Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold Book 5)

by Mary B. Moore

  You’d be amazed how often that happened.

  “So I found a doctor near the house we’d rented, and he puts this cream on it and sticks a dressing over the area. The problem was, some of the skin he put the tape on hadn’t blistered at that stage, but it was going to in the future—”

  Ariana shuddered, knowing what was coming next.

  “—The next day, I went to take the dressing off to put more of the stuff he’d given me on it, and I ended up ripping the blistered skin off with the tape. Swear it felt like someone was tearing my arm off.”

  Looking up at me in alarm, Ariana whispered, “Don’t put tape on it ever. Promise me.”

  “That’s why I’m using a bandage.”

  Looking back over at the curtain, she asked, “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Sharing is caring, girl. Thought we’d bond over burned skin.”

  Rubbing her lips together, she stayed quiet while I finished bandaging her up. It was only a thin bandage that lightly anchored the dressing in place, so it didn’t take me long. By the time I’d taped the end in place and was doing up the fastening of her bra, she’d decided what she wanted to say back to him.

  “If I ever break the law and need to be arrested, can you make sure you’re not the one to do it?”

  “And my work here is done,” he sighed, followed by the sound of his curtain opening.

  I was helping her put her t-shirt back on as Chris—the doctor I’d gone to visit Ari at work with—said, “Well, mine isn’t. Good to see you, Connor.”

  “Ah, hell,” he groaned. “Why do I always get you?”

  “Because I’m awesome, that’s why,” Chris shot back. “I swear, I only saw you two weeks ago. So, how did you end up with glass stuck in your shin, man?”

  It turns out, one of the RTAs we’d had come in earlier had been responsible for Connor’s mishap. He’d gotten out of his vehicle to assist the paramedics, tripped on his shoelace, and landed on some of the glass from the vehicle’s windows.

  “How stupid can one man be?” Ariana mumbled as she got her shit together.

  Archer had come back to see how she was doing and was now talking to Connor while he got the glass removed and stitches put into the wound, so I used the opportunity to give her a quick kiss.

  “Accidents like that happen all the time,” I told her, my mind on her burn still.

  I wasn’t lying, burn care on one like she had was very much a case of personal preference for doctors. Sure, we had a list of options to go for, and each burn was different, but I’d be lying if I said that most doctors would’ve done what I’d done for hers. I had a personal and emotional investment in her wellbeing, though, so I’d gone slightly over the top. Did I give a shit what anyone would say about that? No. Anyone treating someone that meant to them what she meant to me would give it that bit extra.

  Turning around, she looked at me closely. “Are you okay?”

  Checking the time on my watch, I saw I still had two hours to go. “I will be once this shift is over. Are you still up for seeing the kids tomorrow afternoon?” Before she could answer, I added, “You won’t be able to hold them because of your chest, but you can still play with them.”

  “It won’t be the same not getting hugs from them,” she replied, the smallest pout on her lips.

  “I’ll bring some hand soap and hand sanitizer so we can clean you up properly if you touch them.”

  “If I touch them? Isn’t that overkill?”

  Taking the three steps that separated us, I lifted her chin with the tip of my finger and kissed her gently. “Nothing happens to you, Ari, including the risk of infection.”

  “It’s only a small blister. How bad could it get?”

  If only she knew.

  Ten

  Ariana

  It was ten days after the burn incident, and I was flying high, especially now that I’d gotten rid of the big dressing on my chest that Parker insisted I keep on until a couple of days ago.

  After I’d asked him how bad it could get, the morning after the incident, he’d sent me links to YouTube videos on how easily it was for a blister to get infected. I was determined I wasn’t going to go down that rabbit hole, but unfortunately I had the willpower of a dickhead. Everyone knows a dickhead who does something stupid, and I was now claiming that title. I’d watched those videos for three hours, my hand pressed against my mouth as I battled the urge to bring my coffee back up, and now I understood why he hadn’t let me touch the babies when we’d gone to visit them.

