No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

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.