Fix It Up: Torus Intercession Book Three, page 27
They were overdressed for an evening of home-cooked delicacies and a sing-along and people visiting and talking deep into the night. One was in a black short-sleeve top and rose-print floral skirt, with stilettos that sank into the grass as she reached the gate. She had on oversized sunglasses and was dripping in gold and diamonds; her hair, and what I could see of her makeup, was utterly perfect. The other woman, who she waited for before opening the gate, was in a tweed Chanel skirt suit with a Peter Pan collar and nude heels. Her hair, unlike her sister’s, which was up in a French twist, was cut into a short bob that curved around her face.
“Aunt Gwen,” the first woman greeted her, carefully walking down the cobblestone path toward the stairs where we were. “We need to speak to Nick.”
She nodded and turned to me. “Well, this here is Locryn, Nick’s partner, so I expect you’ll want to talk to him instead of me.”
I was surprised that she was acknowledging my place in Nick’s life already, but I appreciated it, and she gave me a quick smile, patted my hand, and then retreated into the house to start coordinating getting the food out onto the many tables. Apparently, Gwen wasn’t going to wait to be treated poorly. She was going to nip that one right in the bud.
“Who are you?” the first woman snapped at me.
“I’m Locryn Barnes,” I told her flatly, making sure she understood how unimpressed I was by her “Who are you?”
She took a breath. “I’m Nick’s sister Danielle, Danielle Bechtel, and this,” she said, turning to the taller woman, “is my sister, Beth Samson.”
“And are you the real estate broker?”
She scowled at me, and her voice was like the crack of a whip. “I am.”
I looked at Beth. “Which makes you the owner of the PR firm.”
“Yes,” she said, and while her tone was cold, it wasn’t the clipped anger of her sister’s. “And you’re who again?”
“I work with Nick,” I told them, because why did it matter? “And right now, he’s playing for all his cousins and such, so it’s gonna be awhile.”
“We can wait.” She was curt, and I’d obviously been dismissed. When a man called her name from the gate, she turned and gestured him in.
He was taller than me, but he wasn’t as heavily muscled. He came into the yard and stopped between the two women.
“We need to speak to Nick about our father,” Beth told me. “May we come inside and wait for him?”
“I’ll check,” I said, climbing the last few stairs and going into the house.
Efrem was there, standing just inside the door.
“What do you think?” I asked him. “Do you want those people in your home?”
“You realize we’ve been here, in this house, for over thirty years, and those girls have been old enough to visit for two decades.”
“I do.”
He shook his head. “And the girls and that boy of yours are the only ties my Gwen has to her sister, and now yours is fixin’ to never come back, and those women are too good to have ever come out here to begin with.”
“We’ll be back,” I told him. “And you can come see our home in Santa Barbara any time you want. Like Nick said, the door’s always open.”
He nodded. “He did say that.”
“You’ll like it. It’s got a big yard too.”
He turned and looked at me.
“Not as big as your yard,” I teased him. “But not tiny, either.”
His smile was warm. “You’re a good boy.”
“Sir, I am older than your son.”
“But not older than me,” he said with a grin, setting me straight. “Bring ’em on in, but sit ’em in the living room. I don’t want them at any of my tables, not the one in the kitchen and not the dining room, either.”
“Yessir,” I said, and after he gave me a pat, I went to the door and invited them in.
There were a lot of disdainful looks cast around, and when they sat, the two women on the love seat, the man in the recliner, not one of them looked comfortable.
“Something to drink?” I asked them.
“Just water, if it’s bottled and not from the tap.” Danielle spoke for all three of them.
I left and came back with cold bottles for the group.
“Thank you,” the man said kindly as I turned back to Danielle and Beth.
“He played until midnight last night,” I apprised them. “So since it’s what, six now, you all might be here for a bit.”
Beth huffed out a breath. “I told you we should have called.”
“What is it you’re needing?” I asked them.
“What exactly do you do for Nick?” Beth asked me.
“I’m his advisor,” I answered, and I wasn’t lying. Technically, I did advise him.
“I thought Sawyer whatever his name is was his business manager, and my understanding was that he was in Los Angeles,” she replied tersely.
“I work with him,” I lied, because it didn’t matter who they thought I was, I just needed to get to the bottom of what they wanted.
Danielle sat up straight. “I don’t know how much you know about our father’s current legal situation, but we’re here to ask Nick to contribute to our father’s defense.”
“In what way?”
“Well, we have retained counsel, of course, but our lawyer has informed us that the sale of the horses will not be enough to clear the debt that’s owed. The land, as well as all our father’s personal assets, and anyone he was in business with––”
“Meaning you all,” I chimed in.
“Yes,” Beth told me. “But only that which was attached to the horse farm. My business as well as my sister’s, our husbands’…they’re not included.”
“Lucky,” I offered.
“The thing is,” Danielle explained, shooting her sister a pointed look, “if Nick would be able to cover the rest of what’s owed after the sale of the horses, then the farm and the personal assets could be left intact.”
