Fix It Up (Torus Intercession 3)

But again, we still had to replace him, which meant a new face. I was annoyed just thinking about it.

“No one stays on the same team for their whole career anymore,” my grandfather had complained the last time I was over watching football with him, before he and my grandmother took off for Phoenix, where they lived for half of the year. “I hate it when my favorite players change teams.”

Me too. I hated change. Period.

“What’s the matter with you?” Shaw continued, needling me for some reason.

“Nothing’s the matter with me,” I groused at him, hoping he’d drop it and go back to his desk. It was weird. The guys in the office annoyed the crap out of me, but I liked them at the same time. And I was aware, because I’d been told, that it didn’t make a lot of sense, but I knew them, knew how they did things, and there was a level of comfort in that.

“You are a testy motherfucker,” Shaw assured me, walking away, but not before flicking over my pen holder just to be a dick.

“That was mature,” I barked at him, glaring as he gave me a shit-eating grin. When my eyes flicked to Rais Solano at his desk and found him smiling, he quickly glanced away.

“You know,” Nash began, which turned my attention to him as he leaned back in his chair, “maybe if you tried being less of a dick, people would stick around.”

“Did it occur to you that if everyone would just stop bitching at me to be in a better mood, then maybe I would actually get in a better mood?”

He squinted at me.

“You assume I’m gonna be a jerk, so why would I not be?”

“That makes no sense.”

“It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“You’re saying I want you to be a dick.”

“Yes,” I assured him.

“Hit him,” he ordered Shaw, who chuckled. “You know,” he said, his focus back on me, “before Brann and Croy left, you were actually fun to be around.”

Nash Miller was probably the calmest, kindest, most easygoing guy I’d ever met in my life. It would have been nice if my scowl incinerated him.

“You tricked us into liking you back when you were charming, and we all want that guy back. We keep hoping he’ll show up.”

“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” I said snidely.

“Oh sack up, Barnes,” he grumbled at me, the deep, gravelly sound of him soothing on my frayed nerves. “You need to snap out of this soon, because you already drove Croy off, and the rest of us will start dropping like flies any second now.”

I bristled, and my voice got low and threatening. “You can kiss my ass, Nash. I had nothing to do with Croy going—”

“Loc.”

I turned to look toward the front door, and lo and behold, there was my boss, Jared Colter, standing with a man and two women, all of them staring at me.

“Fuck,” I swore under my breath.

I had completely forgotten that a client was interviewing for a job that morning. Jared had informed us about it yesterday, that they would be set up in our conference room. Of course, when they were ready to start, I was the one caught sounding like an asshole. Which I was, but still. The only person in the world whose good opinion I wanted—needed—was Jared Colter’s, but from the way he was looking at me, I felt as though I’d stepped in a steaming pile of dogshit.

“You’re up,” Jared said in that voice of his that carried to wherever you were and then settled in your chest like inhaling frigid air. The idea of disappointing him was physically painful, and from the squint I was getting, I was guessing I already had.

I hated it. I was thirty-five years old, for fuck’s sake. I wasn’t supposed to worry about what the hell my boss thought about me as a person. As an employee? Sure. But not a person.

Getting up, I pointed left to the double doors that led down a short hall toward the conference room. “In there?”

He nodded.

Leading the way, I waited when I reached the doors, holding one side open so everyone could go through before me. When Jared reached me, I had to tip my head up, because though I was big, my boss was massive. The dark charcoal gray eyes were even darker than usual as he glowered at me.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I groused, defensive and peevish, hearing how irritable I sounded. “Shaw is driving me nuts.”

He grunted.

“I—”

“I have Croy’s friend who used to be with the DEA in Guadalajara, Ella Guzman, coming in to talk to me about taking his spot sometime this morning, so depending on how long this goes, I might need to step out.”

“I thought she lived in San Francisco,” I said, because I’d met her at Croy’s wedding, where I’d had to stand up for him, me and his buddy Sergio, and she told me that after being away from her family for two years, she was planning on being home for a while.