Chapter 1
The air at Locke & Key Matchmaking smelled of fresh flowers and expensive coffee. Other people’s hopes were odorless, but they filled the waiting room from morning on.
Kira liked walking through the glass doors before Monday had a chance to demand anything of her. The AC grazed the back of her neck, cold and half a degree too sharp. The lobby ran on low voices, footsteps lost in the thick carpet, the phone at reception ringing as discreetly as a phone knows how. The arrangements on the console got swapped out every three days. Studies said fresh flowers improved the comfort of a first visit. Kira just liked them, but studies sounded more professional.
“Morning, Kira,” Robin said from behind the desk.
“Morning.”
Kira passed the marble counter and fixed one of the bouquets. White roses, eucalyptus. Elegant, but not trying too hard. People paid her for love; a perfume ad wasn’t part of the package.
Behind the frosted glass, one of the consultants was already mid-conversation with a client. A man in his forties sat there wearing the face of someone who’d come for love but was privately holding out for a warranty and an owner’s manual.
The office waited with the chill of glass and the smell of a jasmine candle. Outside, L.A. was being its usual shameless, glittering self. Kira set down her bag, slid the coat off her shoulders. The fabric slipped away with the cool of its lining, and she sat before it had finished settling against the chair back.
She opened her laptop.
Monday’s calendar was packed from morning to night.
Kira took a sip of coffee. Bitter, still too hot.
Survivable.
Her first client came in at 9:32.
Madison Vale, twenty-nine, a perfect blond bob and the kind of looks built for expensive restaurant lighting. Today she looked like she’d paid four hundred dollars for the hair just to cry in her car right after.
Kira gestured to the chair.
“Coffee, tea, water?”
“Coffee, please. God.” Madison’s voice came out thin.
Robin brought a mug and discreetly vanished. Madison cupped the coffee in both hands like she was warming her fingers on it. She didn’t speak for a long moment.
“He said I was amazing.”
Kira leaned back in her chair.
“Of course he did.”
“How do you know?”
“Because nobody says ‘I don’t want to be with you’ without throwing the woman a compliment first.” Kira reached for the tablet. “Standard package?”
Madison blinked.
“Sorry?”
“‘I’m not ready.’ ‘You’re perfect.’ ‘It’s not you, it’s me.’”
“Yes,” she admitted quietly. “That’s exactly what he said.”
Kira made a note and set the tablet down.
Madison drank slowly. The mug trembled a little in her hands, clicking against a nail.
“I thought it was going well. We’d been seeing each other almost two months. He texted every day, introduced me to his friends. I knew his dog’s name.”
“Knowing the dog’s name isn’t a declaration of exclusivity.”
Madison winced like someone who’d seen that answer coming and still didn’t want to take it.
“I know.”
She didn’t.
If she’d known, she wouldn’t be sitting in this chair now, two months into a relationship whose existence only she could confirm.
Kira set down the pen.
“So what did I tell you?”
“Don’t give too much too fast,” Madison said into the mug.
“Legs closed until the guy commits to a label.” Kira nodded. “Iron rule.”
Madison looked like the iron rule was an instrument of torture. She didn’t have the strength to protest, though.
“It sounds awful when you put it like that.”
“Most useful truths sound awful. That’s why people prefer Instagram quotes.”
Madison let out a laugh, wet with tears and a little pathetic. Something, at least.
Kira slid the tablet aside.
“You didn’t do anything wrong. You just trusted the vibe between you more than what he was actually doing. That’s fixable.”
“It is?”
“Yes. Just not with him.”
Madison dimmed.
Kira didn’t try to comfort her. Comfort lasted until evening; a concrete plan had a shot at lasting longer.
“He already showed you who he is. If he comes back in two weeks with ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,’ don’t go reserving him a seat at your emotional table.”
“And if he really has been thinking?”
“Great. He can think a little more, ideally alone. Maybe with the dog whose name he so generously shared with you.”
Madison smiled wider.
She didn’t believe yet that everything would work out, but it seemed to be landing on her that a man with a nice profile and a weak spine didn’t deserve dramatic scenes under his wheels.
Kira laid out the plan for her.
Zero contact for thirty days, no accidental drops into his stories, a check-in meeting in a week, profile update after the detox.
Madison left twenty-eight minutes later. Still pale, but holding her back straighter.