“But isn’t your father still going to jail?”
“Yes,” she muttered, “but only for eighteen months or so, and this way––”
“Are you sure? Only eighteen months for child endangerment?” I knew better, because clearly, I was more up to date on what Sterling Madison was being charged with than his daughters were. Because yes, while the statute of limitations had, in fact, run out on child endangerment—which I found obscene to begin with—that wasn’t what the county prosecutor was charging Sterling Madison with. She was hitting the patriarch of the Madison clan with a hate crime, and that would, in fact, put him in jail for far longer than Nick’s sisters understood.
“The whole thing is sordid and regrettable,” Danielle assured me. “But our father is not being charged with any crime relating to Nick, only with fraud and animal cruelty.”
Someone had definitely missed a memo. “Are you sure?” I asked, trying not to sound snide, because her not caring about Nick was twisting my stomach into knots.
“Yes, of course,” she snapped at me.
Oh man, she was in for the shock of her life.
“But we’re not here to talk about that; we need to speak to Nick about the farm and––”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why?”
“I mean, if your father can’t own horses when he eventually gets out, what’s the point of owning a horse farm? That seems odd to me.”
Beth gestured at the man. “My husband, Alan, he’s going to run the horse farm, and my father will be a silent partner.”
There was a knock at the front door that kept me from replying to that, and moments later, another man appeared under the archway between the kitchen and living room.
“This is my husband, Gene,” Danielle told me as the man crossed the floor, and I stood up as he offered me his hand.
“Eugene Bechtel,” he told me. “And you are?”
“Locryn Barnes,” I said, shaking his hand.
“Pleasure,” he said before taking a seat in the club chair next to the recliner where Alan was sitting.
“You were saying about Alan?” I asked Danielle.
“Yes, he’s going to take over the running of––”
“Is he?”
“Of course,” she snapped at me. “And with Nick paying off the debts, and the ownership of the horse farm being transferred from our father to Alan, then the main assets are untouched, which works out best for everyone.”
“What does Nick get out of it?”
“What do you mean, what does Nick get out of it? Are you kidding?”
“No, please, enlighten me.”
“Why, he gets to put this whole wretched chapter behind him. If he doesn’t help our father, then his name will be dragged through the mud the same way—”
“Nick’s the injured party,” I apprised her. “He can’t get dragged through the mud. In the court of public opinion, he’s the hero.”
“I don’t think that’s—”
“You can check,” I told her. “Look him up on social media, in the news, and you’ll see.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. If Nick doesn’t help, our father will be ruined, utterly bankrupt. He’ll have to move in with one of us, and we’ll all be impacted.”
They wouldn’t be impacted for years from now, but again, she clearly had no idea about what charges her father was actually facing. “All of you?”
“Well, yes. Even our children.”
But I’d read everything Nick’s lawyer, the terribly capable and utterly frightening Mavis Barrington, had sent over to him, so I knew that Sterling Madison’s grandchildren would, in fact, be all right in the long term. In the short term it might suck, because they would be tied to their grandfather’s crimes, but kids were resilient. Their parents, not so much.
“My understanding is that your father set up trust funds for your kids that they can access when they turn twenty-one.”
“How do you—is Nick aware of that?” Beth asked me, her voice thready and small.
“He is,” I told her. “He, unlike you all, has an excellent lawyer.”
All four people were staring at me.
“Nick told me that when he came to you for help, you and Danielle,” I said to Beth, turning to her sister and then back, “didn’t believe him.”
“Well, of course not,” Danielle hissed, turning my focus from Beth to her. “Who would ever believe a story like that?”
“But when you saw the footage yourself,” I said, squinting at them, “and knew it was true, why not reach out to him then?”
“He’s gay,” Alan barked out. “Are you forgetting that? Do you have any idea what that news did to our family? We all found out at once, when that horrible footage came out, and they just announced it to the world like it was nothing.”
I nodded, feeling no need to correct them and explain that Nick was bisexual.
“Everyone knew about it and was talking about it. All our family and friends—it was everywhere. Imagine how we all felt, how betrayed, how ashamed we were, and of all of us, poor Sterling, you can’t even imagine how—he’s not the kind of man who—he could never—it’s just not possible for him to––”
“He panicked.” Danielle took over for her brother-in-law. “That day in the barn, he found out his only son was gay, and he wasn’t in his right mind. He flew into a rage, and what happened just…happened.”
But I’d seen the tape, well, some of it, but enough to know that there had been no fit of uncontrollable anger. He had told the men to make his son bleed, and he’d been calm and precise when he gave the order, hence the premeditated hate crime he was being charged with.
“Your brother told me that your father beat him daily after your mother died, and when he told you, you didn’t believe him about that, either.”
“You don’t understand,” Beth replied, almost pleading with me. “Nick lied all the time, about everything, and Daddy never laid a hand on Dani or me, so—”
“You didn’t believe him,” I concluded, getting up, needing to pace, feeling the heat flush my skin as the anger rose. I’d be choking on it in a second.
