The Big Fix

by Holly James

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Female Sleuths

Synopsis

Katherine Center’s The Bodyguard meets The Fall Guy starring Ryan Gosling in a modern blend of screwball action and romantic attraction when a case of mistaken identity lands a college professor on the run with a mysterious—and dangerously hot—fixer . . .

When bookish Penny Collins reluctantly lets her sister drag her to an estate sale at a neighbor’s house, she’s hoping for a little diversion rummaging through dusty antiques. Instead, she ends up in a public squabble over candlesticks with the deceased owner’s nephew, Anthony—right before a dead body tumbles out of a closet.
 
Penny’s plan for the summer involved finalizing tenure at the university where she’s a computer sciences professor. Instead, she’s suddenly on the run with a man she barely knows, scaling walls, evading bullets, and accidentally stabbing henchmen. It seems the wrong people have got it in their heads that she’s Anthony’s girlfriend and, by association, in possession of something they desperately need—and will do anything to get.
 
As for Anthony, he has a top-secret occupation as a fixer, but a recent fix went dangerously awry, and now he and Penny are dodging both a ruthless billionaire and the FBI. And it’ll take all of Penny’s plentiful savvy and common sense, in addition to Anthony’s particular set of skills, to survive long enough for her to see the next semester . . .
 

Release date: March 25, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 304

Sample

An estate sale at a dead guy’s suburban mansion was not how I’d planned to spend my first Saturday of summer break.

“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” I said to my sister as I followed her up the house’s front path. A sign stuck up from the lush front lawn like a proud, little goalpost advertising that the vacant house’s contents were up for grabs to anyone interested in browsing. “We both know I can’t fit anything else into my apartment, and you need exactly zero things from an estate sale, Libby. Your spartan husband isn’t going to let you keep anything you find anyway. He’s allergic to clutter.”

As we approached the house, the lively but overgrown yard rolled and curved in vibrant shades of green and pink on either side of us. The old Victorian sat waiting with doors open like a tired parent exhaling a dramatic breath amid the youth of its own garden. As if we’d caught its sagging porch and faded shutters midsigh while the bounty of early summer freely blossomed around it.

Libby shot me a glare over her shoulder while managing to keep an eye on her son toddling near the untamed rose border and the stroller that she was pushing with one hand aimed straight. “John is gone for the summer, so he can’t stop me anyway. Max, don’t touch that.” She hardly broke stride to scold her son before continuing. “And besides, you could use a little adventure in your life. You’re always so busy studying and working and being responsible. I know the most excitement you get is trivia night with your socially stunted professor friends. Max! I said no!”

I scoffed in offense. “First, we dominate trivia night, and second, how is an estate sale an adventure? It’s just a yard sale where they were too lazy to drag everything outside.”

“One person’s junk is another’s treasure. I’ve always wanted to see inside this house; I think he’s a creepy old hoarder,” she said without bothering to lower her voice.

“Can’t you be a normal neighbor and spy, instead of waiting until he’s dead and hauling the whole family over?” I whispered, but not quietly enough based on the scandalized look the woman carrying a gaudy gold lamp down the front steps gave me. “Sorry,” I muttered as she passed.

The comment earned me another glare from Libby as she nosed the stroller’s front tire to the bottom step. The three-wheeled rover built for a moon landing surely could have scaled the old wooden steps on its own, but Libby pushed it into a position I knew well. “Spying on your neighbors only leads to trouble. Grab that.” She pointed to the handle at the front of my infant niece’s stroller and rocked it back on its hind wheels.

I dutifully circled to the front end and hooked my hand into the strap, lifting Ada like royalty in a cushioned throne to help carry her up the stairs. For fun, I puffed out my cheeks and crossed my eyes at my niece, and the sound of her giggle pierced the air like a sunray.

While Max looked like his father—long and wiry even for a three-year-old—Ada looked, oddly, like me. Libby’s chemically lightened blond hair bobbed on the side of her head like a golden sticky bun, while mine was the color of chocolate and matched the sprig pinched into a little pink bow on Ada’s downy head. We both had blue eyes, Libby’s were green, and a propensity for blushing deep shades of scarlet when called upon to do so by social interactions.

“Max, come on. Inside,” Libby called toward the fourth member of our brood.

