Until Tom, Finding Forever (Providence Book 5)
Page 10
Turning my head so that our lips were just skimming, I looked into his beautiful turquoise eyes and handed him my heart. “I love what we have. I love how we are together. And I love that I can give you me and know that you appreciate it, and won’t abuse it or break my heart.”
I didn’t realize that I’d started crying until his eyes moved down to where the tear was on my cheek, before he moved in to kiss it away.
“I swear here and now that you are everything to me. Every last piece of me is yours, so please look after it and I’ll look after your pieces too.” He looked and sounded more serious than I’d ever heard him be, and I felt the frayed edges inside me smooth over. His final whispered words made me love him more than I’d thought possible. “You are a treasure, a diamond that was created like a miracle of nature. It’s not a cheesy line that I’m just saying for the sake of it - it’s the truth. You’re my rare diamond, pretty girl.”
I cried out this time because he punctuated it with a hard thrust as he kissed me with enough force to steal my breath. Suddenly pulling back, he balanced on his knees and continued with a series of forceful lunges in, grinding periodically and driving me out of my mind.
I desperately wanted to come, it was so close but so far. Tom’s hand wrapping around one of mine and pulling it away from the headboard almost made the orgasm hit without any assistance, but he had better plans for me.
Running our hands down my belly, our knuckles just skimming my skin making my nerves hyperaware. Just as we reached my core and the hard needy nub there, he hooked his pointer finger underneath mine and moved them to my clit. It was my finger that made contact with it, but his finger that provided the pressure as it manipulated mine on top of the bundle of nerves. His grinds and jabs into me, the stroking of my clit, the emotions, they all joined together, and I exploded - or maybe I imploded? Regardless, I shattered under him, a hoarse cry coming out of me as my pussy spasmed around his beautiful cock that was capable of complete sexual sorcery and mastery.
I was still coming when I heard him shout out and felt his release inside me. With every pulse, my body answered. If anyone thought that they could put words to what I was feeling and what was happening to my body at that moment, then they were welcome to try. The answer was that there could never be any way to describe it.
Collapsing down onto the bed still joined, I struggled to breathe as the pillow hugged my face. Adding my studies into my life and having a relationship with Tom would be possible. My priorities were shifting to him being the most important aspect now.
Tom Townsend had won, and I was fucking over the moon about it.
Tom
It might have seemed immature and stupid to have held off having a relationship since the incident with Susy Baker, but I could see it for what it was.
Everyone has fun. Some wait for their one to have sex, some hold a part of themselves back giving only what they want to.
Me? I’d been the latter. The only person who would ever get all of me was Sonya - she was the one person in the world who was made just for me and vice versa.
I loved what we had, but I wanted more. I wanted all of it and I was going to get it.
Chapter Nine
Sonya
There had been another meeting called for the men of the Townsend family, so Layla and I were sitting on her sofa watching a movie. Layla was a scary movie addict, so I was hiding behind a cushion with my knees touching my nose, listening to the heavy breathing and foreboding music.
“Fucks sake, this is so cliché,” she muttered with a mouthful of popcorn. “I mean, the music has changed and it’s dark out, so why wouldn’t you go running off into the middle of fucking nowhere?”
“My point exactly,” I whimpered. Maybe if it was that shit she’d turn it off?
“Oh, fucking great, now she’s lost her top so she’s running in the dark with freaky assed music and her tits are bouncing in a bra that’s at least a cup size too small!”
Peaking over the edge of the cushion, I giggled at what was happening on the screen until a guy with a mask jumped out with a machete in his hand.
I was about to ask if she could please switch it off so that I could sleep tonight, when the window beside us exploded with bodies dressed in black coming through it.
We never had a chance to run, or even press the big red button on Layla’s wall right beside us. The closest we got was jumping up with our mouths open, but a fist to the side of my head was like turning a light off. One flick of the switch and it was all pitch black.
Tom
“We’ll make it quick,” Coleman informed us as he went through the briefing and update. “There was a hit on the prints in AFIS.”
This information was met with a lot of noise. We all wanted justice for the shit that this bastard had caused us, and we wanted it now.
“Who?” Gramps was involved in this meeting, and he was pissed. Apparently, he’d been told about the package a couple of days previously and had picked up a leather studded paddle and a long set of anal beads, declaring that he’d ‘watched a shit ton of those martial art movies and would kill the bastard with only a fly swat and a shoulder massager’. That mental image would last in all of our minds for the rest of our lives.
“Fucking sit down,” Coleman barked, all of us realizing too late how pissed he was. “The prints matched a dead convict. The man was a well-known trafficker.”
