for the worst, knowing it had to be so much more than bad. “Where the hell do I hafta go?”
No answer from anyone, which was an even worse sign. When I finally looked around the office, the three men on my team who were there at the moment—there were two others still out on assignment—all stared at me like I’d drawn the short straw.
“What?” I asked no one in particular.
All three glanced away quickly, no one wanting to meet my gaze. It was like I had the plague—or worse.
“The hell is going on?” I groused at the room.
It was a big room.
The office was basically four sets of two desks, each butted up against the other in the center. In one corner were French doors that led to a huge, ornate, polished-mahogany and leather conference room. On the other side was a door that opened into a short hallway, with the bathrooms, supply closet, and breakroom. In the corner closest to the main door, so you had to walk by it to get to your desk, was my boss Jared Colter’s office. I had long suspected that it was positioned there because he liked to keep tabs on our comings and goings—like whether we were in or not, awake or not, or what time we dragged our asses in—and to basically be a mother hen. But Nash Miller, who had been around the longest, told me that Jared really just enjoyed seeing us safe and sound every day. Apparently he’d lost someone important a while back, and seeing all of us was like keeping an eye on his kids.
To be honest, it kind of bugged me.
The only man’s kid I would ever be had died when I was on a mission on the other side of the world, so it chafed a bit that someone thought they could parent me—or that I needed it—at this late juncture. But I kept my mouth shut since I liked my boss and the guys I worked with. As I hadn’t thought I’d ever have that again after leaving the Navy, I didn’t want to screw up and have to start over somewhere else. Though being late, and not a hundred percent sober, for a morning meeting was not doing me any favors.
“Someone better speak the fuck up,” I warned everyone in general, sounding even surlier than I felt.
“We rock, paper, scissored for this,” Shaw James said irritably from his desk across from Croy Esca, who appeared absorbed with whatever was on his monitor, doing his damnedest to avoid looking me in the eye.
“Coop!” I called out.
The man who sat across from me, who also happened to be the guy I was closest to at the firm, Cooper Davis, snickered, and I turned my head to give him my attention.
“Speak,” I commanded.
He winced like he was about to tell me I was dying. “This is why I’ve told you a million times not to be late.”
“Yeah, I know, but just spit it the fuck out.”
He sighed deeply, then tipped his head and stared at my desk. Following his line of vision, I noticed the dossier sitting in the middle of the clutter in front of me. It had a Post-it note with my name on it.
After flipping open the folder, I read the first line that told me the location of the job. Fuck. Short straw was right. “Montana,” I gasped, my head snapping up, my eyes meeting the deep blue ones of my friend.
His chuckle as he shook his head sucked all the air out of my lungs for a moment before I recovered and my brain kicked in. Every now and then, I noticed that the wavy brown hair that fell almost to my buddy’s shoulders and the mustache and heavy stubble that passed for a beard were really fucking sexy on him. He looked like one of those undercover cops in a bad seventies police drama, but on him, it worked.
“Why aren’t you going?” I asked, recovering, because as hot as the man was, he was not for me. I’d made a different decision the second I walked into the office for my interview. I looked out across the room, he glanced up at the same time, and bam, that was it, lust at first sight. I had gravitated to Cooper at a more normal pace, and he to me, bonding over hockey and dive bars and horror movies. There were also the occasional nights out spent eating great food at the best restaurants in the city. Those were my favorite. Of course they had been few and far between lately, as he’d gotten serious about a guy only to have it unravel in spectacular fashion. A guy who didn’t want to meet your mother was bad news. “I thought you were all about being out of town,” I ventured, not adding the last part that only I knew. Cooper had been ducking his ex since May, so perhaps running off to a different state was a no-brainer.
“Not that far outta town,” he assured me with a squint and a shake of his head.
One down. “Crap,” I muttered, not worried yet but definitely annoyed.
“That’s all kinds of fucked up,” Shaw James chimed in from his desk a few feet away.
“Shaw,” I wailed plaintively, willing my buddy who loved to camp and hike to chime in that it was a joke and he was going. “This is right up your alley, man.”
He swiveled around in his chair and caught me in his dark emerald-green gaze. “Not on a bet, Brann.”
“Why not?” I sort of whined and pleaded at the same time.
“Kids,” he said, shivering like that was the worst thing he could think of. “Read it all, Brann. You’re babysitting a parent, so there’s no way in hell you don’t have to deal with the children. That’s a big no for me.”
I scanned the document quickly. “It says they’re six and eight. You could teach them to fish—you love to fish.”
“Not with kids I don’t,” Shaw assured me, clearly revolted as evidenced by the second shudder as he turned back around.
“You love the outdoors,” I pointed out, grasping for anything to get me out of goi
“It’s a three-month-long job,” he said over his shoulder, “in a one-horse town named after a fuckin’ bear, Brann. I would lose my goddamn mind.”
Like I wouldn’t?
“And you won’t have any privacy. Seriously, the job is to live there with the family,” he continued. There was no mistaking the horror in his voice when he said with. “I honestly can’t think of anything worse than that.”
“No, c’mon, it’ll be fun.”
Nothing.
“Please?”
He said nothing, just rubbed his hand over his ginger buzz cut and ignored me completely.
Fucker.
Turning, I focused my attention on Croy Esca, who looked sympathetic even as he shook his head. Pretty boy, looked way younger than twenty-eight, came from a rich family who cut all ties to him when he came out as gay as a senior in high school. He was lucky because he’d gotten a full ride to some college in California, and moved there from Boston. Somehow, he’d ended up in Chicago. I didn’t know the whole story, and I’d never asked. I didn’t like people prying into my life, I figured I’d extend the guys I worked with the same courtesy.
