“Yeah, baby,” I muttered, leaning forward and gently placing my forehead on hers. “It’s just been a shitty week.”
“I’m sorry,” she replied, running the soft tips of her fingers down the side of my face, stroking my beard which was now in all its full volume bearded glory.
“I’m sorry that I couldn’t get in touch and let you know.”
“Luna called before you got here,” she told me, her eyes still focused on my facial hair. “She said that your new cell arrived and then told me what had happened, so I knew the truth before you arrived. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”
She sounded so guilty and pained over the fact she had, that I knew I had to try to draw a line under it now.
“We’re still new, Dahlia. Full trust comes with time. Even then, if one person disappeared without letting the other know where they were, doubts would happen along with worry. Add on what’s happened to you in the past, and it’s not surprising you would assume what you did.”
Her face softened with each word, and when I finished, she just sat still, not dropping eye contact with me once as if she was looking to see if I genuinely believed what I was saying. She could look all she wanted, my eyes wouldn’t show anything else other than that.
“You’re such a great guy, Madix Blue.”
“And you’re a great woman,” I replied, leaning in and kissing her softly. Pulling back, I lightened the mood. “But, baby, just saying – you and your best friend are crazy as hell.” Another shriek came from the kitchen at that moment, followed by the thud and sounds of skin hitting tile.
“Let go of it,” she yelled. “You’re the smallest here but you’re also the most uncivilized out of all of you. Let go, you little psycho!” The excited sounds of nails clapping off the floor was easy to hear. Jesus, how thin were these walls?
“She’s feeding them the steak,” Dahlia sighed, voicing what I already knew.
“I’ll get you another one,” I assured her, rubbing up and down her back gently, still listening to the drama in the kitchen.
“You really don’t have to,” Dahlia mumbled, face planting in my chest. “I don’t really like red meat.”
That stopped my hand moving on her back as I mulled this over. “You don’t like steak?” Who in their right minds didn’t like steak?
“It’s most red meat. It gives me indigestion, or a really upset stomach.”
Good to know!
“Figures!” Bonnie screamed from the kitchen. “Your dogs are almost as big a bitch as you are.” This was followed by the slamming off the back door.
“Is she always like that?”
“Yup,” she replied, nodding with her face still pressed between my pecs.
“She’s a pistol,” I chuckled.
I’d worried about meeting her after Dahlia had told me about her. If someone is important, you want the people who mean the most to her to like you. My biggest worries were Bonnie, her dad and her grandma. The latter two, I still hadn’t met, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t planned out what I would say when it happened.
“She’s an asshole,” Dahlia growled, pronouncing the ‘hol’ like it was the end of the word I’d used in my previous description of her best friend, pistol. “But she’s awesome, and one of the most beautiful people I know.”
I could see why she’d say that. She was fucking crazy crackers and every encounter with her was no doubt an adventure like with Dahlia, but I knew she hadn’t had it easy in life because of her skin color. Kids were cruel little bastards, and she’d been the focus of a lot of shit growing up. No surprise, the lady who had been giving the Townsends shit in the restaurant, Mrs. Crane, had also spewed vitriol at Bonnie and her family about it all. I didn’t know much about genetics, but I found the whole thing fascinating – she was one very special and unique person. I also knew from Dahlia that Bonnie was as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside – ball crushing aside, obviously.
Focusing back onto the woman I’d missed more than I could put into words over the last week who was sitting with her legs either side of me at that moment, I breathed in her scent and felt everything that was gnawing at me settle for a moment.
I’d meant what I’d said to her. I didn’t know what we had, but I knew that it meant something to me in a way that I wanted it to grow between us. I also wanted to keep it for as long as was humanly possible.
No, scratch that - I wanted to keep her.
“Why didn’t you ask Luna what was happening with me, baby?”
“She hasn’t been well,” she pulled her face out of my chest to look up at me. “Something to do with pain in her vagina.”
Something a brother never ever needed to hear!
“What about the others?” Surely she must have seen at least one of them?
“I saw Levi a couple of times. He came to the garage to take me out for lunch,” she explained. “He wanted to explain about high school and apologize again, which is weird. He wasn’t to blame, and he didn’t do anything. No, actually he did – he went and gave the guys who did it shit, so what does he have to apologize for?”
“The Townsends are very protective people, baby. They don’t like people being bullied, hurt or left alone. I think it might have started because of Luna, or it might just be the way they’ve always been. But, they take that seriously and Levi went through enough with my sister to open his eyes big time to that shit. He might have done something, but the fact that he didn’t beat the crap out of them during it? That’ll sit heavy with him for a lifetime.”
“That’s dumb!” Was all she had to say to that as she shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t at all like what happened to Luna, she really suffered. I was just picked on by small-minded, tiny dicked assholes.”
I chuckled at her description, but inside I felt the need for justice like Levi no doubt still did too. I was starting to piece together why Dahlia reacted the way she did to joking comments about her luck or why she hunched into herself slightly when people looked at her funny. Her mother had started that, but those kids had driven a stake through any confidence she had. You can get out of a bad situation, but the scars still stay with you.
