Page 1 of Out Of A Fix

OUT OF A FIX

Through the years, Nash Miller has watched all his buddies fall in love and get married. It was romantic, and he’d wondered when he himself would find the one. Now, older, wiser, he realizes that what he’s always wanted—a husband and a family—just isn’t in the cards for him. And that’s all right. He has wonderful friends, a good life, and he gets to help people, which has always been his true calling. So when the time comes to protect a family in a tiny town in Washington State, he’s more than willing to get on his white horse and ride.

The family needs a bodyguard, but it goes beyond that. The mother abandoned them for a new life, and the father is absent, stuck on a work project he took on to keep his family afloat. What Nash finds are three kids in need of a fixer, and lucky for them, that’s exactly what he does. Providing support and structure is second nature to him, and he’s on solid ground, confident…until their father, Luke Duchesne, gets home. He’s nothing like Nash assumed he’d be, and with each passing day, the lure of the man, and his great kids, gets harder to resist. But he can’t stay there. He’s a fixer, after all, and what they’re all feeling is simply gratitude. Isn’t it…? Though when Luke kisses him, it starts to feel like so much more. Nash hopes he’ll be able to explore a life with Luke—he just needs to make sure his own isn’t cut short.

ONE

I’d never been to a fancier—or longer—wedding in my life. I could have died there.

I should have known from the way it started that it was going to be a slog. There were pictures taken as we all entered—who does that? Waiting to sit for a ceremony was just odd. Then there were words of welcome, and this was also new to me, never had that happened before in my fifty-two years, and then—horribly—came the poems. So many, many poems, read by lots of people—all Owen’s friends, whom I’d never seen in my life—and all of it, together, was simply not the kind of nuptials I thought my boss and friend, Jared Colter, would have been part of. At all. Ever. In all truthfulness, I didn’t think he was the knot-tying type to begin with. But apparently, when you finally realized that the love of your life was right under your nose the whole time, when they told you the kind of wedding they wanted, you went along because it was the least you could do since clearly, you were a huge fucking idiot. Being all in meant with everything, no matter how much boredom that inflicted on others.

Seriously, though, I’d been to Catholic weddings with a mass first that hadn’t taken this long. Another buddy of mine was Greek Orthodox, and his wedding, I was fairly certain, had not tipped over into an ice age. At the forty-five-minute mark—for the ceremony—I was ready to go. We weren’t even at the reception yet, no cake cutting or best-man speeches. I was so done. And yes, I could own, somewhere in the deep recesses of my soul, that going to weddings made me a bit sad. I too had been a romantic once, but that ship had sailed years ago.

The elbow into my side brought me out of my thoughts.

“Oww,” I grumbled at my oldest, best friend, Rais Solano.

“Stop fidgeting,” he ordered me under his breath. He was sitting to my left in the second to last row of the church we were in.

And we were in those last two rows because all the rest were filled. Amazing but true, every single one. It was incomprehensible. I had no idea Jared Colter even knew this many people. Some of them were Owen’s friends—anyone younger than forty was probably his—but the majority were those who had stepped out of the shadows to be counted on the man’s special day. Which was great and loyal and all that, but again, there was a sea of three hundred or so. I was surprised when I walked in, and was even more so that no one had gotten up and left. But when you were caught in a time loop, that perhaps wasn’t possible.

“Leave him alone,” Rais’s date, Sienna Donahue, chided him. She was a stunningly beautiful blonde, whom I’d liked from the moment I met her. “I’ve been to high school graduations with rambling valedictorian speeches that didn’t last this long.”

“Or mass,” my friend Cooper Davis, who was also hers, chimed in from beside her. “And I’m Catholic, so I know what I’m talking about.”

“We’re all gonna die here,” I muttered.

“You look like a grown-up, but you’re really not,” Rais scolded me.

“All of you, zip it,” Cooper’s husband, Ash Lennox, the very famous actor—and deservedly so—whispered harshly from next to Cooper, glaring at me, punctuating his words with hand gestures—the cut-it one with his hand across his throat—before leaning back. “You’re going to get us in trouble, and I like your boss.”

“I’m so bored,” Shaw James, another friend of mine, whined from my right. “And there’s a reception after this.”

“Shh,” his husband, Benji, chided, leaning forward so I could see him. He had to. Shaw James was not a small man. Between his height, his shoulders, and all the muscle, Benji appeared absolutely tiny in comparison. “You all need to keep it down and be respectful.”

“Your wedding wasn’t like this,” I grumbled.

“Shaw and I got married in his parents’ backyard,” Benji reminded me. “This is not that. This is fancy.”

“I liked that better,” I mumbled. “I am here under duress.”

“Stop saying that,” Rais warned me. “You’ve said that nine times already, and you know our boss probably didn’t want us here to begin with. We only made the guest list because of Owen.”

“That’s not true,” Sienna argued. “I’ve talked to Mr. Colter, and he treasures you all.”

“Oh, I’m gonna be sick,” Shaw replied.

“Stop speaking,” Benji ordered.

“I would have made the guest list,” Ash said flatly. “As would Nick.”

“Thank you.” Nick Madison, who was sitting behind us, leaned forward in the pew and put a hand on Ash’s shoulder. “That’s nice of you to say.”

“You’re very welcome.”

Nick Madison was a huge rock star. His tours sold out in hours, he had a Netflix special a while back, a crapton of Grammys, and any and every kind of other award you could think of. He was also married to the—bar none—grouchiest man on the planet, my friend Locryn Barnes. If you looked up snarly in a dictionary, Loc’s face would be there.

“When Jared Colter leaves his intended at the altar to come kill you all, I’m gonna sit here and let it happen,” the aforementioned Locryn Barnes growled.