Contents
Untitled
Going For Gold
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Love, Mary x
About the Author
Providence Gold Series Books
Copyright © 2019 Mary B Moore
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced, copied or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without written expressed permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, places, events and incident are products of the authors imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is purely coincidental.
Cover design: Tracie Douglas https://www.facebook.com/darkwatercovers/
Cover Photograph: Deposit Photos
Editor: B&C
The use of actors, artists, movies, TV Shows, and song titles/ lyrics throughout this book are done so for storytelling purposes and should in no way be seen as advertisement. Trademark names are used in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement of the respective owner’s trademark.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for use only, then you should return it to the seller and please purchase your own copy.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1911 and the Copyright Act 1988, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior express, written consent of the author.
This book is intended for mature adults only and contains consensual sexual content and language that may offend some. Suggested reading audience is 18 years or older. I consider this book as Adult Romance. If this isn’t your type of book, then please don’t purchase it.
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Going For Gold
Charlotte
Two years ago, my life changed. All it took was a lot of alcohol, mainly tequila, and my friend’s fortune telling grandmother reading my future.
Now, I count the minutes I waste and keep them in a document on my phone, tallying up them all up. I just know I’m going to feel bitter over those wasted minutes. I’ve also started working through my bucket list, adamant I’ll get through it all. Why? Because I’m twenty-one, the age she said life would change for me at.
And then I meet Levi Townsend, the man who shoots my minute tally to an insane level. I’m not sure if this pisses me off, or if I like that he tests my limits.
Does it even matter though? Not with the big day coming soon.
I just need to get through all the items on my list before the big day comes.
Levi
Who the hell believes in that fortune telling crap? Oh, she does!
It’s just my luck that the woman I keep bumping into and can’t get out of my head is convinced she’s jinxed, and measures every minute of her day like it’s her last.
Then again, maybe it is?
Being a Townsend, I’m going to test her self-control, push her boundaries, drive her crazy… and I can’t wait.
But, what happens when it turns from ‘just fun between friends’ to ‘this isn’t friendship, it’s freaking love’? I’ll repeat – I. Am. A. Townsend. We’re determined, we’re loyal, we’re honest, we love deeply and we’ll drive you out of your ever-loving mind until you say ‘yes’.
So, I’ll just have to change her mind!
Dedication
I’m so sorry I had to delay Levi by two weeks, but he’s finally here. I have to say, I think he ties with Cole on being my favorite Townsend ever (sorry Tate!).
As 2019 draws to an end, it’s been a huge year for me – both with writing and in my personal life. This will be the 8th book I’ve written this year, 10th I’ve published (including the Providence box sets), and my 21st book all together (with one that isn’t live anymore because it was for an anthology). I want to thank all of you for your support, for loving the Cheap Thrills and Providence Gold series, and for just being the best supporters ever. When I first started writing, I figured that I’d get maybe five readers maximum. Over the last almost four years, that figure has been blown out of the water, but this last year has been the most surreal one. So many of you have read and loved the Townsends and Cheap Thrills crazies and reached out to me, and there really are no words to describe how amazing that feels.
When I read over Going For Gold, I could see how distracted I’d been as I was writing it. My son hasn’t had an easy year health wise, and looking after him and writing Levi… something suffered. So, delaying it to rewrite the whole thing was a horrible decision to make, but I’m hoping I did him justice for you all. Let it never be said that Mary delivered a sub-par Townsend, damn it.
So, thank you, and this one is dedicated to the Townsend lovers.
M xox
PS read the note that follows after the book. Trust me, there’s some news in there you’ll like x
Chapter One
Charlotte
It felt like my hair was being pulled out of my head as I looked down through the clouds at the ground – a really fucking hard ground. I mean, I’ve walked on it since I was thirteen months old, I knew how hard it was, and the distance between my body and it right now wasn’t really compatible with me being a breathing and living human being. All it would take is the parachute failing, a flock of birds ripping through the thin fabric, being off by one second when the cord was pulled… I was too young to die.
Turning to look at the asshole beside me whose fault this all was, I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times, trying to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. Thankfully, he wasn’t aware of me doing this seeing as how he was still looking down at where I’d just looked up from.