  Also, even though I was pretty much all healed, I was now a germaphobe. I washed my hands frequently, stewed over whether I’d done it correctly or not, followed Sadie’s advice to sing happy birthday twice while I did it, used three pumps of soap, and also followed it with hand sanitizing gel. In fact, I’d just finished doing rewashing them after wiping down the bar top, something we did regularly because it got so sticky thanks to the drinks we were serving. Plus, I just didn’t know where people’s hands had been.

  “Nothing wrong with being sanitary,” Sadie pointed out, spraying another layer of the antibacterial cleaning stuff Lily had on the bar. “Germs are evil things, and don’t even get me started on viruses.”

  That made me look at the people around us in an even worse light. How many of them were carrying a virus or hadn’t washed their hands?

  Hearing her, Beau turned and gave Sadie her full attention now that everyone had been served. Busy nights here were a blast, but when I called them busy, I meant busy.

  “Are you that fixated on it because you’ve had an infection?”

  Satisfied with our cleaning project, Sadie put the bottle back in its home. “Nope, but there was this commercial on television once for an antibacterial product. They showed a raw piece of chicken being put on a kitchen counter with red salmonella bacteria around it. The person used a wet cloth to wipe it up, but the red just smeared all over the place. Then they touched the bin—more red—and their face…” she shuddered.

  “I couldn’t touch anything in the kitchen for weeks. Anyway, they showed the antibacterial cleanser's effect on it, but even then it left a tiny bit behind because that’s real life. We miss areas when we clean or just make a half-arsed attempt at it. So, from then on, I figured I’d do two or three passes with the spray and once with a wipe, too, just to make sure. I also make sure I wash my hands as thoroughly as possible, including in the corners of my nails. The problem is, most antibacterial stuff only kills ninety-nine point nine percent of germs, so I have to do my best not to think about what that point one percent bacteria is.”

  I swear my life was changing as she spoke. All I could think about now was that point one percent bacteria and if I had it on me. Glancing at Beau, I could see her looking at her own hands and then the surface of the bar, too.

  We were all so engrossed in it that we didn’t see Charlotte, Levi’s wife, until she spoke. “Please don’t let him hear this. Your brother has coprophobia, and it’s driving me insane. That'll just make it worse.”

  I didn’t know he had a phobia of anything apart from being normal, so this surprised me. “What’s coprophobia?”

  “A fear of poop,” she replied, her expression not turning to amusement, so I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

  “I don’t think anyone likes poop.”

  “Maybe not, but your brother takes it to the extreme. When Niklaus does a dookie, your brother either freaks out and has to go and wash his hands—even though he hasn’t touched it—or, if I’m not there to change the diaper, he puts two pairs of gloves on. His hands legit shake when he changes him, and he puts the diaper in four bags. After that, he washes his hands twice and uses hand sanitizer.”

  Niklaus was my two-month-old nephew, named after a character from a show called The Originals. It was made even better by the fact that the other character in it was called Elijah, and my cousin Elijah was his godfather. And, no, Lily wasn’t to blame for this. Charlotte had binge watched it while
she was pregnant and decided on the name while the hormones were running rampant in her body. We called him Nik for short, but she called him Klaus when she didn’t think anyone was around.

  “How do you know all of that if you’re not around to see it?” Beau asked as she squeezed some of the large bottle of hand sanitizer we kept behind the bar into her hand.

  “We have security cameras in the house. When I’m out, I open the app on my phone and wait to hit the speaker button so I can scare the shit out of him. I’ve watched him change Nik’s dookie diaper twice, and that’s his regime for it.”

  Ironically, we knew some of her secrets because of those cameras, too. Where else would Levi have found out she called Nik Klaus? Or the fact she played catch with her dogs by throwing a butt plug for them? The butt plug that was meant to have been thrown out months ago.

  I had the same system in my home, but I had it locked down tight so that my family couldn’t watch the stupid shit I got up to.

  “Is that why he freaked out when you got the plug stuck in your…” Beau whispered quietly, looking at Charlotte’s butt.

