Until Tom, Finding Forever (Providence Book 5)

by Mary B. Moore

  Sighing and looking at my watch, I saw that we had now had two hours until we had to leave for classes, which meant that we’d been at this shit for an hour already. Apparently, that was how long it took for whatever the fuck was going to happen.

  “Proceed,” I nodded.

  Creeping closer, Layla poked the lump and jumped back. When nothing happened, she poked it again. Then again. Deciding that she was safe, she started to sing a song that I remember mom singing to us in the mornings.

  “Wakey, wakey, little bird. The sun is up, haven’t you heard. It’s time to leave your nest and say…”

  “Fuck. Off!” came the muffled snarled response from the bed. It sounded like something out of The Omen or something.

  Gulping slightly, Layla continued. “Let the sun be bright today. Wakey, wakey, little bird. The sun is up, haven’t you heard. Spread your wings and let’s go fly…”

  “I’m going to kill you,” Satan growled from the bed. Taking a step back, just in case, I leaned against the wall and quickly scanned the room to make sure that I had an escape route. I wasn’t sure that Layla was overreacting now that I’d heard the voice from the bed. She only came up to my nipple and must have weighed around…I actually wasn’t touching that. Women were funny about shit like that, and with what I’d heard coming from her this morning – she could probably sense when people were thinking about her weight. I liked to breathe and be alive and I intended to keep my balls - so no I wasn’t going there.

  In a shaky voice, Layla started again. “Up into the bright blue sky. Wakey, wakey, little bird. The sun is up, haven’t you heard…”

  That was when she made the mistake of leaning slightly toward the bed, lost her balance and poked the lump with the bat. Now that is was awake, this had a completely different result than the previous times. An arm shot out, grabbed the end of the bat and yanked, pulling Layla fully off her feet and onto the bed.

  What followed was like something out of a cartoon. Screams, the covers flying, things being knocked off the table beside the bed and just carnage, pure carnage.

  “Coffee,” Layla shrieked, reminding me about the pitcher in my hand.

  “I don’t wanna,” I whimpered. Now that I’d seen it all play out, I was rethinking ever waking her up. We’d get married, I’d let her sleep, in fact I could sleep somewhere else. Anywhere!

  “Pussy!” She yelled, as she managed to free her head from the half nelson hold that Sonya had put it in.

  Creeping close, I remembered the instructions that she’d given me while we prepared for this earlier and leaning over, I used my free hand to waft the smell of the coffee toward the tumbling bodies on the bed.

  A head suddenly popped up, my choking sister was freed, and a hand reached out and snatched the pitcher. I stood frozen to the spot as I watched her guzzle down half of it, before sighing and then smiling brightly.

  “Morning!”

  What the fuck had just happened?

  ****

  Five months later

  Tom

  This fucking sucked. I was lying in a hospital bed, having been shot in the ass - through no fault of my own - and now we were all going to England to get Sabine. If my brother, Brett, hadn’t been such an asshole, I wouldn’t have a hole in my butt cheek and I wouldn’t be leaving Sonya.

  Picking up the cell that security had left with me, after mine had cruelly been killed by an ass bullet, I dialed Layla.

  “…Lo?” the line was shit, but I only needed her for a second.

  “What’s the type of cat that Sonya wanted?”

  I didn’t want her left on her own. Sure, there’d be security guarding her - especially with some Townsend hating psycho who shot innocent people in the ass walking around the world - but what if she needed to cuddle? Not that I would know if she did even cuddle.

  “M…n” came the garbled reply.

  “A what?”

  “M…n…n” I made out, before the line cut dead.

  Looking at the phone in confusion, I repeated, “A Munun?”

  I heard my brother’s wife Maya sigh as she entered the room. “It’s a Munchkin. They’re seriously adorable! Tiny itty-bitty balls of cuteness,” she wrinkled her nose as she held her hands up and made tiny little purring noises.

  “Did you get take out at the pharmacy?” I’d never heard of that type of cat, and weren’t they all little balls of cuteness? I didn’t like cats, but even I thought kittens were cute. Trying to adjust my body into a more comfortable position, I accidentally leaned on the hole in my ass cheek and couldn’t stop the scream. “Oh, holy mother of all things ass fucking agony!”

  Then it all went even more to shit. Just after a nurse came running in to give me a nice “dose of happiness”, my brothers - who had been recording all of this from the doorway - burst out laughing and started fighting over who could upload it first.

  Seconds before I lost control of my drool, I gave the order to Maya to order Sonya a fucking Munchkin kitten.

  Sonya

  The knock at the door pulled me from my book. I was meant to be studying, but I’d had a dream about a wolfy Tom last night, so I’d gone hunting for a shifter book to read and once I popped I couldn’t stop. Six hours on, and I was on book four.

  Opening the door, I saw one of the Townsend’s security people standing with an animal carrier in his hand.

  “Um, Tom got you this. And they had to go to England.”

