For years I’d been paranoid that I wasn’t loveable. Then, after both of my ex’s, the last one especially, I’d been adamant that my initial feelings had been correct, and that I hadn’t one thing about me that anyone would ever love, and I was better off just living life as I was. I was happy, I had a good life, and I didn’t get my heart broken and then shat on.
Then I’d met a giant who had wooed me, made me believe he was a good guy who genuinely cared about me, made me believe that I had been wrong about being loveable, and had let me ride his big beanstalk.
Except, he was a humper and dumper and I felt like shit because of it. That was made worse by the fact that I’d made the photo of my leg the background and lock screen on my phone and I couldn’t bring myself to change it, so I saw it constantly.
As if that wasn’t confusing enough, I’d swing from that thought to worrying something had happened. Then I’d move onto being certain he was such a great guy that something definitely had happened, and back again. It was a torturous circle made worse because I hadn’t seen Luna, and when I spent time with Levi, it was because he wanted to apologize, and I could see he needed that closure on it all. Madix was never brought up once, so it left me going around in the circle of ‘what the fuck’? I also wasn’t sure I had the right to question Madix’s whereabouts because we hadn’t made anything official or even broached the conversation about our relationship.
Talk about a head fuck, and yes I would call it that. A big dicked, brain-ramming head fuck!
There was only one thing for it – tequila. And rum. And my best friend who matched me drink for drink throughout it all, held my hair out of my face when I tossed my rum and tequila cookies up with a force that felt like it came from my toes, all the while seething and swearing she’d make him pay in her head.
Twelve
Madix
“T he next time you need to send me away, do me a god-damned favor and tell me how long,” I snapped, glaring at Noah and Levi.
Granted they looked apologetic, but it wasn’t their women they had to leave at the ass crack of dawn. To make matters worse, I couldn’t even get in touch with Dahlia. All thanks to the bastard who had set small explosive devices on the signal masts around site four of the Townsend Oil operations and who had then downed three of the largest trees in the area so they fell across the only road out.
Then, someone had also lost the satellite phone for the site. Just to top off the shit-tastic situation, because the ground hadn’t been assessed by a GPR, ground-penetrating radar, following some issues with areas dipping inward days earlier, we could only drive on the already approved areas. This was something only someone who worked on the site would know. This also meant that we were stuck on the site until we could get the trees off the road. A team of detectives had attended and gathered evidence, but the only answers we had so far were that the person had used a small amount of explosives on the trees and had packed them in a little hole that had been drilled. Cutting out a chunk on the opposite side to make it fall in the road's direction, they’d attached a receptor to the explosives that would have been attached to an old-style flip-phone. Once they had it all in position, they hit the switch on their 1990’s cell, and boom. Fucker! And no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t find anyone who carried a cell like that, well apart from Vanilla Ice.
Oh, and someone had lost the satellite phone for the site too, meaning we were totally stuck as we only had our radios to communicate. The police had come in with helicopters, but we’d had to stay on the site to sort shit out. Fucking awesome!
Why would anyone be doing this? We’d looked at the issues that the Townsend cousins were having, but none of it fit. This seemed aimed at these Townsends specifically.
As if that wasn’t one big fabulous shit sandwich, on the drive to the site with Archer and his ass-breathed dog, a bee had flown in the car and he’d waved his arms around, knocking my cell out of my hand and shattering it on the road. So, I wouldn’t have been able to get in touch with Dahlia even if we’d had signal masts available. I never would have left Dahlia without shaking her awake and enduring the pain of a fist to the face if I’d known. Especially not only hours after we’d had sex for the first time.
We’d gotten a call from one of the workers on the site who had used the satellite phone before it went missing to tell us about some problems with machinery and the fact that the signal masts were now out of order. They had found sugar in the gas tanks of six vehicles that had blocked the filters, as well as cut lines and debris in the hydraulics of a lot of machinery. When we were just about to arrive, we’d heard a loud bang followed by a small plume of smoke rising into the air. As everyone had pulled out their radios to check in with people around the site and get a report on any damage so we could get the necessary emergency services out, there had been a series of bangs from the distance that we’d just travelled up minutes previously. That was when we’d discovered the trees were down and had seen the damage to the trunks.
It was one big fucking mess.
I’d been away from Dahlia for too long. I hadn’t heard her voice, seen her smile or any of the other mushy shit I could list, and I missed it all. I’d also been sleeping in a bed made for a normal-sized man, so I’d hardly slept the whole time I’d been here. The site was now closed until further notice and there was a team of engineers and mechanics with security fixing what had been fucked.
On the way back, Archer had stopped so I could pick up my new cell, but for some reason my contacts weren’t pulling through, so the store was going to drop it off later once they’d figured out what the issue was.
It was tempting to go home and pass out for seventy-two hours, but I’d left Harambe with Luna, who was almost at the end of her pregnancy. If I’d known I would be gone for that long, I’d have asked Dahlia to keep him, but we’d only intended on being at the site for a maximum of twenty-four hours.
Now, I needed to check on my sister and my soon-to-be niece or nephew, then get my dog and get to my woman.
