Free Sweet Child o' Mine by Lexi Blake

Chapter One

    I an Taggart frowned as he looked
at his childhood friend. Sullivan Roarke had grown up with Ian, Alex, and Sean.
He’d worked the same shitty jobs Ian and Alex had worked for the same shitty
pay. He’d given Ian some of that pay when Ian had a hard time keeping a roof
over his and Sean’s head. Sully had never asked for payback.
    Until
today.
    “So
what you’re telling me is this douchebag lets you film his life and people
watch it? Like actual living people who breathe and shit.”
    Alex,
who was sitting beside Sully, groaned. “Ian hasn’t developed tact in the decade
or so since you last saw him.”
    Sully
sat back with a wry smile on his face. “I wouldn’t expect him to. And we don’t
call Hoover the douchebag. We like to call him the talent.”
    “Which
only proves you have no understanding of the word.” Tact was useless in Ian’s
mind.
    “Perhaps,
but I’ve made a lot of money off
Kendalmire’s Way
. The network
recently reupped us for three years. Do you have any idea how unusual that is?
I’ve been in this business for a while now and this show is my goldmine. If I
can get six or seven years out of this show, I ’ll be set for life and I won’t have to do reality shows anymore. I’ll be able to move
into scripted TV, which is where I want to be.”
    Thank
god. He’d worried that Sully had lost his damn mind. “So you don’t particularly
want to film douchebag rich kids who think they’re DJs and their blonde model
girlfriends, who shop and prove the American education system has completely
failed?”
    Sully
chuckled. “Not particularly, but then I suspect you’ve taken on some jobs that
weren’t agreeable for the sake of money.”
    Oh,
he’d saved a few people who he would rather have strangled. “True.”
    “So
from what I understand you have to run this by the rest of the team before you
take a case?” Sully asked. “I didn’t know that or I wouldn’t have brought
Hoover in today.”
    Normally,
he would present the case to the team and they would decide to take or reject
the assignment and who was the best operative to work the case, if they agreed
to it. “You didn’t just bring Lord Douche. You brought all his douche minions,
too.”
    “The
good news is apparently none of them eat because Charlotte offered them cookies
and they looked at her like she was crazy,” Alex offered. “That’s in your
favor, Sully. If any one of them had touched Ian’s cookies, he would have
thrown them down an elevator shaft.”
    They
were his freaking cookies. Sean had recently brought in an assistant pastry
chef at his restaurant, Top. Ian was a principle investor so he tended to treat
Macon Miles like his own personal bakery. Adam’s baby bro didn’t seem to mind.
He’d kept Ian supplied with sweets. Ian was caught in
a never-ending cycle of pain. He got nervous about Charlie giving birth and he
ate. He got worried that he was going to end up as big as Charlie and with no
actual babies coming out of him, so he worked out. He then worried he was
working out too much and neglecting Charlie and he reached for the cookies
again.
    He
was going to be so freaking happy when the demons were all born and life could
get back to…
    Yeah,
he wasn’t sure what normal was anymore.
    He
really wanted one of those cookies followed by a couple of rounds of punching
the shit out of someone in the ring he’d set up at the new Sanctum facility. Or
he could punch Hoover Kendalmire. That would be fun, too.
    “We’re
taking the case, Sully,” Alex assured him.
    They
were. Because he owed Sully for all those precious ten dollar bills he would
slip to Sean for school lunches and for showing up with pizza right about the
time Ian’s paycheck would run out. “How many times has he been assaulted?”
    “Yesterday
makes three. It was a really close call. Someone took a shot at him. We have it
on camera,” Sully explained.
    Ian
had already looked over the footage. Hoover and his model girlfriend