“Listen,” Danielle began. “I think we’re just going to walk down to where Nick—”
“You need to get in touch with your lawyer, because my guess is that he, or she, or they have no clue that you people think Alan here can run the horse farm. I’m telling you right now, he can’t. There’s a provision in the injunction Nick’s attorney has filed that clearly states that nobody who has fuck-all to do with your piece-of-shit father can ever run the goddamn horse ranch!”
I was furious, and I yelled the last, the sound bouncing off the walls.
“Get the fuck out and don’t come back!”
“Who do you––”
I snarled and stormed out of the room, out the front door, and around the side of the house, pacing near where the food tables were being set up, breathing in through my nose, hoping to God that Alan came out of the house and attacked me so I could beat the shit out of him. I hoped whoever ended up with the horse farm leveled it all and started over from scratch. Or, just as good, they could simply bar everyone on Nick’s father’s side of the family from ever stepping foot on the property again.
They were all so lucky that my gun was still locked up and not in a holster on my shoulder, my hip, or my ankle.
“Loc!”
Turning, I saw Dez, and when he came loping up, I held up a hand, warning him to stay back.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, stopping but staying close, arms crossed, watching me.
I shook my head, pacing toward him, almost reaching him and then turning around, again and again, but it didn’t help, the anger not dissipating in the least.
“You need me to go get a shovel, and we can bury whoever it is you wanna kill?”
“That is a very thoughtful offer,” I growled.
“Come on, let’s get you…a…beer or…G?”
I checked to see what had Dez so spellbound and found Gene there, having come from the house, standing there on the lawn, frozen, staring at Dez like he’d seen a ghost.
When I turned to look at Dez, he was rooted to his spot on the grass as well.
“Huh,” I said, because whenever you thought the world was big, it proved it was not. It was actually very small, and people you thought could never exist in the same orbit were always much closer than you imagined.
It struck me then that the reason Eugene, or Gene, as his wife called him, or G, as Dez, his lover, called him, had not backed up Alan with his whole gay-equaled-bad thing, was that he was not a huge fucking hypocrite. He was just a cheater.
“What are you doing?” Danielle shrieked at her husband as she charged by him, shoes off, but then came to an abrupt stop as well, her gaze riveted on Dez. “D?”
D? All these letters instead of names.
“What are…why are you here?”
His eyes did a thing, softened as he looked at her, and I was working that out in my head when Beth was suddenly in my face, screaming at me.
“How the hell did you know there was that stipulation in the judgement?”
“Because Nick is the one who asked for it to be in there,” I answered, calming because she was so incensed. Why it worked that way for me, I had no idea, but the louder, angrier, completely over the top someone else was, the more dialed down I became. “And since they were letting your piece-of-shit father walk on the child endangerment charges, they were quite accommodating of anything your brother wanted to add to the new charges they were filing. That included the hate crime.”
“The what crime?” she shrieked at me.
“That can’t be,” Alan lamented, missing what his wife and I were discussing, fixated on the piece that affected his perceived livelihood. He came up beside her, hand raking through his thinning brown hair, yanking on his tie, clearly distraught. “Everything is in place for me to take over the farm.”
Beth rounded on him. “We have to talk to Nick and get him to—”
“Dez,” Nick greeted the man with such fake enthusiasm that I turned to squint at him as he came walking across the lawn to reach us. “You’re back. So great to see you again.”
He was such a liar, and I shot him a pointed look.
“I—” Dez croaked out, looking at Nick and then back at Gene. “I wanted to see Locryn again to…what are you doing here?” he asked Gene and then turned to Danielle. “And how do you know him?”
She swallowed and bent over to put her hands on her knees.
“I’m here with my wife, and…why did you want to see Locryn?” Gene asked, looking like a man drowning on dry land.
I threw up my hands and turned as Nick reached me and put his hands on my hips to keep me still.
“What the hell is going on?”
Grabbing his bicep, I dragged him out of earshot.
“That, as you know, is your sister Danielle,” I said, pointing. “That guy there is her husband, Gene, who’s secretly been boning Dez.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said,” I told him. “But I suspect that Dez is also sleeping with Danielle, which is why she looks like she’s about to pass out.”
“I had no idea this was what ‘friend of the family’ entailed.”
“Oh you’re nasty.”
He waggled his eyebrows at me.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I am,” he placated me. “Deeply.”
“Ass.”
“And who is he?” he asked, pointing at Alan.
“That is your sister Beth’s husband, Alan, who really can’t think of anything worse than being gay, so I think you should go tell him you’re actually bi, and we’ll see if his head explodes.”
A smile slowly curled his lips.
“And up until five minutes or so ago, Alan thought he was taking over the horse farm from your father.”
“What? No. There’s a thingy, a…whatever you call it.”
“Stipulation.”
“Yeah, that.”
“What’s with you? You seem distracted.”
“That’s because I saw Dez again, and he made a beeline right for you, so I got over here as fast as I could, and I really don’t enjoy other people being interested in you.”