  Groaning, I covered my ears with my hands and moved away from them, singing, “La, la, la, la!”

  When I was far enough away, I dropped them and looked around the bar. At one of the tables—with the rest of her witches in waiting was—Shonelle Harsden—one of the biggest bullies I’d ever had the misfortune of meeting.

  And one of her victims was walking toward me with a huge smile on her beautiful face, Bonnie, followed by her mom, who was one of the best people I’d ever met in my life.

  “Where have you been?” I squealed as she reached me. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in months.”

  “I’ve been working on the Atavism project, having tests and reading through some of the case studies,” she replied, waving at the girls behind me.

  “I heard about what happened to two of the people on it,” Charlotte said gently, joining us. “I’m so sorry.”

  I hadn’t heard anything about what they were discussing. “What do you mean? What happened?”

  “Two of the people involved in the case study were found murdered,” Bonnie whispered. “A week after they joined the list, their bodies were found in a car outside of Chicago.”

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” I knew how much this study meant to Bonnie and the fact she was working with the people when they died… Fuck, that was bad.

  Smiling sadly at me, she shrugged. “I hope they find who did it. It could be a coincidence, but the police haven’t revealed much about the crime scene yet, so I don’t know if it’s linked to our study or not.”

  Seeing that she wanted to change the subject, I introduced her to our group's newest addition.

  “Bonnie, this is Sadie Dahl, our resident Brit, and fountain of knowledge on bacteria and viruses. Sadie, this Bonnie Blue Butler, one of the most beautiful and unique women you’ll ever have the pleasure of meeting.”

  Sadie was uncharacteristically quiet when she shook Bonnie’s hand, but when she should have released it, she said, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you’ve got to be the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Bonnie froze in place, but her mom, Sheila, beamed with pride beside her. “I keep telling her that, but she never listens to me. Sheila Butler, by the way,” she introduced herself to Sadie, holding her hand out.

  Releasing Bonnie’s, Sadie shook it. “You created a princess, Mrs. Butler.”

  “I know,” Sheila winked.

  Leaning over the bar top to hug her, Beau squeezed her tight. “Do you recognize the name, Sadie?”

  Looking blankly at me, Sadie shook her head. “Uh, no? Should I?”

  “Think of the movie Gone With The Wind.”

  Sadie’s reaction this time was shocked. Unfortunately, this was something Bonnie had been bullied about her whole life. It hadn’t just stopped at kids being nasty to her, though. Their parents had attacked Sheila in the street for her choice in name, too.

  “I can’t say I’ve watched it,” she replied slowly and carefully. “But I’ve heard about it.”

  “No,” Sheila whispered, confusing all of us. When she saw our expressions, she explained, “She wasn’t named after that movie.”

  “But…” Beau started, looking shocked.

  “No,” Sheila said firmly. “I named her Bonita because after she was born, the nurse kept saying that and staring at her. We were in shock, but so in love with her at the same time, and the name was the perfect description for Bonnie, so we took it. Her middle name is Bluebell after my grandmother, who was from Scotland and loved the bluebells that’d grown in the fields around the village she’d grew up in. I’ve never even watched the movie, so I didn’t know until she started kindergarten that there was a character in it with the name Bonnie Blue Butler.”

  Beau and I absorbed this, both of us shocked that we hadn’t known this information years ago. We’d been some of the only people who’d stood up for Bonnie while people were bullying her and her parents because of that name. Then again, they’d also bullied her because she was genetically from two white people, but she wasn’t white herself. Fuck, that really pissed me off, even now.

  “But why did we think your name was Bonnie Blue, then?” Beau asked, sounding as tormented as I felt.

  “When Bonnie was five, she came home from school crying because that group of girls—” she gestured at her head where Shonelle was sitting “—said that her dad and I were racist c-words. I’d had it said to me directly and had even been spat at on the street, but them saying it to her? It really hurt, so we told her that we were going to change it. It’s one thing to target me, it’s another thing to say it to a little girl who didn’t have a mean word to say about anyone.”