Here’s the thing – I said I wanted to cross items off my bucket list, but I hadn’t really known what I’d wanted to do. Out of desperation, I’d gone online and done an internet search for bucket list items. Surprisingly, skydiving was number one on most of the lists. The reason it was surprising was because it meant that thousands of people around the world were listing things they wanted to do before they died, and number one was something that would kill them outright.
When Levi had told me his brother Noah was into jumping out of planes like a psycho kamikaze, I’d asked him about it, but he’d made it seem easy like jumping off a swing – the lying asshole of a bull. Yeah, he was the asshole of a bull, the tail end of the angry bovine creature with horns on its head. I wasn’t going to go into how crusty one of those would be, not with my stupid decisions staring me in the fact at that precise moment, anyway.
As
soon as I found my way out of this mess, I was going to cause him pain. Then I was going to have another look at my list and take off things that might bring me death, especially as I was trying to get through all of this just in case that was what was coming to me. I should have gone for jumping into a pit of feathers, or lying in a room with puppies crawling over me – which, FYI, wasn’t on any of the bucket lists online, but it totally fucking should have been.
A hard tap to the shoulder almost made me embarrass myself.
“Are you ready, Charlotte?” Lucifer – or Pete if you went by what his parents had called him – yelled over the sound of the air rushing in around us.
I was still facing toward Levi, so I saw the guy attached to him doing the same thing. I’d never been the type who prayed, but I figured now was the best time to start.
Please, God, don’t let him say yes. Let him back out of it so that I’ve got a good reason to do the same thing.
“Charlotte?” Pete yelled, giving my arm a shake.
Just then, Levi and his guy scooted to the open edge of the plane and started preparing to jump. It was like I was watching it happen in slow motion now, and I was vaguely aware of a dark tunnel creeping in around my vision as they started to lean out of the side of the plane. That’s when something constricted around my chest, and I started panting, doing my best to get oxygen into lungs that felt like they were the size of a quarter as the tunnel closed in more quickly.
Just as they’d leaned past the point of return, the tunnel won and it was lights out. The last thing I heard as I slipped into the darkness, was Levi yelling, “I’ve changed my mind!”
Or, at least that’s what I thought I’d heard.
Levi
Keeping my eyes on the road, I silently seethed – yes, seethed – over today’s events. When I’d said I’d help her fulfill her bucket list, I’d thought she meant shit like tattoos and climbing a mountain, not skydiving. I’d figured that sending her to Noah and hearing him explain exactly what happened would make her change her mind, instead she’d been even more determined to do it thanks to his pep talk.
When I got home, I was going to kill my brother, hug my best friend who was also his wife, and then kill him all over again.
“It’s fun.” He’d said. “You’ll love it.” He’d said. “It’s as harmless as riding a bike.” He’d said. “You’ll want to do it again, and again, and again.” He’d said.
I should have just paid attention to Luna’s frantic head shaking behind him, instead of thinking that I could hack it.
And the betrayal of the woman – admittedly beautiful woman – beside me, passing out so she didn’t have to do it. Granted, she couldn’t have helped it, but would it have killed the guy she was attached to, to just do it? She could have woken up halfway down and still crossed it off her bucket list even though she didn’t actually do the jumping. Or I could have had the best photos of her passed out a million miles above the ground – and those photos would have been awesome. But no, she had to pass out and wake up as the plane was coming into land, while I plummeted to my death with a dude’s dick pressed against my ass.
Awe-fucking-some.
“We should discuss what happened,” Charlotte whispered, but I stayed quiet. When she realized I wasn’t going to say anything, she added, “It was an accident.” Still, I stayed silent. “Was it at least fun?”
That snapped me out of my brush with death snit. “Fun? Fun is when you enjoy something, when you smile and feel light because it’s been something thrilling. Know what isn’t fun?” I swear to God her lips twitched, so I pulled over to the side of the road so that I could blast her with my expression – my fierce and terrifying expression as a survivor.
Cutting the engine, I angled in my chair so that I was looking at her now. “Fun isn’t feeling your brain travel from your head, through your body, and out of your ass hole. Fun isn’t realizing that when that cord is pulled, the parachute may very well fail…”
“They said you had a backup parachute,” she interrupted, but I was too far in to even try to listen to her attempt at being reasonable.
“Fun isn’t realizing that your last moments before you hit the ground and your feet take the opposite direction your brain took – going up through your ass, into your now empty skull – were going to be spent with the dick and balls of the guy you’re strapped to against the crack of your ass,” I hissed, leaning forward as far as my seatbelt would let me.