I might have my own issues, but I was thinking that I might be able to help Dahlia get rid of the chains holding her back and get her to see her true worth.
Maybe she would help me do the same thing?
Remembering something that I’d forgotten to tell her, I held her face between my hands and looked at the tiny sparkling blue gem on her nose. She’d gotten pierced again.
“I love the new addition,” I murmured. “It suits you.”
“Do you like the color of the crystal in it?” she asked, turning her head sideways so that I could get the full effect of it.
I wonder if she was affected by swelling in her nose this time?
Then it hit me what she meant about the gem – it was blue.
Consider my chains melted!
Thirteen
Dahlia
“W ill you let me take you out on a date?” Madix whispered a couple of hours later.
After I’d gotten comfy in his lap, I’d made the mistake of leaning up to give him a kiss and one thing had led to a-very-pleasurable-nother and we’d ended up in my bedroom. We’d initially made the mistake of not closing the bedroom door and had been interrupted by Harambe and Bing jumping on the bed – on Madix’s back, making the thrust he was in the process of doing almost painful – and Baileys shrieking at us on the floor, demanding to be lifted up.
Covering his dick with his hand because he didn’t want to risk the dogs attacking it (and also he’d said he would’ve felt like a creeper showing the dogs his junk), Madix had ordered them out and then slammed the door. The whining, barking and scratching on the door had almost ruined the rest of our reunion, but if you’re in the orgasm zone, and it’s a Madix Blue orgasm, you hardly hear anything.
Now, the dogs were in the kitchen gnawing on some hide sticks, and we were cuddled up toget
her in my bed.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked, a feeling of excitement building inside me.
I still felt awful for judging him and putting him in the ‘League of Assholes’ that Bonnie and I had created over the years. I knew how shit it felt to be judged– man did I ever – and I knew that Madix felt like he should be judged because of his mom, so being guilty of doing that to him would take a while to get over. I was determined now to prove to him how much I trusted him and how great a guy he was, completely determined.
“I know a place,” he assured me grinning, before reaching out and nabbing his phone off the bedside table where he’d put it after dealing with the dogs a second time.
“What should I wear?” I sat up and moved my legs over the edge of the mattress, not getting very far before one of his gorilla arms wrapped around my waist and pulled me back to him.
“Not yet, we’ve got time,” he muttered, before he leaned down and took my mouth again.
No arguments from me!
I was relieved, beyond relieved, as we rode across the Townsends property on an ATV instead of the horses that Madix had originally steered me toward. I didn’t do horseback riding. I’d once had a dream I’d been standing on a wooden fence, using it to help me get onto a big white horse. As I’d gotten my right leg over and was almost settled on the saddle, the horse had spooked and galloped off through really tall grass. In my dream it felt like we’d ridden for days, but really it would have been maybe thirty minutes, and nothing had stopped that big bastard from heading off into the sunset.
Until that was, for some reason, a talking teddy bear called Mr. Ricketts had jumped out of nowhere and flashed the horse his fuzzy bits (which I did not see, thank God), making it rear up so quickly, that it head-butted me in the face. I’d woken up in a cave surrounded by Mr. Ricketts and his fuzzy friends who were preparing a big pot over a fire and kept winking at me. I wasn’t crazy enough to think that Mr. Ricketts existed, but it had worried me it was possibly an omen, putting me off horseback riding for life.
I also couldn’t watch the movie Ted, for obvious reasons.
Did I voice this out loud to Madix? Did I hell! He probably already thought I was crazy enough as it was. I’d made the mistake of telling Bonnie’s brother, Foxe, about it once though and he’d bought me a talking Ted. In fact, he’d probably sent me most of the merchandise available for the movies since then – the asshole.
Now, I was sitting on my own ATV behind Madix’s, with Harambe and Bing riding on the little seat thing on the back of mine, and he had Baileys in the pocket of the flannel shirt he’d put on as we’d gotten out of his car at the barn. I was going to get a photo of that on my phone as soon as he got us to our destination. It was too stinking cute!
Being careful not to hit anything and knock the dogs off the back, who were now sitting with their paws on the bar separating us with their heads tilted back into the wind, I sped up slightly on a smooth patch of grass before we got to a thick cluster of trees. I think the best way to describe how I felt throughout the journey was tense as fuck, so I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw Madix pulling to a stop ahead.
Braking beside his vehicle, I looked around and saw a crystal-clear pool with the sun glinting off it. In all my years living in Gonzales County, I’d never once heard of its existence. Not surprisingly actually, it was on Townsend land, but still.
“Awesome,” Madix muttered, walking over to a cooler that was under one of the trees. “They managed to do it.”
“Do what?” I asked, carefully getting off my vehicle and walking over to him on legs that were only slightly shaky. The vibrations in those ATV’s was no joke. If Madix ever dumped me and my vibrator didn’t do the job, I’d totally be buying one of those things – a girl needed to have plans after all.
And that’s when I discovered that Madix also had plans, fucking awesome ones in fact, as he pulled out containers that I recognized immediately – Mexican! What girl in their right mind said no to Mexican? Not this one.
