Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold Book 5)

by Mary B. Moore

  “I’m not going to feel ashamed because I don’t like liars. You can make it about her color, but it’s because the family’s been trying to dig their way out of a hole of debauchery for the last twenty-three years. So, you can take your knowledge and shove it up your ass,” Shonelle hissed and turned to walk away.

  Calling out her name before she could get far, Grams held up her middle finger, a move that was totally at odds with her normal beauty and class. “You can sit on this and rotate. Then I’d like you to go and sit on a cactus covered in razor wire and do the same.”

  Blowing out a breath, Bonnie looked sadly back at all of us. “Well, that was embarrassing.”

  Scowling at her, her mom asked, “Why? Because someone finally told her to shut the hell up?”

  Before she could reply, Grams added, “To not understand something is one thing, Bonnie. But to hate someone because you don’t want to listen and understand something—that’s ignorance. How you act on that willful ignorance is what defines you as a person, and she’s done enough damage to your family. We’ve all said our piece to her and her mom over the years—and I don’t even live here—and they’ve ignored every word of it. Never doubt your beauty, sweetheart, because you’ve been blessed with so much of it.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Sadie agreed, rolling her eyes at the shocked look she got from Bonnie. “Love, I do not lie. You are, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve got a feeling once I get to know you, that beauty’s just going to grow.”

  The respect Sadie had from my family had just increased hugely from the look on Gram’s face. We might be the only ones who heard her say it, but I knew the rest of the family would hear it soon. I also knew that Bonnie had another person in her corner now, something she could never have too many of.

  “Thank you,” Bonnie replied, smiling shyly. “Mom was telling me she heard her saying something to you in the store the other day. I’m sorry she’s directing her bitch at you, too.”

  “Nothing I’m not going to hear more of. I’m saying things the wrong way, using the wrong words, my ‘version of English’ is wrong, blah, blah, blah. I really don’t see what the issue is if I’m honest, but it seems to mean something to her.”

  Leaning over the bar, Bonnie whispered, “I don’t think it’s something—I think it’s someone.”

  Here’s a tip for all of the male and female population of the world—no matter how hard you try, if you know who the person’s talking about and they’re in the same area as you, you’ll always turn your head and look at them. Sometimes you’ll get away with it, but if it’s a group of you doing it, you won’t. Fortunately, Elijah was made of titanium because he just rolled his eyes at us and wiggled his finger at Sadie.

  “Anyway,” Grams clapped her hands together. “I think my grandson has something to say to you,” she pointed to Sadie “Oh, and you only have one earring in, so you better put the other one back in before you lose it.”

  And that was the end of a tense situation. Given how dedicated Shonelle was to her task of making Bonnie’s life a misery, it went without saying there’d be more soon, though. She could try, Bonnie had an army at her back who wouldn’t let her get away with it. It was niggling at me that Sadie hadn’t told us about the problems she was having with her, I’d get that information out of her. Maybe I’d even get Elijah to do it.

  Later that night…

  I was just about to get into the shower when my phone pinged with a message. Obviously—like almost everyone else in the world—I brought my phone into the bathroom with me, so I didn’t have to go far to pick it up and see who it was from.

  Parker: Company? x

  Not understanding what he meant, I replied:

  Me: As in a business, or as in do I want any? x

  His response was almost immediate.

  Parker: As in, I’d love to spend some time with you. x

  I didn’t believe in miracles, I was too much of a realist for that. You had to work hard for what you got, no matter what it was you were working for. However, for the last couple of weeks, what was growing between us felt almost like a miracle. We talked about things, watched movies, hung out, we laughed a lot, and I felt comfortable and relaxed around him. I hadn’t let my guard down completely, but it was almost there. We were both guarded people, but we’d found a level of trust in each other we didn’t think was possible.

  I’d even told him about the weird lady who always came into Rebels and asked questions about my family. I’d served the vodka and Red Bull to her weeks ago, and whenever I tried to ask her questions, or it looked like one of my family was about to approach, she’d take her drink and disappear—leaving a hefty tip each time.

  I was attributing her actions to the joys of working in a bar with all kinds of patrons, but Parker wanted me to be careful. Her description wasn’t ringing any bells for him, but with my family, you could never be too cautious.

  We’d also been taking it slowly. I’d only ever had sex once when I was eighteen—not that Parker knew that—and with our hang-ups, we needed to take the time. It wouldn’t just fuck up our emotions if we messed this up, it would also have an impact on our family because he was part of us, too.

  That didn’t mean we hadn’t had some heated make out sessions, though. There’d even been some hand under the top action, but that’s where it’d ended. So it went without saying that I was feeling slightly… antsy.

  I also wasn’t dumb, so there was no way I’d say no to Parker coming to visit.

  Me: Absolutely! x

  Roughly fifteen seconds after I’d sent the message, the sound of a train horn roared through my home, making me squeal, and the dogs go nuts. I hated that doorbell, and if I could figure out how to remove it, I would.