Max abandoned the rose border and bounded up the steps behind us, green sycamore leaf from one of the yard’s enormous twin trees in hand. He victoriously and silently presented it to me once I set down the stroller.

“Thanks, pal,” I said, and poked its stem into my jeans pocket, accustomed to accepting his small, random gifts.

He dashed through the front door, on a mission, and skirted a man exiting with a pricey-looking ceramic vase, which surely would have shattered, had it fallen from his grip.

“Slow down!” Libby called, but Max had already disappeared.

“Lib, maybe we should leave the stroller outside?” I offered as she rocked it back again to lift the front wheel over the front door’s lip.

“Only if you want to carry Ada,” she said, and charged forward with the resolve of her son.

I followed her into the foyer and had the sudden sensation of being swallowed by the enormous house. Most California homes were airy, light-filled celebrations of sky and sea, with panels of glass built to suck the heavily taxed sunshine right inside and hold it in place. This house was a celebration of wood. Polished, shiny, dark wood. And wallpaper in shades of burgundy and emerald, with tiny gold pinstripes. A staircase curved from above, unfurling itself with a red tongue runner and landing several feet from a round table, which a man in a tweed jacket was currently inspecting. Rooms branched off to either side of the foyer: a dining room to the right and formal living room to the left. A hallway stretched like a throat into the dim reaches of the house’s belly, perhaps to a parlor or an office.

It was simply stunning.

“Guess he wasn’t a creepy old hoarder after all,” Libby mumbled under her breath.

“I’d say not.” I craned my neck to take in the chandelier dangling from the ceiling like an elegantly beaded tonsil.

Libby had told me her neighbor had died the week before. She’d slipped it into a conversation between news of Max starting swim lessons and the sponge cake recipe she was thinking of trying for their neighborhood potluck, as if it fit like any other fact from her busy life.

“Which neighbor?” I’d asked, knowing it was no one from her inner circle, given her casual delivery.

“The grumpy one on the north. Mr. Griotti.”

“Huh” was all I’d said because I had never met Mr. Griotti and didn’t know him beyond being the grumpy neighbor who lived in the big, old Victorian to the north of my sister, and I occasionally saw him coming and going when I visited.

She’d made no more mention of it until last night when she called to invite me to the estate sale this morning. I’d balked because estate sales were not part of our regularly scheduled activities, and because I’d already had plans to spend the day lounging by her pool, sipping lemonade and listening to an audiobook, as I was prone to do on weekends in summer. Alas, her insistence had gotten me out of the city, where I lived, and down the San Francisco Peninsula to her suburban kingdom several hours sooner than I normally would have shown up on a sunny Saturday. I had to assume it was due to her insatiable need to snoop inside her dead neighbor’s mansion, and not wanting to do it alone.

Standing inside the yawning foyer, I could not deny that I’d always wanted to see the inside of the house too.

“So, how does this work?” I asked as we drifted toward the living room. “We grab stuff and stick money in a box or something?”

“Not exactly. There should be someone running the sale.” She turned her head and spoke toward the room like she expected to see the ringleader there waiting for us. “He should be around here somewhere . . .” She mumbled the last part and pushed off with her stroller like she saw someone she knew.

Despite my reluctance to come, the idea of an estate sale fascinated me. The going-out-of-business, everything-must-go mentality applied to the contents of someone’s life felt at once enormously sad and wildly ripe for opportunity. Everything from their furniture to their dishes, the decorative baubles and utilitarian tokens, available to be picked over by scavengers. Walking the halls where someone had lived, with most everything exactly how he’d left it, felt like one step above looting. Breaking and entering with permission.

I had imagined we’d find a fair amount of junk inside the old house, but there was no junk in sight. The inside was elegant and prim, as if only the casing around it had gone to seed.

I lost sight of Libby and made my way into the living room toward a bookshelf crowded with spines and trinkets. It stood neck-high and held an assortment of artwork on its top.

“I’ve seen these on an antique show before,” a nearby woman quietly hissed to her husband. She held a pair of gold candlesticks and leaned in conspiratorially. “These are worth at least five hundred for the pair.”

“There are no price stickers on anything,” her husband said.

They were midsixties, retired-looking. She wore a matching blue tracksuit set, and he, khakis and a polo shirt. I didn’t recognize them from the neighborhood. From the looks of them, they were bargain hunters and had sniffed out the sale from miles off.