  This wasn’t new news to me. Layla had called, semi-hysterical, during book two and had told me about the trip and Tom’s accident. I’d been worried, but I refused to let on that he was getting to me. If I gave him even a sliver of an inch, he’d take a mile, and - shifter books aside - my studies came first. I’d worked too hard to get to where I was now to let him distract me.

  Smiling at the man in front of me, I took the pet carrier hesitantly and stepped back as he dropped a couple of bags inside the door and then closed it. Nothing that Tom Townsend did was normal or expected, and I didn’t know what was sitting inside it. A six-foot-three man who assumedly worked out wouldn’t buy you a tiny dwarf bunny rabbit, would he? Maybe a panther? Or a tiger? But something cute and friendly? I wasn’t buying it.

  That was until I heard the tiny little meow as I walked over to the couch with it, and my heart melted. Layla must have told him that I wanted a Maine Coon - a kitten that grew into a freaking massive cat. Those things cost a vital organ and were my dream pet.

  Crouching down in front of the carrier, I opened the cage door carefully and peeked inside. Inside was the most beautiful tabby kitten that I’d even seen in my life.

  “Oh, you’re much smaller than I ever expected,” I cooed as I lifted it out. “How do you grow into such a big kitty with these tiny little legs?” It just purred as I ran my finger down a stubby limb. “You are the most precious thing I’ve ever seen!” Apparently, it liked that because it meowed and caught my finger with its tiny little claws…that were like the fiery blades of hell. Sweet Jesus!

  Quickly removing my finger from its grasp, I decided to think of names for it. Right now, I wanted something cute and sappy because it was so tiny, but I had to remember that in a couple of months, it would be flipping huge. Tank? Rocky? Shrek? Jabba? Big bastard?

  “I don’t know what to call you, buddy?” I explained, feeling like a bad kitty mama already as it wandered off my lap and onto my Kindle. “Oh, you’re a genius!” What else do you call a bad ass kitten than the name of a big bad ass wolf shifter in the series you were just reading. Thinking back through the books and the furry hotness’ in them, I decided on one that would suit him once he was fully grown too. A quick Google search to see what baby kitty testicles looked like, many apologies for checking out his junk and a squeal later, it was decided. “Well, my little man, your name is Dante. It’s all alpha and killer like you’ll be!”

  I really had no idea that he would take that last characteristic to heart and turn into a psycho. If I had, I would have left it off when I
named him.

  Chapter One

  Tom

  “So, I just spoke to Sonya,” Layla said through a mouthful of Bakewell Tart. It had been two months since we’d been home, and although I’d spoken to her most days, I was missing her something fierce. “Says that the kitten you got her is a psychopath and that she’s suing you for Band-Aids and mental trauma.”

  This I already knew because she told me it daily. In fact, I got at least thirty texts a day telling me and showing me her latest injury. One good thing had come from the distance, and that was that we’d spoken – as in actually spoken. We’d shared stories from our childhoods, facts about ourselves and had discovered that we had a shit ton in common too.

  One thing that we didn’t was our childhoods. Whereas mine had been fun and somewhat crazy, hers had been lonely. She was an only child and had said on many occasions that she was the pregnancy that her parents had never wanted. Although she was laughing when she said it, there was an element of seriousness in her words. Her parents were focused on their careers, and image was very important to them. Having a little kid hanging around hadn’t been in keeping with that and with their social lives, so they’d hired a team to ensure that she had the necessities, but also so that they could continue living as they wanted. When she’d been ten years old, they’d told her to become self-sufficient and she had which was why she was so determined to graduate and be independent from them.

  Afterwards, I’d quizzed Layla for more details and the more I found out, the more pissed off I became. My family was very close, and I had never ever been starved of love and attention. My parents made time for us, encouraged us and supported us all. Hers had seen love and attention as a weakness which would make her dependent on them for the rest of their lives. They’d viewed their careers as more important than their daughter, and when she’d even tried to sneak into parties or dinners to show an interest in them, they’d turned her down and sent her away. On those occasions, the guests had also been surprised at their little visitor because they hadn’t even been aware that the Harts had a daughter.

  Looking back at Layla, I replied, “It’s a cat!” It was the only answer that I could offer up. Maybe she’d never had a cat before and was doing something wrong, because I’d never heard of a kitten being that blood thirsty before.

  “Yeah, a fucking big ass cat. Those things grow to the size of a Labrador,” the pig got out, before she stuffed the rest of the cake in her mouth. I knew for a fact that she had two huge boxes of the things in the hold to fuel her addiction once we got home. At the rate she got through them, that would only last her a week.

  “Thanks for that information,” I muttered, looking at my watch. When would we finally land? Flying in a private plane was a luxury for most, but a necessity for me, one that I was almost begrudging at the moment. I didn’t fly commercial because, every single time I did, I got put next to a mental patient. Shit like that scarred a man for life.