  Remembering too late that I was only wearing a thin bathrobe, I tightened my belt as I went downstairs to answer the door. It was unfortunate that I was dressed like this, but in my defense, I’d been about to get in the shower when he’d text me. Fifteen seconds also wasn’t enough warning to put on regular clothes.

  Answering the door looking like a dirty hooker, it was. Well, a dirty hooker in a nice robe.

  Hurdling the dogs, I got to the door without having an accident and opened it. When he didn’t say anything, just scanned me from head to toe, I shifted nervously and cleared my throat.

  “Christ.”

  Taking a step back and waving him in, I explained, “I was about to take a shower when you text. I didn’t even think about what I was wearing until I was coming down the stairs.”

  Pulling me closer to him, he rubbed the small of my back with one hand. “Don’t apologize. I love this.”

  The ‘this’ was a silky turquoise robe that only came to the knees. Mom had bought it for me months ago, and I loved it.

  I was about to make a joke about it, but I noticed the tension around his eyes and mouth and the fact his smile wasn’t reaching them.

  “Are you okay?”

  Dropping his head onto my shoulder with a sigh, he rumbled, “No. I’m not even close to being okay.”

  Leading him over to the couch, I chose a seat and pulled him down beside me. Deciding he wanted me closer, he scooting me toward him, closing the mere inch that’d been between us.

  “What happened? Is it Dale?”

  Looking absolutely defeated, Parker dropped his head back onto the cushion. “We had a guy brought in tonight who’d been in an accident and had to be cut out of his vehicle. His injuries are incompatible with life, but he had a medical alert bracelet on that said to check his wallet for a letter.”

  “You can get that?”

  “You can get them engraved with whatever you need,” he explained, rolling his head slightly to look at me. “When they found the letter, it stated if anything happened to him, he was to be put on life support until his liver could be harvested and transplanted into his son.”

  “Why was he giving his son his liver? Couldn’t he do t
hat when he was alive?”

  One side of his mouth hitched slightly in a weak smile. “Yeah, you can. He was scheduled to donate half of it to his son in Denver in six days.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “The paramedics did what they could and brought him in. I spoke to the transplant team in Denver about it, and they were going to send a team to do some checks and transport him to Denver and notify the family that the operation was going ahead once they had it. The problem is, they need to check if the accident caused damage to the liver and if they can still use it. It’s up to the team to accept or deny it.”

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, the double tragedy hitting me. “How old is the son?”

  “Fourteen.”

  Closing my eyes, I tried to think of a fourteen-year-old being sick enough to need a new liver, and now maybe having lost the chance of getting one quickly and his father, all in one night.

  “That poor family. I want to ask why they didn’t do the surgery immediately, but that’s not exactly the point anymore, is it? Have you had any updates?”

  “No, I left after we got him on life support. They were hopeful they’d be able to take half of it still, so…” he shrugged, using the nail on his thumb to pick at the label on the bottle of water. “The letter was just so fucking sad. It wasn’t about him and saving his life or taking drastic measures, it was purely about his son.”

  “I wonder why he carried the letter with him?”

  “According to his wife, it was in case anything like this happened. He didn’t want to take any chances of not saving his son’s life.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered, sitting back and staring at the floor. “It’s like he knew something was going to happen.”

  With what sounded like a defeated sigh, Parker dropped his head to look at the floor. “Who knows? It just hits hard that he might not be able to give his son what he was hoping to, you know? Two lives lost because of an accident.”

  Leaning into him, I thought about it. I didn’t know much about medicine, everything I’d picked up was from the television or books, so I didn’t understand how transplants worked. I was sure I’d heard somewhere that organs could come from people outside of the family. It didn’t take away the fact a tragedy had happened, but my hope was the boy would still be able to get what he needed before it was too late. Then again, how do you recover from losing your dad in the way this boy had?

  I felt helpless for everyone concerned, including Parker.

  “If it’s too damaged, can he get a transplant from someone else?”

  “Yeah, he can, so long as they find someone compatible with him.”

  Doctors are humans, so it’s bound to affect them when something happens like this, but it was hitting Parker hard.

  Not wanting to sound callous, I thought about the best way to word what I wanted to ask. “Can I ask a question?”

  Looking down at me, he raised his eyebrows. “Always. You know more about me than anyone apart from Dale and my shrink.”

  “This can’t be the first loss of a patient you’ve had to deal with...” I began hesitantly. “Do they all affect you like this?”

  I’d been worried he’d recoil and close up, maybe think I was a judgmental bitch, but the small smile on his face showed me he understood where I was going with this.

  “It’s definitely not the first patient I’ve lost, but learning from patients and their cases makes you a better doctor.” That made sense. “By that, I mean—if someone comes in with a complex problem that we’ve never dealt with before, you go with a theory, make it practical, and gauge the impact what you’ve done has on the patient.”

  “Like, use people as guinea pigs?”

  “Exactly,” he nodded slowly. “Some infections don’t react to what’s usually used against them, and some injuries don’t heal as you’d expect. You have to adapt and adjust so that you can help the patient recover.