“Yes, that probably means he doesn’t know how much anything is worth,” she continued in a whisper.

I bent my ear their direction and pretended to take interest in a small, framed oil painting perched atop the bookcase.

“Or he hasn’t gotten to pricing anything because his uncle just died,” the husband said.

“Well, his lack of preparation is to our advantage, then, isn’t it,” she said in a callous tone, which sent an uncomfortable chill up my spine.

A shuffle of noise drew our attention to the doorway leading back into the foyer. A man had appeared, holding a box and looking harried. He wore black jeans and a black T-shirt and black boots, with the tiniest heel, like he’d stepped offstage at a rock concert. Whatever was in the box must have been heavy, given the flex of his arms and the slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. A small bead had greedily latched on to one of the dark waves framing his face and adhered to his temple in a curled J.

He was, quite possibly, the most beautiful thing in the room, maybe the whole house.

“Perfect—that’s him,” the woman with the candlesticks said. She bustled over toward him, brushing past me at the bookcase, with her husband in tow. “Excuse me, young man? I’ll give you fifty dollars for these.” She waved the candlesticks at him, one in each hand like a pair of gilded batons.

Fifty dollars? More like a rip-off than a bargain.

The man with the box glanced at her and the candlesticks, catching sight of me in the background. I stole a closer look at his face and noticed matching purple half-moons beneath his eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. A dart of sympathy hit me in the heart that this poor, exhausted man, who’d just lost his uncle, was about to get ripped off by a pair of local hucksters.

He opened his mouth to respond to her offer, and I stepped in before he could speak.

“I’ll give you five hundred,” I blurted. An embarrassed flame curled into my cheeks. I did not have five hundred dollars to drop on a pair of candlesticks I’d never use, and now the beautiful, tired man with the box was staring at me.

The woman swiveled around and glared at me hard enough to make me flinch. “These are mine. I found them first.”

The man with the box eyed her, and then me, and then back to her. He nodded his head once and said, “A hundred for the pair, and they’re yours.”

The woman beamed and bounced up on her toes. She snapped her fingers at her husband, who pulled out his wallet and stuck a wad of cash into the man’s hand that was still clutching the box. The thieves skipped off, grinning, and left me gaping.

The man walked toward me with his box and set it on top of the bookcase. Books. No wonder it was so heavy.

“You’re either really bad at math or really bad at haggling,” I said to him.

He cast me another glance, and without the box in his arms, I realized how broad and tall he was. A specimen, surely. And definitely no one I had ever seen in my sister’s neighborhood.

“Sorry, but I knew you weren’t going to buy those. You don’t look like someone ready to drop five hundred bucks on a pair of candlesticks.”

I flinched, shocked. “Okay, that was rude.”

“Just being honest.” He pivoted on his heel and stalked back toward the foyer.

I followed, suddenly feeling the need to explain myself. “Well, I was only trying to help. I’ll have you know, I overheard your customer conspiring to rip you off because she knew the true value of those candlesticks, and I thought, as a dutiful neighbor, I would intervene and drive up the price to closer to where it should be.”

He paused, and I almost ran into his back. He turned to eye me. “You live around here?”

A flush returned to my face. His disarming gaze was heavy and prickly and made me feel like I was being x-rayed. “No, but my sister does. I’m visiting for the weekend. Do you live around here?”

“Well, now I do, but it’s only temporary while I deal with all this.” He waved his hands at the room and then combed one hand through his mop of hair. It promptly fell right back into disarray. The stubborn, sweaty J still stuck to his temple.

I was about to ask him if he was from a place where neighbors were rude to one another when Libby reappeared with the stroller, still aimed out in front of her like the bow of a boat. “Pen, have you seen Max? I can’t find—Oh, I see you’ve met.” A smile spread across her face, lifting her eyes into a telling, scheming sparkle, which I knew well. “Penny, this is Anthony. Anthony, this is my sister, Penny.”

The man—Anthony—suspiciously eyed Libby and the stroller, and though he’d done nothing to make me expect a welcoming smile and handshake, I was still surprised when I didn’t get either. Instead he arched a thick, dark brow at Libby. “And who are you?”

