Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold Book 5)

by Mary B. Moore

  She was freakishly strong for someone her size because she pulled me into the office and shut the door behind us without even breaking a sweat. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked from my nose to my chest and back again.

  Sighing, I gestured at her to get on with it, knowing exactly what she wanted to do.

  “Go ahead.”

  Her hand came straight up and squeezed my nose, and then pushed on the tip. “I don’t feel anything. Do they put a prosthetic inside or something?”

  “No, they removed some from here, shaved this bit down a little,” I pointed at the bridge of my nose, “then they narrowed it here,” I pointed either side of the tip of my nose. “They also removed a tiny bit of the septum. Basically, they took some of the girth, got rid of a bump, then made the tip point up slightly so it looked cute.”

  Turning my head to see my side profile, she moved in closer and studied it. “Did they have to break it?”

  Nodding, I winced at the reminder of the pain of it. “Yeah. They take a special hammer and chisel thing and then tap away until they break the bones they want to move into a certain position.”

  A slight gagging noise came from her. “Christ, that must have hurt.”

  “I woke up with a cast on it, swollen black eyes, and two plastic tampon things up my nostrils that I had to keep in for a week.”

  Shuddering, she groaned. “I can’t even imagine. I’ve always wanted mine done, but I watched a program about it on television and changed my mind when I saw them breaking the bones.”

  Pulling my phone out of my back pocket, I pulled up the folder of family photos and searched for the one I wanted to show her. “That’s what it looked like before. I’m not a plastic surgery junkie, but I’m grateful for the magic they performed on me.”

  Sadie’s eyes looked hilarious as they flicked from the screen to me. “I can’t believe they’re fake. They look so normal.”

  “I didn’t want them to look fake, I just wanted to look and feel like a woman,” I sighed. “I was so flat-chested that I avoided looking in the mirror and cried whenever I had to go shopping for clothes. Don’t even get me started on the meltdown when I had to go and get my prom dress.”

  “I have the same problem, but for the opposite reason,” she said sympathetically. “I’m terrified of surgery, so I’d never get my melons reduced. Instead, I make fun of them and do my best to live with it.”

  I could understand that.

  “Ok, full disclosure here—I thought yours were fake when I first met you.”

  “Not something I haven’t encountered a million times,” she grumbled. “I’d want mine to look like yours, though. Hey, why can’t you see the implants?”

  “Because they’re under the muscle. The muscle flattens them a bit and makes them look more natural. You can choose the profile you want when you go for the surgery, and I was adamant I wanted low profile implants.”

  Nodding, she poked one with the tip of her index finger. “Where did they cut you to put them in?”

  With my finger, I drew under my nipple. “Here. They could have gone through the side here,” I indicated the side of my breast, “or they could cut underneath, but my surgeon recommended the under nipple incision.”

  This time, she poked the opposite breast, frowned, and then poked her own boob.

  “They feel the same.”

  Lifting my hand, I decided to hell with it and put a hand on mine and the other hand on one of hers.

  “They really do, don’t they?” I’d known my surgeon was good, but I’d never realized just how good.

  Copying my move, she did the same thing on my opposite side and held a boobie in each hand, too. “Wait, bounce up and down. Maybe they’ll feel different then?”

  And that’s how Parker, Elijah, and Tate found us, standing in the office, a handful of each other’s tits, jumping up and down.

  Looking between us, Elijah frowned. “Uh… if you weren’t my cousin, this would be seriously hot.”

  “Pervert,” I hissed at the same time that Tate smacked him around the head.

  “That’s my sister, you sick shit.”

  His eyes on Sadie’s hand that was still holding my tit, Parker reached up and scratched his chin.

  A squeeze on my boob brought my attention back down to Sadie, and I watched as she nodded her head at the door, indicating for us to move. If that hadn’t been enough of a hint, though, the slight tug of my boob in that direction would have. So, still joined, we shuffled sideways to the door, and she kicked it shut in their faces.

  “Thank fuck for that,” Tate muttered through the door. “I think I need to bleach my eyes.”

  “I think we corrupted this office,” I whispered to Sadie, doing my best not to give in to the laughter that was building inside me.

  Shaking her head wildly, she whispered back, “No, trust me, it’s seen worse. Hey, do you think your brother and Lily have done it in here? I bet they have. He looks like a naughty little shagger.”

  Lunging for the door, I had it open and was out of there in a matter of seconds.

  “You’ve ruined my life,” I hissed, turning back and stopping when I saw everyone sitting down at tables and staring at the wall. “Ah, hell, not again.”

  I hated that wall. I’d even shown Lily cool signs and posters we could put on it so that it wouldn’t happen again. So far, no turkey. Bastards!

  “Come and sit with us,” my dad, Jerome, called across the floor to us, waving with his hand at two empty seats.

  Linking arms with me, Sadie walked us over, likely not realizing what was going on, seeing as how she was still laughing about my reaction to her office question.

  “What’s going on?” I asked suspiciously, sitting down between Gramps and Parker.

  His smile at my choice made my brain go blank for a moment. So much had changed between us in the last week.