And then he pulled out the key to my heart – a huge pot of salsa Verde with a massive bag of chips to go with it.
Sweet Jesus. Who was I kidding? If he ever dumped me, I’d need more than an ATV to get over him.
Madix
“How did you know about my addiction to salsa Verde?” she asked, after inhaling the first pot of the stuff and two chicken tacos. I had another two pots still in the cooler, but I had it on good authority that she would eat the stuff until she was sick, so I kept them hidden.
Snorting, I combed through her hair with my fingers while I explained.
“When I got up to put the dogs in the kitchen, there were a couple of texts from your best friend on my phone. One was a closeup of a pen that had ‘uni-ball’ written on it,” she stiffened hearing that. Wait until she heard the rest. “The other was a link to an article on how the first testicle prosthesis was made of metal during the war.” That one had made me wince at the mental image of how heavy that would be. “And the last was a link to a company who made them now and a photo on their website of one being inserted.”
“I’ll kill her,” she growled, trying to get up to reach her phone which was on the edge of the blanket we were currently lying on.
Holding on tight to her, I continued. “I acknowledged them and thanked her for being so thoughtful and then asked what your food secrets were. She sent a really long list – a really, really long list – and then pointed out which ones were your ‘most favorites’. When she said that you could eat more salsa Verde than the whole of Mexico in one sitting…”
“That bitch!” she gasped, reaching out again.
“I went with that,” I finished and then lifted her up and put her on top of me so that our date wasn’t ruined by a smackdown with her best friend.
She lay there glaring at a patch of grass over my head for a good while, before the tension left her body and her focus returned to me. I’d learned this with my sister – sometimes it was better to let women calm down in their own time.
“Thank you for spoiling me,” she whispered, gently rubbing her thumb across my lower lip, her eyes glued to it.
When I grinned, her body relaxed so much that she practically melted on top of me – something I would have laughed at, but I had too much Mexican food in me to do that.
“Babe, that was a really long list!” I chuckled.
Apparently that was way the wrong thing to say because her spine went rigid again and her head shot back up so that she was glaring down at me.
“I like food, okay?” she snapped. “Have you seen the size of my ass?”
Now that wasn’t funny!
Skimming my hand down to the area in question, I grabbed a handful. “What’s wrong with your ass?”
“It’s huge!” she even said it in a way that questioned my sanity.
On this, my sanity couldn’t be questioned because it was freakin’ perfect.
“The fuck you say,” I growled, feeling my dick getting hard. I had the perfect mental snapshot of her ass from our first time together, and it was nothing short of a body miracle.
“I think I would know,” she said sarcastically, but any of her previous anger was gone. I had a feeling that this was down to her being able to clearly feel the hard on that was making itself known through my jeans against her stomach.
“I think I would know,” I replied, unable to stop myself grinding up against her slightly when she shifted at that moment, rubbing against that one spot on the tip of my cock.
Jesus Christ, was it possible for your eyes to get stuck in the back of your head?
“It’s my ass,” she tried to argue, but it came out breathlessly, and was now just words with no meaning behind them.
Unlike my next ones.
“Not anymore it’s not,” I grumbled, and then spun us so she was lying on her back with me on top of her.
Just as I was leaning down to kiss her as my left hand made its ascent up her body underneath her t-s
hirt, the dogs went ape shit. I hadn’t lost sight of the fact that someone was fucking with the Townsends company and had my gun in its holder on the waistband of my pants. That was all fair and well, but I didn’t want Dahlia caught up in any of the bullshit, so whatever I did next would have to include her safety being the priority.
“Go and hide behind the tree,” I whispered as quietly as I could over the racket that the dogs were making, pointing at the area where the trees separated us from the big field we’d driven along.
“What about you?” she replied, sounding more pissed than scared. That was my girl, but I needed her safe.
“Go!” I rolled off her and got my gun out, before moving behind another tree that would give me an uninterrupted view of where the dogs were.
It seemed like it took forever as I crouched down and kept checking both the place where whoever it was would need to come through to get to where we were, and the place where Dahlia was hidden. When the person finally turned up, I almost shot him just out of spite and irritation that he’d interrupted us.
Levi fucking Townsend rode into the clearing and looked around in confusion.
“Mad!” he yelled, jumping off the horse and spinning around in a circle. “Where’d your humans go?” he asked the dogs who were going nuts trying to get to him first. Baileys had even somehow gotten on top of Harambe’s back and was using him as a trampoline.
“Oh, for the love of all things sacred,” Dahlia muttered before coming out from behind her tree. I’d been intending to leave him until he got bored and left us, but she’d obviously taken pity on the sad sack.
Straightening out from my crouched position, I walked out too, glaring at him the whole time.
“What were you guys doing?” he asked, looking at the separate trees and then back at us.
“Hunting for fucking mermaids,” I snapped before walking up to my woman and removing a leaf from her hair.
“Huh,” he scratched the back of his neck and then peered around us at the water behind us.
No one could be that dumb. Well, aside from his brother Tate!
Mad Gold (Providence Gold Series Book 2) Page 12