The door closed softly.
Kira finished the coffee, which had gone cold a solid fifteen minutes earlier, and glanced at her notes. Monday had survived its first assault.
The door opened without a knock.
Only one person in this company got to do that.
Sam Miller walked in with two mugs.
One was for Kira, which meant there was a topic. Red hair fell to Sam’s shoulders, amusement glinting in the gray eyes, but Kira had known her too long to miss the worry underneath.
She passed the mug across the desk.
“Oof. She’s going to be digesting that one for a week?”
Kira took the coffee. Warmth came through the ceramic into her fingers.
“Three days, if she follows instructions.”
“So, a week.”
Sam dropped into the chair on the other side of the desk. She said nothing, tapping a nail against the mug.
Once.
Twice.
“So how was the weekend?”
Kira fixed her eyes on the calendar.
“Fine.”
“I ask because you look like someone who pulled an all-nighter with a shifter romance.”
Her neck went hot, treacherously, with no appeal. She took a sip to give her face something to do.
“I’ve got a lot of work.”
“Of course.” Sam sipped. “How does your system classify alpha males?”
“That’s different.”
“Especially when they growl for three chapters because the word ‘sorry’ is beyond them,” Sam said, and calmly drank her coffee.
Kira shot her a look.
Sam raised the mug in a gesture of innocence, but the smile stayed.
They could afford the silence. Kira went back to the calendar, Sam finished her coffee. After a moment the nail tapped the ceramic again.
Kira looked up.
So there was something to it after all.
“I’ve got a potential client,” Sam said.
“Privately?”
“A friend of Eric’s.”
Kira raised a brow.
Sam rarely mixed personal connections with Locke & Key business. Common sense told her how much trouble usually came of it.
“Eric has friends who need professional matchmaking?”
“Eric has one friend who’s been single too long and is starting to wear people down.”
“Wear people down?”
“Mostly my husband, which by extension means me.” Sam shrugged. “You get it.”
“What’s the problem?”
Sam set the mug down.
“He’s famous.”
Kira didn’t answer right away.
Famous clients tended to be cautious and absurd, and their money always came with demands of its own. The real trouble only started when they mistook a magazine cover for an exemption from basic decency.
“How famous?”
Sam hesitated. A little, but enough.
“Nick Coles.”
Kira’s fingers went still over the keyboard.
Once, then a second time, her eyelids dropped before she could stop them.
That name meant something even to people who didn’t listen to his music. Nick Coles’s choruses leaked out of radios, commercials, and café speakers, usually right when someone was trying to forget a terrible breakup. For years he’d been the most recognizable problem ever to sit at a piano.
"That Nick Coles?”
“I don’t know another one.”
Kira was quiet for a moment.
“Why would he need my agency?”
“Because he’s allergic to opportunists,” Sam said.
“That’s not an allergy. That’s a side effect of fame.”
Sam looked at her over the mug.
“Exactly.” Sam’s voice softened, though the look stayed sharp. “I want someone to finally tell him something he can’t turn into a song.”
Something shifted in Kira, a curiosity too quick to smother. She noted it and immediately filed it under very inconvenient.
She leaned back in her chair.
“What’s the actual problem?”
“He dates women who love Nick Coles, not him. When he figures it out, he disappears or does something stupid.” Sam let the pause hang. “Sometimes he writes another song that has Eric wandering around the house like a widower in a music video.”
“Does he have his manager’s blessing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he want this?”
Sam pressed her lips together and looked off to the side.
Kira sighed.
“That was kind of an important question.”
“He doesn’t know yet that he wants it.”
They looked at each other.
Outside, L.A. glittered as if its residents’ heartaches were worth exactly nothing. The calendar on Kira’s desk was waiting.
Nick Coles: famous, not for that long, somewhere two or three years out from a breakup with an influencer, and apparently allergic to opportunists. Plus a friend who’d had it up to here with his love life.
Common sense said to turn the case down without a second thought.
Kira unlocked the tablet.
“Fine. Bring him in.”
Sam stood with a smile that put Kira on guard immediately.
“Don’t get excited. I haven’t said anything yet,” Kira warned her.
The door closed.
Kira watched the empty chair for a few more seconds. Then she typed into the search bar: Nick Coles.
It was research.
Unlike shifter romances, it fell within working hours.