His reaction did not faze her in the least. She politely laughed a charming sound. “I’m Libby. We met last night in your driveway. I’m your neighbor.”

As soon as she said it, everything clicked.

It was a setup. Libby’s latest form of meddling and attempt at playing matchmaker. This brooding—yes, attractive—but rude man fell from the sky and landed next door, and she lured me on false pretenses to come meet him. We were not at this estate sale to browse the home goods selection. We were here to browse the tall, dark, handsome man selection, of which there was one option. This was the adventure she’d been referring to.

A look of chagrin passed over Anthony’s face with the speed of a blink. “Sorry, it’s been a haze these past few days. I do recall the, um, pie you brought over.”

I fought not to roll my eyes.

Libby placed a loving hand on his arm. “Yes, well, hopefully things calm down soon. I’m sure you’re dealing with so much. My sister, Penny—”

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” I cut her off, and grabbed her extended arm to drag her away before she could further force me upon this man, who clearly had no interest.

She tsked at me, once we were a few paces away. Anthony stayed close, distracted by another looter asking how much for a decorative glass bird.

“A pie, Elizabeth?” I scolded her. “May I ask what exactly you think you’re doing?”

She rolled her eyes in that dismissive I know what’s best for you big-sister way she’d honed over a lifetime of bossing me around. “Yes, Penelope. I baked him a pie. The poor guy flew in from New York yesterday, and he’s dealing with the loss of a family member. I was simply being a kind neighbor.”

“Yes, and the fact that you’ve dragged me along, and essentially served me up on a platter, is coincidence?”

She didn’t even try to deny it. “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, he’s rather attractive. And you’re rather single.” She looked over at him negotiating with the bird lover like she was peeling a banana with her eyes.

Both facts were undeniably and unfortunately true. I’d dated in grad school, and even then, had limited time for a social life. But as soon as I’d landed a faculty job with a ticking tenure clock, I’d forgotten to look up, and somehow five years had passed with nothing more than a few coffee dates, despite Libby’s best meddling efforts. She’d made attempts to set me up with her husband’s coworker, their pediatrician, and the guy who sold organic chard at their farmers market. None of those failed missions had been as sly as this one though. Her premeditation was growing more sophisticated.

“Yes, and he’s also very rude,” I said. “Did you hear what he said to me about the candlesticks?”

“No, I didn’t. Max! There you are. Please don’t touch that . . .” She scooted away, cutting our conversation short, and with the stroller leading the charge. I’d lost her to the duties of parenting once again, but what was she expecting, bringing a grabby three-year-old into a museum of a house?

I turned back around to see Anthony pocketing another handful of cash and apparently done with the bird man. I crossed my arms and glared at him. “Why didn’t you take my offer on the candlesticks?”

He looked up, as if he’d forgotten I was standing there, and at once seemed exasperated that we were apparently still having this conversation. “Look, I meant no offense to you.” He stepped closer, and the smell of him hit me in a heady rush of dark, spicy notes and a hint of something feral. Like throwing a handful of cinnamon and amber on a campfire. He lowered his voice. “The truth is, I don’t care what anyone pays me for any of this stuff. I just want to get rid of it. The sooner I do, the sooner I can sell the house and leave.”

If I’d taken him for a sentimental man, I was mistaken. As was I mistaken about his size. Standing so close, I became intimately aware of his height and the expanse of his chest. I wondered what he did back in New York. Perhaps modeled underwear or trained professional athletes.

“Oh” was all I could summon.

Anthony’s dark eyes suddenly shot over my shoulder. He stared down the hall with a look of stricken panic. “Stay away from there!”

I flinched at the loud boom of his voice, so suddenly changed from the raspy whisper he’d spoken in moments before. I turned to see Libby hoisting a crying Ada out of her stroller, already bouncing and shushing, while simultaneously trying to stop Max from opening the door beneath the stairs.

Anthony charged down the hall like an angry bull, and I rushed to catch up, having no idea what kind of experience he had with children and not wanting him to lift my nephew off the floor by the collar with one of his enormous hands.

“I’ll get it,” I said, and shoved past him. The brief contact of our bodies, a mere bump, hit me like lightning. I thought he might have felt it too, with the way he bounced off me, but that might have been due to the limited space. The hall, much narrower than I realized, now that it contained Libby, the stroller, a crying baby, a rebellious toddler, and the two of us, seemed to shrink with every step.