Christ, she’d looked so cute the morning I’d left. She might be a savage sleep addict with a mean left hook when you tried to wake her, but she at least looked sweet while she did it. I hoped when I’d sent her the text that it stressed how much I hadn’t want to leave her, and if it hadn’t, that my note on her leg had. I’d seen the Sharpie after my last attempt at waking her and had decided that it would be an awesome idea to write a message on her leg. Now I wished I’d written a damn essay.
Once I’d done what I’d needed to do at home, I went and saw Luna and her ever expanding stomach. After hugs and belly rubs, I got kicked by the baby and picked up my oversized puppy, then dragged my ass into my truck and drove to Dahlia’s.
Pulling up in front of her house, I cut the engine and tiredly got out, whistling at Harambe to follow. I swear the dog had tripled in size during the short space of time I’d been away. Either that or my sister was getting me back for worrying her and had swapped it with a different dog. I was too tired to even care if that was the case right now.
Knocking on her door, I felt my lips twitch when I heard Bing bark followed by a strange yowling growl. Baileys might be the size of a muffin, but he was a savage in the making… if you were scared of muffins that was.
When the door opened, I blinked a couple times at the beautiful African-American woman with hazel eyes who was glaring at me, before I dropped to my knees on the ground in front of her as my balls ricocheted around my torso, ending up where the tonsils I’d had removed when I was thirteen had once been. She’d actually hit my thigh right underneath them first, but when I’d bent over, she’d struck again – something which I didn’t realize until my balls stopped using my insides as a pinball machine, and I felt the pain in my leg and pieced it together.
“Why?” I gasped, my hands automatically coming down to my broken balls before I curled my body over them protectively.
“Oh, you know why,” she sneered. “You might have a horse ding-dong i
n those pants, but no one makes my best friend feel like shit. So, take your equine schlong back the way you came in and your….” she broke off and gasped. “Oh, aren’t you the cutest baby puppy? Yes, you are, yes you are! What’s that? You want muffles?” This was all followed by the sound that adults make when they pretend to eat a baby’s stomach, that weird mwaw-mwaw noise. “What’s that you’re saying now? You want your Bon-Bon to feed you snozzies? I don’t know if there are any, but I did see Dahly-Wally buy a nice big, fat, juicy steak.”
“If you feed him that steak, you twisted twat, I’ll rip your nipples off and feed them to him as a side salad,” the light of my life screeched from inside the house. “Now, let Madix in for God’s sake.”
Dahlia’s best friend leaned in over me and hissed, “I’m only doing this because your puppy is giving me the sad eyes,” she warned. “But if you hurt her, I’ll Duct Tape your dick to your ball sacks. Oh, and you can thank me later for still being able to say ball sacks in the plural sense, instead of it being just one because that’s all you have left. Or deflated bags in general,” she tacked on at the end, looking down at the testicles in question making me wince internally.
What the fuck was wrong with just saying hello and introducing yourself?
With one last glare in my direction, she turned around and walked toward Dahlia’s kitchen with all three dogs trailing behind her. I didn’t doubt she would give them that steak, and apparently neither did they.
Looking back at Dahlia, I took her in, watching as she placed the cell she was holding to her chest on the table. As I got to her eyes though, I paused when I saw the tears building in them.
“Are you…” I got out before she launched herself at me, making me lose my balance enough that I went down on one knee on the floor, pain shooting up my thigh at the impact.
Wrapping her legs around my waist, she held on tight.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed. “I’m so, so, so, sorry,” she kept repeating into my neck.
I took a second to get over the shock of what had happened, but when I did I was about to ask her what was wrong when a voice barked, “What the fuck?” from the direction of the kitchen. Both of us turned our heads and saw Bonnie staring at us in confusion.
“I’m such a bitch,” Dahlia wailed, bringing my attention back to her.
“Well, yeah,” Bonnie agreed loudly. “And I can see why you’d be crying if it’s taken you this long to figure that out.”
Wrenching her head away from me, Dahlia turned back to her best friend, almost falling off my lap. “Shut up, snatch face,” she snapped. “I’m… I’m…,” she trailed off, looking for the word and not finding it.
“Distraught?” Bonnie suggested.
“Yeah!” Dahlia nodded and looked back at me but stopped when her best friend continued.
“A twat? Melodramatic? Saggy flapped? A snotty ugly crier?”
“Oh my God,” Dahlia screeched. “You should have been a blow job. One that didn’t result in a happy ending either so that the sperm that made you got stuck in your dad’s…”
I really didn’t want to, but I lifted my hand off her right butt cheek and clamped it over her mouth so she couldn’t finish whatever it was she was saying.
Unfortunately, this didn’t stop Bonnie’s mouth running. “Yeah, well, you should have been anal!”
Feeling her move, I held on tight with my other hand to stop her jumping off my lap. After I’d spoken with Dahlia and found out what was wrong, I’d let her go and kill her friend.
Grinning, Bonnie turned and walked back into the kitchen, leaving me with a pissed off and still teary woman who was now glaring at me for stopping her.
That was until our dogs decided to help their momma out.