We all must have had the same confused expressions on our faces, because he threw his head back and let out a muffled shout.
“Trafficker?” Cole asked what we were all wondering. Now, even with an IQ that was Mensa worthy, trafficking could mean anything. There was also the question of terminology and its progression in our vocabulary. Gay used to mean happy, sick used to literally mean sick – vocabulary changed all the time.
“Humans, guns and drugs,” Coleman hissed out through visibly gritted teeth.
“Holy shit.”
“Damn, that’s sick!”
“What does a trafficker have to do with us?”
Coleman leaned his head against the wall behind him, waiting until we’d gotten it out of our system.
“That’s what we didn’t understand, and what we still don’t understand,” he sighed. “In addition to that, records show that the guy has been dead for a couple of months. So, how did this take so long to get here if he sent it?”
None of us knew what the answer to that was.
“Logically, there could be many reasons. He gave instructions to someone just in case? It got misplaced?” Ren offered.
Plausible, but it didn’t sound right. Bombs are fragile and if you went to the extent of making a bomb specifically for someone, you want for it to reach its destination and target - so you’d make sure that it did. If you were involved in something like trafficking and explosives, then you had ways of escape too.
The answer suddenly became clear. “He’s not fucking dead!” I whispered, a chill going up my back. My stomach dropped into my colon, and a really bad feeling came over me. “Dad, do you have that list of people that Coleman asked you for?” I ran over to my bag and pulled out the laptop that I’d started carrying with me everywhere again.
“Yeah, here it is.” He handed me a slip of paper with eight names on it.
Running a search on all of their names took time, but I was determined and skimmed through the information as it came up.
“Um, I hate to tell you this at this exact moment,” Gramps stuttered behind me, and I gave him a cursory glance over my shoulder before turning back to the screen. “Well, ya see, uh…fuck this is hard.” He sounded like he wanted to be anywhere else, but where he was at that moment. “Yourcousinsarecoming.”
All of us stopped what we were doing at the same time and silence took over the room. Had he said…? No, no. He couldn’t have said that.
“Did you say what I think you said?” Brett asked sounding horrified.
Please let the answer be no, please let it be no.
“Did you say that our cousins are coming?”
“Uh…maybe. Quite possibly!”
“Which ones?” Dad asked gruffly.
“Jer’s,” Gramps replied giving the name of the one brother of dad’s whose kids made us all look stable.
Spinning in my chair, I listened as the searches ran behind me. This was huge – they were so unstable that even an earthquake was safer than being around them. Unfortunately, they also dealt with the field running of our oil company. We did the office work, they did the physical work. It was a miracle and a blessing that the company hadn’t exploded – well, at least it hadn’t yet. There was always time. They also tended to think later and act now.
Rubbing my hands down my face, the fact that this was a clusterfuck of epic proportions hit me.
“Which cousins?” I hated asking, but I had to know. Out of the five of them, three were the definition of nuts. It’s one thing to ride the little yellow bus, it’s another to be the one’s licking the windows – and I had it on good information that their bus windows were always squeaky clean.
“Noah,” Gramps started with the second eldest, and all of us dropped our heads back in exasperation. “Archer.”
“Ah fuck it,” Brett huffed as he hit his head on the wall.
“And?” I prompted. There were three more crazy sacks to choose from, and I needed to know, although Gramps reluctance to offer up the last name made it more than obvious that the worst one of the bunch was coming.
“…ate,” he mumbled.
“Did you say Tate?” Ren clarified sounding as horrified as we all felt. He was the youngest Townsend in that family and the one that had been the Tasmanian Devil since he shot out of my aunt’s womb.
Shrugging Gramps went back to studying the wall, which was blank. I looked around for his leather paddle/fly killer – I was going to…
The thudding of multiple heads filled the room, a majority were my family’s, one was Coleman’s. He’d had the unfortunate luck to meet them on a few occasions – mainly weddings. The other times had been when Brett had to go out into the oil fields to check shit over.
On one of those visits, Tate had driven his truck into one of the machines. His excuse? He’d been attacked by a Pterodactyl sized fly, and when he’d lifted his gun to shoot it, he’d hit the airbag on his steering wheel. Said airbag had somehow survived but had been triggered by the shot and had inflated into his face causing him to drive into a machine that cost millions of dollars. He was lucky to get away alive and unhurt, especially when you consider that his crotch was close to where he’d shot at.
“We’re all gonna die,” Dad groaned as he hit his head harder on the wall.