  Smiling softly at her mom, Bonnie added, “I refused. My name had meaning to it, which is more than could be said about a lot of names, and I wanted to keep it.”

  “We spoke to the principal about it, but he didn’t care. So, when it continued, we spoke to the Sheriff at the time, Kirk Greenwood. He told us that he’d speak to the parents involved but also said to Bonnie that if you took away the power to hurt, the people trying to do it lost their power over you. She took that advice to heart and stopped correcting people when they called her Bonnie Blue.”

  Looking at Sadie, Bonnie explained, “I’m my parents' biological child, but I’m black.”

  Sadie jerked at this comment. “Why does that make a difference?”

  “Both Mom and Dad are white.”

  Sadie’s eyes narrowed and her nostrils flared. “Are you telling me that you were bullied because of your color?”

  “Sort of. We all have dormant genes inside us that go back centuries, if not millennia. One of mine became active again, meaning I was born black.”

  While she was explaining this, Grams had joined us and was talking to Sheila, but both women were clearly listening to the conversation.

  “Atavism, right?” Sadie asked, shocking all of us, but getting a nod from Bonnie, too. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people knew about. “Right, one of the kids I went to school with had white parents, too. The way I understood it is it’s a gift and makes you truly unique. Heck, anyone can be born ordinary,” she pointed at herself just as Elijah joined us, her words getting frowns from all of us, “but to have your beauty stay hidden for hundreds of years? No, that’s nothing to sneer at or be a bitch about. That’s something for people to be grateful they’ve had the chance to witness.”

  A shy smile grew on Bonnie’s face, but she asked, “You think you’re ordinary?”

  “Of course. I’m blonde and short, babe. If I didn’t dye my eyebrows and eyelashes, people would think I was the spawn of the abominable snowman or something. It doesn’t get much more ordinary than that.”

  “Excuse me,” Elijah growled. “When you’re finished here, we need to have a word over there.” He pointed at a stool at the end of the bar, waiting for Sadie to acknowle
dge the order before moving to sit on it.

  “Wow,” Bonnie snickered. “Girl, you’re in trouble.”

  “I’m always in trouble,” Sadie sighed, waving her hand dismissively in the air. “Anyway, what I’m saying is that for people to pick on you for your beauty—and on a technicality, your color—is just the highest level of bullshit.”

  Then, a voice none of us enjoyed hearing interrupted. “Uh, it’s not that people don’t like her because of her beauty,” Shonelle sneered. “It’s because her family are all liars. There’s no way two white people could ever produce a black child. You either adopted her, or your momma had an affair. Just tell the truth.”

  The area around us went quiet, all of us staying silent as her words registered. Sadie was the first to move, reaching up to take out her earrings, but it was Grams who broke the silence.

  “You have a problem with her color regardless of your excuses. You can argue you’re not, but the fact you gaslight Bonnie because of her color puts you in one of the most disgusting categories a person can be put into. A racist.”

  “Bitch, you don’t know me,” Shonelle spat.

  “You’re wrong, Shonelle Bell.” Yeah, her last name really was Bell. “I know your mom had a crush on Bonnie’s dad, Doug, and hated that he fell in love with Sheila. I also know your mom was the one to start the rumor about Bonnie’s name and about Sheila having an affair. I further know that she went to Doug after Bonnie was born and offered to comfort him using her vagina,” she said quietly so that only our group would hear it. “You’d be amazed what else I know, Shonelle. I just have to wonder exactly why you and that mama of yours are so obsessed with the Butlers and everyone else that lives here. You can deflect attention off what y’all get up to, but that doesn’t mean people don’t know. Think about that, and for the love of God, stop being a bitch to everyone.”

  In every town, every community, there are rumors about people. Most of them, I ignored, but there’d been some interesting ones about the Bells. Then again, I’d have to muster quite a few fucks to find out the answer, and I just didn’t have them in me to muster.