“Montana?” I said hopefully, smiling for good measure.
Croy arched a white-blond eyebrow and replied with that silky tone of his, “Whatever would I do there, Brann?”
“You could paint,” I said, pouring on all the cheerful enthusiasm I could muster. He was an artist, that much I knew.
Croy’s grimace gave me his answer—clearly I was deluded and no way in hell was he driving his ass northwest.
Spinning slowly in my office chair, the concern becoming real, I caught Cooper with my stare. “Let’s really think about this now,” I said seriously.
“I’m givin’ that a hard pass. Way too much nature,” he informed me. “And it’s gonna get really cold there by November.”
But it was only the second week in September now. “It gets a bit cold here too,” I reminded him. It was Chicago, after all.
“Yeah, but here I have pizza and the Blackhawks and my bed,” he shot back, grinning. He was being nice about it, not snide like Shaw, but still, he wasn’t going. And he was right. There was a lot to be said for being in your own bed.
I tried to look pitiful.
“I think the puppy dog thing only works on guys who wanna fuck you.”
I was thinking that was accurate.
“Do you even know what’s in Montana?” he asked, pinning me with a look.
“No,” I answered miserably.
“Well then, just think, maybe it’ll be an adventure.”
“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.
“Again,” he said, sounding tired but gentle. “This is why we never, ever, sleep in, especially toward the end of the week. You have no idea what kind of bullshit job Jare got talked into taking on Monday or Tuesday that he’ll dump on you and then start his weekend early.”
At Torus, we specialized in what Jared Colter called, intercession and alignment. It was a fancy way to say fixer. Basically, we were intermediaries. We interceded on a client’s behalf, and by the time we left, their life would be, or should be, in order. It was what my boss called syzygy, connected things that lined up just right. When Jared hired me, he gave me a whole speech about positive energy and good karma and crap like that, but for me, it was all about helping people out. I was happy to do that and, bonus, I got paid—a win-win situation and, in theory, it was easy.
What we did was never the same. We operated as assistants, instructors, contractors, everything from seeing someone through the first few days of an acrimonious divorce to checking on kids living across the country from their separated parents to overseeing a home renovation to plain-old standard protection. But the jobs were never long. Certainly one job never took a month, let alone two, and holy God, not out in the middle of nowhere. What my boss was asking me to do wasn’t even humane. “I’m gonna go tell him I can’t do it,” I announced, a headache starting because I’d had no opportunity to either caffeinate or hydrate yet.
Cooper’s brow furrowed as he stared at me—in a way he had that made me unsure of my life choices. “I had no idea you have a death wish.”
I let my head slump onto my folded arms.
“It could be worse.”
“How could it?” I whimpered.
“At least it’s not snowing there yet.”
“That you fuckin’ know of,” I grumbled into my desk. I had to think of something, anything, to change Jared’s mind.
“Oh, shit, look who’s back!”
Lifting my head, I saw Locryn Barnes and Nash Miller walk into the office, both all scruffy and tired from their month and a half away.
It was nice to see Nash. He was a good guy and would have sympathized with my current predicament and maybe even gone instead if he hadn’t just gotten back. The other man, the guy I had been secretly sleeping with since I started working at Torus five months ago, him I wanted to run over with my 1983 Toyota Land Cruiser. And yes, since there weren’t a lot of those still on the road, someone probably would have noticed when I hit Locryn and then reversed back over him for good measure. But truly, it would be a small price to pay for the supreme feeling of bliss I was certain to experience once Locryn Barnes was splattered all over the pavement.
If I were being honest with myself, I was the one who deserved to be run over for being such a fucking idiot. How stupid could I possibly be, thinking that a guy who was keeping me a secret—from everyone—wanted anything serious? I’d been there for sex, a booty call from the jump, and nothing more. When he left six weeks ago on a job with Nash, he didn’t even bother to say goodbye. I hadn’t heard a peep from him in all that time, and now here he was, back without warning. He hadn’t even asked me to water his plants or feed his fish, for fuck’s sake. Locryn couldn’t have made things any clearer, and suddenly, just like that, Montana sounded really good. So good in fact that I had to wonder if somehow, someway, though we’d been super careful about the affair, so secretive, so cloak-and-dagger, that maybe Jared Colter knew anyway. The man had been a spook with the CIA, after all.
After getting up, pushing in my chair, I took the folder, put it under my arm, and smiled at Cooper when he looked up at me.
“I’ll call ya from Montana, and when I get back from this stupid assignment, I’m gonna need you to take me for Thai at the good place with the beer I like, all right?”
“You got it,” he said, grinning at me. “Pack a parka. You’ll still be there in November.”
I groaned and turned for the door.
“Oh ho, pretty boy, can’t even say hello,” Locryn called after me.
Flipping him off over my shoulder, I could hear everyone laughing as I reached my boss’s door. I knocked softly on the glass before leaning in.
I noticed then exactly what I had when I first met the man—that the silver flecks in his dark charcoal-grey eyes, and the laugh lines accentuating them, were amazing.
I had never been one to notice older men, but his height and powerful build, the gray-and-silver strands in his thick blond hair, and the way he carried himself—commanding and not to be fucked with—had stolen my breath away once or twice. Really handsome man, and though I’d never understood what the term silver fox meant before I met him, I had a firm picture in my mind now.
Jared was on the phone and said something quickly before putting his hand over the handset. “Are you going home to pack?”
“And then get a plane ticket, yeah,” I told him. “I’ll start reporting once I’ve been there a couple days.”