  I’d had a lot of time to reflect after our conversation and trip to the farm. Thinking back on it, I’d known him pretty much my whole life, and when I thought about some of the occasions that I remembered seeing him as a kid, I realized there’d been changes in him over the years. He’d always been an enigma, but he’d also intrigued the hell out of me for as long as I could remember.

  There’d been moments when something would happen, and he’d take charge—like the time I fell out of a tree and skinned my knee and arm badly. He’d calmed me down and carried me back to the house. While Mom was cleaning it out and bandaging it up, he held my hand and checked to make sure I wasn’t in pain. He’d been fourteen and I’d only been five, but I remembered his expression clearly all these years later—a concerned adult in a teenage boy’s body, a protector.

  Both Layla and I had been tomboys and had followed my brothers and cousins around, copying what they did. I’d had a catalog of injuries over the years, most of which he’d been there for because my cousins were reckless idiots.

  The memory that stuck out the most was when I’d broken my ulna. I’d been twelve, and he’d been twenty-one at the time. He’d come back for the fourth of July celebrations and had been staying with my cousins with his brother, three years into his medical degree. The doctors had wanted to sedate me, and I’d freaked out because, well, needles. Eventually, Parker had come into the room, held my hand, and distracted me while they gave me something that’d knocked me out so they could work on my arm. In all honesty, it was probably the hysteria that’d made them need to sedate me. I’d been so fixated on not having an injection from the second they’d said I needed to go to the hospital that I’d ended up having one so they could just do their jobs.

  The last words I’d heard before I’d passed out were, “Keep her safe, Doc, and do a good job. I hate when she’s in pain, so if there’s anything you can do to make it so that she doesn’t feel any when she wakes up, do it now.”

  Had I had a crush on him? Probably not because of the age difference and the fact he was part of my family, but there’d been something.

&
nbsp; Thinking back on all of it again, I felt guilty that I hadn’t known his protectiveness was because of what he’d gone through with his stepmom. I should’ve picked up on something or at least seen that the tension wasn’t normal.

  A nudge from the man in question brought my attention back to the table to see that Dad was talking to me.

  “It’s this week’s viewing of your drunken escapades,” he said as he turned his chair to face the wall they were projecting it onto. Turning at a noise over his shoulder, he shouted, “Pizza’s here!”

  “You lot really ordered pizza for this?” Sadie hissed. “You know, we should be charging you for watching this. At least that might make it worth going through this torture.”

  Figuring that saying nothing would probably be the best thing, I dug my phone out of my pocket and decided to do some shopping online. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to look at anything so I didn’t have to focus on this place.

  Then I had shopping inspiration: stuff for the goats. What kind of toys would they play with?

  Typing in toys for goats, I started chuckling at the first picture that came up. Apparently, for a cool grand, I could get what looked like a colored, oversized toilet brush with a nifty metal arm on it to change the angle it was at.

  Feeling a chin on my shoulder, I turned and saw Parker looking at the screen.

  “They want a thousand bucks for that?” he asked incredulously. “Why not just get ten toilet brushes from a dollar store and glue them together?”

  See?

  “I might just do that.”

  Reaching across me, he hit an article on goat playgrounds and scrolled down the page to the photographs. In one, the owner had buried old tires in the ground, leaving different lengths poking out so the goat would have to go up and down when it jumped on them.

  “That’s pretty cool,” he hummed. “And we could get tires easily.”

  I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, though. It just seemed too dull.

  The next idea definitely didn’t—it was a kid’s jungle gym. The person had removed one of the walls and angled it so there was an incline up to the center part of the structure.

  “Now that looks fun!” I breathed, picturing me running up after them and then going down the slide that the next photo showed could be added onto it.

  “We could surround it with the tires,” Parker suggested. “Paint them different colors to keep the goats interested, and get one of those jungle gyms that’s like a pirate ship and do this to it.”

  I didn’t realize how close our faces were until I turned to agree with him and our noses bumped.

  “If y’all are going to kiss, at least wait until I’ve finished eating,” Levi growled, sounding like he already had a mouthful of food.

  Thankfully, Sadie came to the rescue. “Can goats see colors? I mean, dogs are color blind, and they say that bulls are as well—which is weird because they hate those red cape things. But maybe goats are the same?”

  Clearing my throat, I typed it into the search on my phone and then blinked when I read the answer.

  “Apparently, goats can see a variety of colors, including yellow, orange, green, violet, blue, and red. The one they can see the best, though, is orange, and the worst is blue,” I read off the screen. “Huh, how about that.”

  Looking offended, Levi’s wife, Charlotte, huffed, “So why can’t dogs see colors? That’s unfair.”

  Just then, Tate stood on the bar top and shouted, “Hear ye, hear ye! Welcome to this week’s edition of The Lush Diaries. Feel free to order food, and I’ll be operating the bar for this episode, so be gentle with me. For now, though, enjoy the viewing.”

  Images of me strangling him—and not gently—flashed through my mind. I seriously thought about it.

  Hopping back down, he walked over to the laptop attached to the projector and hit play.

  And thus commenced another two hours of hell for the three of us.