Her breath hitched, and for a second I felt really bad about ranting, and thought that maybe I’d scared or upset her… until she choked out, “You could really feel his wiener and nuts against your ass crack?” When I just glared at her, she took a shuddering breath in. “Did he at least give you his number before we left?”
Hitting my hand down on the button to undo my belt, I threw it over my shoulder, not even wincing when it hit the window, and moved until our noses were an inch apart. “You left me to die.”
“I think you’re being a tad dramatic, Levi. You were attached to a good-looking dude who knew what he was doing. And, if you think of it in a positive way, he was well hung enough for you to feel it through his clothing against your ass.”
All I heard through the pounding in my head was a bunch of apologies and sweet words, though, and they weren’t going to help her. “Don’t try to sweet talk your way out of this…”
Frowning, she tilted her head to the side and looked at me. “I wasn’t sweet talking my way out of it. I was pointing out how fortunate you were…”
I shook my head as I held my hand up. “Stop begging, it’s not going to work,” I said firmly, and then proceeded to list the reasons why. I’d only gotten halfway through the first one when I realized I was starting to slur my words and heard her saying something through the roaring in my head.
“…yeah, he’s slurring and talking weird,” she said, and then suddenly I was being blinded by the light going on. “Shit, it looks like he’s in shock.” I tried to get my mouth to move, but it felt like my tongue was ten sizes too big for it. Maybe I was allergic to skydiving? “Ok, get Parker to meet us there.”
And that was kind of it for me. I was still conscious but nothing would work how I wanted it to, which is how I found myself half on the passenger seat of my car, and half on the floor of it.
“Don’t worry, I’ll have you home soon,” the sweet voice of an angel reassured me as I fell sideways into the door. “Oops, sorry,” it muttered, and then I was being thrown about the place like we were driving over Lego. My teeth rattled, my bones played the ultimate game of Jenga inside my body, and the limits of my bladder were tested.
After what felt like a lifetime of the shaking and rattling, it finally stopped, and my head fell backward on my neck as the world just switched off. Now why couldn’t it have done that while I was on the plane?
Chapter Two
Charlotte
I was a nurse, and nurses knew what to do when things like this happened, right? Sure, but if there was a doctor around that was even better - and I was definitely leaving it up to the doctor.
“Stop pacing,” Ariana sighed, stretching her legs out in front of her. “You heard what the donkey dick said – Levi’s just fine,” she reminded me, and then added, “he’s a big pussy, but he’s just fine.”
I’d never been a superstitious person – well, up until I went to that damn party two years ago, that was. Now I found myself doing the stupidest things like throwing salt over my shoulder whenever it tipped over, or doing something else to erase bad luck whenever something like that happened. All the sites on my phone and laptop were open to subjects based on luck, old fables, and things like that, because I just wasn’t willing to take chances now. Well, with the exception of jumping out of a plane, obviously.
Judge away, whatever you want to do, but I was doing what I needed to do. I had a notebook full of good luck actions and omens, and I had another one with things that led to bad luck or warned of bad things about to happen.
I didn’t look at these ones as often as I did at the beginning now, though, after Levi started doing my bucket list items with me. He’d read through these two at the same time and had told me, “All this constant bad and good luck shit stops now. No more throwing salt and being scared of life.”
He didn’t know the story, but apparently if you live your life like something bad will happen at any second, you won’t enjoy life - and the whole purpose of a bucket list was to enjoy life, right? So they were in a drawer now, and I only did a couple of items from them every now and then.
Then there was my third notebook with items for my bucket list. Well, I had two other notebooks, seeing as how I technically had two bucket lists. Bucket list one: the normal things. Things that were exciting and could be done in public.
Bucket list two: sex related things that I wanted to try. Item number one on it was to have sex, the rest were notes from online searches (again), porn, and from looking at things I’d found in sex shop sites online.
I wasn’t brave enough to try a majority of the two small pages worth of things, but my theory was - if others enjoyed them enough to buy the toys and do it in porn, then I should open myself up to trying them. In safety of my mind, that theory totally worked. Not surprisingly, the second one was hidden under my pillow and never left my home, but I took the first one with me everywhere so that I could add to it whenever something hit me.
Going For Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Four Page 1