“Max, buddy, leave that alone. This isn’t our house. We can’t go touching things and opening doors without permission!” I called to my nephew.

He stood with both chubby hands wrapped around the glass emerald-green knob protruding from the door like a big, shiny jewel. Even a house as old as this one was unlikely to have a basement in California; the door must have led to a closet beneath the stairs.

“Please don’t do that!” Anthony called again. The sharp fear lacing his voice like barbs made me wonder exactly what was in the closet.

“Max, don’t!” Libby halfheartedly scolded, her true attention tuned to Ada and her scrunched, howling face blooming a furious shade of pink.

“Max, leave it alone!” I echoed.

The devilish glint in Max’s eye said clearly that he was not going to obey. If all the adults wanted him to stop, that could only mean whatever he was about to get into must have been good.

“No!” Anthony bellowed, his voice a thunderclap in the cramped, wooden space right as Max yanked on the knob with both hands.

The door swung open with more force than a small child could have exerted, as if something had been leaning on it from the other side ready to fall.

Indeed, something fell out, crashing to the floor like a collapsing drawbridge, and landed with a dead, heavy thud between us. Anthony and I stood on one side, Max, Libby, the stroller, and the still-screaming Ada on the other.

We collectively stared at the object: an oblong shape haphazardly covered in a sheet. It took me a surprising amount of time to realize that the limp, gray thing sticking out from one side of it was a hand, and the pale, gaunt moon at the top, a lifeless face, and that I was, indeed, staring at a dead body.

And then we were all screaming with Ada.

I’d never been in an interrogation room before, but I suddenly found myself sitting in one across from a detective.

The police had arrived promptly on the scene, surely having a lack of other calls to tend to on a quiet Saturday in paradise. I wasn’t even sure who summoned them, seeing I was too busy losing my mind in the hall. Before I knew it, Libby was dragging me in one hand, Max in the other, and somehow still pushing the stroller out the back door of the house. The estate sale ended, crime scene tape was unspooled into a yellow barrier like a scar on the pristine neighborhood, and we were asked to come down to the police station to give a statement.

Now I sat across from Detective Daryl Warner, a man I’d seen at a handful of holiday barbeques and once very drunk in an ugly sweater at a Christmas party. In a community where everyone knew everyone, it was only suitable that the detective was my sister’s best friend’s husband. He was Libby’s age, late thirties, with dark skin and a face like he could be your best friend or break you in half with his bare hands, depending on his mood. The mood and the face were, thankfully, friendly at the moment.

We’d left Libby in the lobby with the kids, partly because Ada was asleep, but mostly because Warner said he wanted to talk to me first. Alone.

He pulled out a pen and clicked it before resting his hand atop the yellow notepad, ready and waiting with a fresh page. He started off casual. “How are you, Penny?”

I snorted, unsure if he was sincerely asking or trying to break the tension. “Well, I mean, I just saw a dead body fall out of a closet, so you know.”

He kindly smiled at me. He had young kids of his own and lived a few streets over from Libby. His wife, Nicole, founder of an extremely lucrative online skincare company, spent a fair amount of time poolside with us in Libby’s backyard. She made a mean strawberry margarita and always had the best book recommendations. “You’re only here for the day?”

“That was the plan. I come down most weekends in the summer to swim with the kids, but Libby invited me to the estate sale today.”

“You’re still up in the city?”

“Yes.”

Although there were several to choose from in the Bay Area, the city most commonly referred to San Francisco. The seven square miles where people piled on top of each other and paid eye-watering prices to climb the wind-whipped hills and live in the fog. My apartment in the Outer Richmond was a solid seventy-five-minute drive to Libby’s house in a peninsula suburb.

“You’re still teaching at the school?” Detective Warner continued with his line of questioning, which felt more like a catch-up at a backyard barbeque than anything to do with discovering a dead body.

“Yes. Finalizing my tenure case this summer.”

“Hey, congrats. Still computer sciences?”

“Uh-huh. Are we going to talk about the body, or what?”

He gently laughed. “Getting there, don’t worry. I wanted to know what you’re up to these days. I haven’t been around to any gatherings this summer to find out.”

“Well, we’re only a few days in. There’s hardly been a chance yet.”

Classes had recently en. . .