  “When you lose a patient, if you were to just close the door and walk away, would you be learning from it? No. We don’t know everything there is to know about science and medicine—no matter what people think—so every day is a learning experience. Unfortunately,” he blew out a breath, “we can’t save everyone. I’m not a robot, I take on the hit of that loss and wonder what I could’ve done differently. Patients are human beings, someone’s son, dad, or brother. They’re not dispensable, they matter.”

  “And have you ever thought that you fucked up and the death was on you?”

  “I can’t answer that because I’ve got no way of knowing with the patients I’ve lost if a different treatment would’ve saved them. That’s not the kind of problems they had. But tonight’s was different. A man died, but a young boy has lost his dad, who loved him enough to be as prepared for a bad event as he was, and his only concern was his son’s life. And he might have to know that his dad died in an accident that took away something that would’ve lived on inside his body, keeping him alive. Does that make sense?”

  It did. I couldn’t imagine having an organ inside me that came from one of my parents after they’d passed away, but I also couldn’t imagine being in that poor boy’s shoes.

  “Will you be able to find out about the liver?”

  Nodding, he cracked his neck as he sat up. “Yeah, I’ll find out when I get in tomorrow.”

  I hadn’t expected it tonight, but I knew he needed company, so I was going to do for him what worked best for me when I was stressed.

  Getting up, I held my hand out to him. “Come on.”

  Looking from my hand to me, he frowned. “Where are we going?”

  “I’m going to look after you,” I explained, shaking my hand to get him to hurry up.

  Slowly, he reached out and took it. “If this is a Townsend way of relieving stress, trust me—none of them work on me.”

  I knew of quite a few ways my family dealt with things, and I could confidently say that none of them worked on me, either. The fact he’d experienced that insanity them made me chuckle as I led him up the stairs to my room.

  “Uh, I can’t for sure say that this isn’t what some of my family do,” I snickered as I looked over my shoulder at him, laughing harder at his missed step. “But, I can say that this isn’t something weird, and none of them will be jumping out to surprise you.”

  Thank fuck—which was what I said inside my head and not audibly. There was no need to give any of it away, yet.

  As we reached the top and moved into my room, I pointed at the bed as I veered off to the bathroom. “Can you stay in here while I get stuff together? I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

  The blind trust he had in me as he walked over to the bed meant a lot to me. After dealing with my family for most of his life, I wouldn’t have. We were prone to having weird and wonderful ideas, which usually backfired, and he’d probably witnessed more of them than I had.

  Pulling out some clean towels from the cupboard, I turned the shower on and made sure I hadn’t left anything embarrassing on the counters and that my underwear from earlier hadn’t landed outside the hamper instead of inside it. Satisfied he wasn’t going to run screaming with disgust, I moved out to get him and grinned when I saw him looking confused.

  “I don’t see your computer or gaming system, babe. Didn’t you have something like that?”

  I had. Now I didn’t.

  “I decided that I didn’t want to use them anymore, so I got rid of them.” There was no way in hell I was going to tell him why.

  Sure enough, though, he was a nosy shit head when it suited him. “Why not?”

  “The shower’s ready,” I said, changing the subject. “Now, I know men don’t normally—”

  “I shower, Ari, every day, so I don’t have a problem with that. What I have a problem with is that you’ve gotten rid of the things that you loved only months ago. What the fuck?” he growled as he stood up with his hands on his hips.

  I got that he had an issue about my missing things, but seeing him in his scrubs ou
tside of the ER right now was messing with my brain. They weren’t the light green color I’d been expecting from watching television shows, but a really deep green instead. They also weren’t baggy and ugly. No, the ones he had were more form-fitting. It was the pants that were the genius item, though, with pockets like you find on cargo pants on the side of the leg, like smart cargo sweatpants.

  “Well?”

  Fiddling with the tie of my robe, I tried to quickly come up with a reason that wasn’t the real one. Not liking being under pressure, my brain didn’t fart, it freaking flatlined.

  “Ariana,” Parker growled warningly. “Why don’t you have your games and computer?”

  On a scale of one to ten, how pathetic would “because the girl posting photos of y’all together was the total opposite of me” sound? In truth, it wasn’t as clear cut as that, but it was pretty damn close.

  “Well, you see, I figured I’d move from the nerdy-gamer-chic type to the non-nerdy-gamer-chic type. We all have to grow up at some point, right?”

  His blue-green eyes looked from one of mine to the other, no doubt trying to scent the bullshit in the air. Not that he’d find any. Well, not much.

  “Gaming doesn’t make you a nerd or mean that you need to grow up, Ari. It just means you have something that relaxes you.”

  “Yeah, and it’s something that kids do with monotonous regularity nowadays,” I pointed out, emphasizing the word kids.

  “So? Kids also start biking and horseback riding. It doesn’t make it wrong for adults to do it, too.”

  Still.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is? Not many people I know in real life do it, so it was about time I moved onto better things.”

  I watched as he closed the distance between us, the buttons on his shirt getting closer until they were inches away from my face. He was so close, I could see the tiny individual threads holding them in place.

  Tilting my chin up gently with his thumb, he continued frowning. Jesus, if he just did it a little bit more, the space between his eyebrows would look like a baby’s butt crack. Something I decided to share with him.