  2h 59m 36s time stamp on the video

  “Just a heads up,” Sadie warned during a conversation about period pains. “I turn into the grumpiest wench in the wicked west during my period. My friends said it wasn’t fair to call it PMS or PMT for me. More like PBW—Psycho Bitch Week.”

  “I never get period pains or PMS,” Beau admitted, dodging the chips we threw at her. “I got an IED put in.”

  Both Sadie and I paused, probably trying to figure out what didn’t sound right about what she’d said.

  “An IED?” I asked carefully.

  “Yup.”

  Slowly, both of our heads looked down at where Beau’s vagina would be under the table like we could see it through the wood.

  Sounding as confused as she looked, Sadie asked slowly, “But an IED?”

  Not giving her a chance to reply, I squeaked, “If you pull the string, it stops you getting pregnant? Like a grenade?”

  “Ain’t nothing happin’ up in there,” Beau snorted, tipping back the slush in her glass.

  At the same time, we pushed back from the table—our chairs making a screeching noise on the floor—and jumped up, taking big steps away from where Beau was watching us through one eye, with the other one covered by her clenched fist.

  Brain freeze, a margarita drinkers biggest foe.

  “That’s a bit bloody extreme, isn’t it?” Sadie stuttered. “Why not just go on birth control?”

  “I did,” Beau mumbled, sounding confused as she took in how on edge the two of us were now. “Would you mind not staring at my honey pot?”

  “You have an exploding pussy,” I snapped. “What do you want us to do? Whisper sweet nothings?”

  The people watching in the bar went from chuckling to laughing their asses off as Beau covered her face with her hands.

  “Who told you my pussy was explosive?”

  Looking at each other with confused expressions, Sadie and I turned back to her. “Uh, you just did when you said you had an IED put up your nunney,” Sadie pointed out.

  Beau’s face scrunched up. “My what?”

  “Your nunney. You know, your…” Sadie pointed at her crotch with her finger.

  Looking even more confused, Beau looked between the two of us. “Is it called something different in England?”

  “Um, it’s called something very different here,” I pointed out. “If you’re talking about the contraceptive, it’s an IUD.”

  “That’s what I said,” Beau huffed exasperatedly.

  “No,” I said slowly. “You called it an IED—an improvised explosive device.”

  Wincing, Beau reached for the fullest glass on the table and swallowed a mouthful. “That explains why I failed a project in my senior year about Uncle Alan getting injured by an IED in Iraq. It also explains why he has it framed next to his desk and sent copies out to the rest of his former unit.”

  The loudest one laughing in the bar now was, in fact, Beau’s uncle as he nodded his head to confirm that was exactly why he’d done it.

  “It’s also sent out to boost the morale of some of the troops,” he shouted loud enough for everyone to hear. “What makes them laugh the hardest is finding out she was eighteen when she wrote it.”

  Looking at him out of the corner of her eye, Beau lifted her hand and rubbed her eyebrow—with her middle finger.

  3h 02m 01s time stamp on the video

  “I hate bats,” I shuddered. We’d moved onto the subject of phobias in the time it took for us to retake our seats. “Have you seen them? They have rat bodies, Pomeranian faces, and ears like a Chihuahua. And their wings—what is up with those things?”

  Snickering, Beau told Sadie, “Her cousin Cole has a phobia of periods.”

  “As in the punctuation one or the evil one?”

  “The evil one,” I answered, getting a shrug from Sadie.

  “Most men are freaked out by it. I asked my friend to get me tampons while he was at the shop once, and he lost his shit. I don’t think it’s in most men’s DNA to like them. Then again, most women hate
them, too.”

  “No,” Beau said, her eyes sparkling. “Cole has a legit phobia. He’s had panic attacks, run into moving traffic to get away from a tampon, fainted, you name it.”

  A memory about him must have hit me because I burst out laughing and struggled to get the words out. “When he was at school, his science teacher said they’d be studying the periodic table. He fainted, fell back on the stool he was on, hit the table behind him, and ended up in hospital with a concussion. When they explained what the table was, he said he thought it was a sort of dam inside a woman that released overflow every month.”

  Sadie blinked slowly. “I’m not sure I know what to say about that, and I can’t blame it on the booze.”

  Beau grinned at her. “The stories are never-ending.”

  3h 33m 03s timestamp

  Waving her hand through the air and knocking herself slightly off-balance with it, Sadie tried to sit upright. “I’m unique. Even I don’t understand myself sometimes. Did you know I locked myself in the ladies yesterday?”

  When Beau and I stared at her in amusement, she nodded and continued, “Yup. For some reason, I convinced myself the locks here were like the direction water in a toilet in Australia goes when it’s flushed. Opposite.”

  “Why the hell did you do that?” Beau wheezed, the randomness of it just too much for her.

  Me? Well, I understood random, so it kind of made sense weirdly.

  “Because I don’t make sense. I decided it was broken and just slid out through the gap between the floor and the door.”

  Both of us cringed on the screen and looked down at her chest. It was Beau who asked what we were both thinking, though.

  “How the hell did you get those through the gap?”

  “My poor knockers,” she mumbled. “I had to push them down with my hands and wiggle. I’ve even got a bruise, look,” she pulled down her top, fortunately with her back to the camera.