  At this precise moment, I’d take it over the noises coming from my family and the smell coming from some questionable locations. I say questionable because, although I would have thought it would be Gramps, seeing as how it normally was, I’d learned over the course of our trip away that the kids could beat him hands down in the aromatic department. That discovery had been made when we accidentally fed them strawberries whilst driving back to Appledore, forgetting that they were sensitive to them. This resulted in my introduction to how much shit a toddler could actually hold and expel. I had zero desire to ever experience that again. So, from now on, unless there was a Hazmat suit to hand, I wouldn’t be in close proximity to a kid and food again. I’d said this to my family until I was blue in the face, forgetting that we had a century long flight back to the States to get through.

  Now, I was sitting like a paranoid crazy person, watching what was going on with the kids. I’d even plotted out the best route to my version of a panic room – a storage area in the galley where the food was kept. I wasn’t going through that hell again.

  “Hey, where’d my strawberries go?” Grams asked from somewhere behind me, just as I was starting to feel sleep taking over.

  That was enough to snap me awake and have me jumping out of my chair in the direction of my safe place. Cole got there just before me, but it was every man for himself and I felt zero guilt shoving him out of the way and climbing in with my nose in the far corner of it. If I ran out of oxygen, so be it.

  ****

  The rest of the journey was thankfully uneventful. Every time one of my brothers grabbed me by the foot and tried to pull me out of my safe haven, I made sure to give them a hard kick to wherever I could reach. This meant that there were currently two Townsends coming off the plane and walking very stiffly. I couldn’t help it if the angle of my foot meant that their balls had taken the full force of the blow. They shouldn’t have put them in the way of its kick, so really it was their own fault!

  Common sense should have had them at least prepared for the possibility of it happening, which would have meant that their legs would at have been a little bit more together. That way, their nuts would have been slightly protected at the very least. I couldn’t help it if they stood with their legs that far apart.

  “When can we head back to college?” Layla asked as we got to the first car in the long line of our vehicles. I was starting to worry that we were becoming such a big family that at some point, we’d just have to hire buses or something. This was ridiculous.

  “You’re not,” Coleman answered, like he hadn’t just fucked up all of my Sonya plans.

  Shaking my head and laughing, I stared the behemoth down. “Yeah, no. We’re going.”

  Admittedly, his responding stare would have the Terminator pissing his pants, but I hadn’t seen her in over two months, and this shit wasn’t happening. For all I knew, she could be getting kidnapped or shot as we stood here. The more likely scenario was that her deranged feline was clawing her to death and that she was bleeding out on the kitchen floor. Now that thought made my blood run cold because there was a high probability that it was actually happening.

  Pulling out my phone, I dialed the head of the security unit that had been assigned to her. As it rang out, I returned the glares coming from Coleman and laid down the law. “We’re going!”

  I must have looked absolutely terrifying, because after taking in my stance and the glare, he shook his head and typed out a message on his phone. “Layla will go and get her,” he sighed. “Y’all need to be on the ranch.”

  As the phone rang out in my ear, I broke eye contact with Coleman and dialed again. Just as I was about to send the 911 emergency text to the rest of her team, Matty answered.

  “You have a psycho pussy,” he bellowed into the phone. I heard Sonya yelling something back at him, but there was too much hissing static to make it out properly. “No, I’m not touching it. Get that pussy away from me!”

  The line went dead as I looked at Coleman who had heard most of it and was struggling not to laugh. “Your man’s a dead man,” I growled. He’d touched my pussy, then refused to touch my pussy…which made me a bit confused how I should feel about it. And how was Sonya’s pussy psycho? I’d watched a movie once where the chick had some sort of alien shit up her vagina and it bit the dude’s dick off. Rational thought dictated that this wasn’t true, but there were a fuck ton of things being discovered on a daily basis, so maybe it was?

  Coleman’s phone beeped and the sound of screaming and the word pussy and feline could be heard coming from it. Turning the screen to face me, I saw two of the security team bleeding in the corner of a room with a tiny kitten standing in front of them hissing. Sonya came onto the video then with towels duct taped to around her arm, oven mitts on her hands and a hockey mask over her face.

  “I’m gonna kill him,” she snarled as she turned her head away from the kitty and grabbed it. I’d never seen a cat go that insane and it’s howling battled her screams in pitch and volume.

  Thinking of my
own pets at home, I winced thinking of the carnage. “I’ll call doc and book it to get neutered.”

  Chapter Two

  Sonya

  “I still don’t see why I had to come too,” I huffed, listening to Dante hissing from his cage on the floor beside me.

  “Because it’s safer,” Coleman repeated, yet again, through gritted teeth as he drove.

  “Because Tom deemed it so,” Layla added, sounding way too happy for someone whose life currently hung in the balance.

  One minute I was excitedly jumping around and welcoming her back as Dante arched his back so much that his asshole was by his ear, and the next I was sitting in this admittedly nice SUV, and being driven to the Townsends ranch. Granted, there was someone who had taken being salty at the Townsends to the next level, but I was now doing my school work from home and the campus coffee shop was out of my reach. I needed their rocket fuel java to get me through the hours of school work!