Hoping that I could at least get some useful details before I died in a flaming inferno accidentally caused by my family, I turned back to the laptop and started looking through the information, trying to figure out who would be the most likely psycho candidate.
“What’s the name of the guy whose prints it was?” I asked as I typed into the computer on my lap.
“Gary Lanay,” Coleman replied, coming to stand behind my shoulder watching the screen. “What are you going to do?”
Searching the list, I didn’t see any that matched, until something jumped out at me. Ray Lagan – it was an anagram for Gary Lanay.
“Who’s this guy - Ray Lagan?” I asked dad as I typed the names in, looking for photo ID for both of them.
“Oh, we went to college together,” Dad sounded confused as he told us. “He had a crush on your mom, but he was a weird guy and she wasn’t interested. When she told him no and went out with me, he lost his shit. Said something about money and fucking shit up. He left not long after it and we never heard from him again.”
“Is this him?” I pointed at the screen so that dad could see the license photo.
Leaning over my shoulder, it didn’t take dad long to respond. “Fucking hell!”
Looking over at Coleman, I could see he’d figured it out too. Before we could do anything, the door burst open and a bloody Tony came in dragging Todd behind him who looked like he’d been shot in the side.
“They’ve got them,” Tony yelled, dropping Todd down onto the ground. Somehow, he landed on his knees and stayed upright, holding his side.
“Who?” Coleman barked as more of his men came in through the open door.
“I don’t know,” Tony screamed. “I was going to see Layla and Sonya because it was milking time at the other houses - tits and babies everywhere. I tripped over him,” he swung his hand in Todd’s direction who was now being helped onto a sofa by another one of the security team. “I saw three guys in black carrying them out, but they started shooting at me when I yelled for help.”
“I need the details,” Coleman ordered, moving Tony over to a corner and quizzing him.
His words sank in and I felt all of the breath leave me. They had Sonya. They’d taken her.
Some men find that shit like this breaks them, but it changed me and in a way that I wasn’t going to come back from.
For the millionth time in my life, my brain started to go through an analysis of what I knew and what we had available. I went through the areas around us that they could take them to, the statistics of ever finding them and survival and finally the psychological repercussions of situations like this on the victims.
All of it was for shit. I didn’t know the details that would piece it all together and help us find them and we’d have to split up to cover the areas that they could possibly have been taken to.
What I did know was that I was going to get them back, and that I didn’t intend to leave anyone breathing afterwards.
Chapter Ten
Sonya
Layla and I both came around while we were tied up and in the back of a vehicle. It had been pitch black with no light even coming in from the front, which appeared to have a piece of board in place to separate the front from the back.
We’d whispered to each other as quietly as we could, knowing that there was no hope of escape at that precise moment. We couldn’t even stop ourselves rolling or bouncing with the movement of the car.
I don’t know how long we drove for, and I couldn’t remember all of the turns that were taken like in the movies. They made it seem so easy, but when you were scared the fuck out of your mind, and in a vehicle with fuck knows who and it was pitch black? No fucking way!
After a while the van started to slow down, and we could hear murmuring coming from the front, so we both closed our eyes and tried to slow our breathing as much as we could. Again, it looked so easy in the movies, but in real life you’re aware of what you’re doing, so it was easy for your brain to start screaming that you needed to breathe how your adrenalin demanded you to. At least, I think that’s how it worked? Or was it that your brain just took over and decided to fuck with you that little bit more? Either way, we both ended up gasping for oxygen.
Just then the door opened, and I relaxed my body as much as I could, begging my brain not to be an asshole.
“Take ‘em inside,” a deep voice ordered. The orders this time didn’t give me the warm and fuzzies, they just made me pissed.
I was lifted and dumped over a shoulder again, bouncing with every step that the guy took. The knock to my head had made me nauseous, but the bouncing and gravity wreaking havoc on the contents of my stomach added to it. It would be karma if I puked down the back of this guy, but then he’d know that I was awake. Or could you just puke while you were unconscious? We’d all heard of drunk people doing it and the disasters that came about as a result, but what if no alcohol was
involved? And if I was upside down, would it come out of my nose? What about those people who could cry milk when they held their noses shut and tensed hard enough – would I cry puke?
For once, my curiosity was beneficial because it took my mind off my breathing so that I didn’t gasp or give my conscious state away.
A door opened and the asshole carrying me stepped up onto a wooden floor. Was he wearing fucking tap shoes? That’s what it sounded like as he click-clacked across the floor. Or maybe it was stilettos? Peeking open an eye slightly to check, I was disappointed when just normal black boots showed on his feet. Maybe he had a Fred Astaire obsession and tap danced in his spare time?