“What the hell is… aww, did you poop, Baileys? It looks like tiny itty-bitty raisins. Aunty Bon-Bon will get it for her precious little…,” and then she screamed. “I stood in shit. I Stood. In. Shit!” Making us both chuckle and Dahlia’s eyes start sparkling again. “You’re meant to be a baby dog, not a horse. That’s not cute, so not cute. Oh, strike me down with a cactus up the ass – it’s between my toes. Bad, Harambe, bad!”
Keeping my hands in their current positions – one on her ass, the other still across her mouth so she didn’t run it and end up with shitty footprints throughout the house as her friend chased her – I walked us over to the door that led into the kitchen and kicked it shut with my foot.
Moving over to her couch, I settled down into it and took a deep breath as I tipped my head back to lay it on the cushion behind me. I was exhausted after the shit I’d been through with work, exhausted from the long drive back, exhausted with everything. And I wasn’t too proud to admit that I was worried and hella apprehensive about what Dahlia was about to tell me. So, yeah, I need a second to prepare myself and figure out how to hold up the fifty-ton weight that was my head so I could deal with it all.
Lowering my hand down, I took a deep breath and prepared.
“I’m sorry,” she croaked. “I thought you were ignoring me after we’d had sex.”
I could understand that, but I needed to know exactly why because with Dahlia, there could be many reasons and I needed to know what I was dealing with. “Why?”
“I didn’t hear from you and you disappeared,” she whispered, gnawing on her lower lip and lowering her eyes to look at my neck. “I called you a maggot dick too.”
If that’s what she’d called me when she’d been thinking I’d done that, it didn’t bode well for any future arguments, because even through the exhaustion and confusion I found that funny as fuck. I knew from my arguments with Luna that laughing in an angry woman’s face had disastrous consequences though, so I kept that inside.
There were so many moments in life when you had to rationalize things to pick the best emotion to go with. Because I cared about her as much as I did, I didn’t want to say something that could be inflammatory to the situation. If I’d been in her shoes, the hurt would still be there, and I hated the thought of Dahlia hurting because of me.
“Why would you think I’d do that to you?” I asked softly. “I know that the situation could make anyone feel that way, but do you not trust me normally?” I kept my voice in the same even tone throughout. I wasn’t even sure that the question made sense, but I was just so damn tired that it was the only way I could word it.
Still nibbling her lower lip and avoiding eye contact, she reached out to my t-shirt and started playing with one of the folds in the material where it had bunched up when I’d sat down. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s more that I’ve had shitty luck in the past, and when I didn’t hear from you I was hurt and thought the same thing was happening again.”
When she explained about her high school boyfriend dumping her because of the fountain and her other ex dumping her after their first time together, it made sense. It pissed me off that they had treated her that way, but I could understand why it would make her assume that I’d done the same thing.
Choosing my words carefully, I replied, “I don’t know what the future holds for our relationship,” her eyes lifted to mine and she couldn’t hide the hurt in them. That all changed with what I said next. “I know what I want it to hold for us, though. And I also know that I wouldn’t ever do you wrong like that or hurt you, baby. What we’ve got, I really like and in a way that I want to keep it. Do you understand?”
I only just finished the last word when she launched herself at me and kissed me hard. The memory of kissing her and how she’d felt both inside and out during our night together had kept my anger, frustration and anxiety in check over the last week. Now, I felt some of it rearing its head in the back of my mind because my memories had apparently been shit – her taste and her lips were way better than I remembered. And whoever the asshole was doing this, had cheated me of a week of them.
I was adding that onto the pain I was going to cause who was doing it when we caught him. I wasn’t a cop anymore, and although I stil
l had to act within certain boundaries, both legally and morally, I was going to make sure that the fucker paid before I handed him over to the police.
It confused me how people viewed explosives, because the fact was they were deadly. Terrorist acts had opened the public’s eyes to how much damage they could do, but a lot of people still used them for random things or didn’t respect them as much as they respected a gun. Big mistake! When I’d been a cop, I’d been called out to a scene where a group of four teenage boys had found how to make a small explosive on the web. They’d followed it using easy to find shit, and it had gone off immediately. It left one kid with burns over one side of his body, one with only one eye and massive burns, and one with burns and missing an arm because he’d been holding the last chemical they poured into the container. The fourth kid had been holding the container itself and he ended up losing both arms and was now unrecognizable. They hadn’t been intending to hurt anyone, they’d only been intending on attempting to mine for gold after watching a television program where they’d done just that to get down to the pay dirt and wanted to try it too. But people still had a high level of arrogance and disrespect for explosives, assuming they could make their own. Especially because the internet labelled a majority of them “a safe method for creating an explosive” and then gave a list of reasons you’d need it to make it more appealing to the reader. Gardening, ice fishing, house renovations, swimming pool construction, gold mining, farming, water location, ant nest destruction… it was all there. Assholes! And then we have someone who has salty feelings toward an oil company, who finds something like that online and uses it to fuck up an operation. The world was a weird place!
“Are you okay?” Dahlia asked, bringing my attention back to her. I hadn’t realized I’d stopped kissing her and was staring at the wall instead.
Mad Gold (Providence Gold Series Book 2) Page 11