I was so shocked by what had just transpired and the fact I was pressed up against him, that it took me a second to realize that he’d spoken.
“Yup,” I croaked, and then cleared my throat hoping that he hadn’t figured out that I was nervous.
What woman wanted Noah Townsend to know that? None! In fact, most women wanted a guy to think we were confident in that moment. Maybe not every moment, but that moment? Uh, yeah.
The twitch at the corner of the smug bastard’s mouth proved that I’d failed epically, and he totally knew how nervous I was.
“What about now?”
His hand moved further down so that it now held my entire butt cheek, while the other one pulled me up toward his face – the face that was now making its descent toward me.
Just as we made contact, and I was begging my heart not to stop, to give me at least two minutes of kissing Noah before I croaked– and not vocally, but physically as in my heart just quit beating type of croaked– a voice boomed from beside us.
“Yo! Noah, man!”
Watching his beautiful eyes shut up close and seeing his long lashes fan out against his skin was nothing short of spectacular. Granted, I’d rather see that happen while we were kissing, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. Especially when he followed it by resting his forehead gently against mine.
He let out a cross between a sigh and huff of frustration and then his forehead, still attached to mine, started to turn in the direction that the voice had come from.
Not wanting to lose the connection to him, I figured I’d turn too. The movement was slow, and we ended up with the sides of our foreheads still touching as I took in the giant guy standing beside us with his hands on his hips, looking at Noah in confusion.
I’d been so absorbed in what Noah had been doing, that I hadn’t even heard the sound of this guy’s car pulling up near us. It was like he’d appeared out of magic!
He was wearing jeans that looked like they’d been made just for him they fit that well, and his pale blue shirt was immaculate. This guy was hot, really hot, and in an unusual way.
Then Noah did something that almost made my legs give out behind me and made me supremely grateful for the sexy car pressed up against my back. He growled– while our torsos were pressed together, He. Freaking. Growled.
And it felt spectacular!
Noah
I’d been so focused on spending time with Luna that I’d forgotten to tell Rich that I’d come to the warehouse to collect the contracts that had been dropped off there.
When she’d been brought back by Levi that night all those months ago, we’d discussed it and decided that anyone who wasn’t on the approved list would need to be put through a special security vetting to make sure that Luna stayed safe. This meant that any paperwork and contracts were dropped off at a warehouse that we had. It was only a thirty- minute drive away from us, but I’d taken the long route so that I could spend time with her.
Rich normally did the drive for us as the head of operations, which explained why he was looking so confused.
“Fuck,” I sighed, reluctantly pulling my head off of Luna’s and standing up. I made sure to keep our bodies pressed together though. “Sorry, man. I meant to text and let you know I was going to bring Luna to get the papers. She’s got cabin fever!”
Even though she’d been with us for a good amount of time, he hadn’t had the opportunity to actually meet her yet. We’d been working flat out and now had operations running in four locations, so he was a busy guy.
When his eyes flicked to her, the smooth bastard broke out his best smile and reached a hand out toward her.
Before he could open his mouth, I beat him to it. “Luna, this is Rich Suave. Rich, this is Luna.”
“Hey, Rich,” she shook his hand, as his eyes flicked to me in irritation.
I had no regrets on this one, there’d been a specific reason why I had wanted to say his name to her. She hadn’t picked it up immediately, but Luna wasn’t a slouch.
The fact his name was Rich Suave, and he looked the way he did would register, and soon.
“Luna,” he rumbled. His voice was deep and would have fit a bear of a man. As it was, he stood two inches taller than my six-foot-four, but I wouldn’t describe him as a bear. More like an Amazon. “It’s a pleasure to meet you finally. I hope you’re feeling better.” When she nodded and smiled at him, his face softened for a moment, and then he focused back on me. I didn’t doubt he knew that I was going to punch his face in if he’d looked at her like that much longer. “So, do you want to get them, or should I?” He jerked his chin in the direction of the door to the warehouse office where the paperwork would be waiting.
“You get them,” I decided, coming up with a backup plan that Luna would love. “I’ve got an idea that’ll make Miss. Priss here happy,” I nodded my head in her direction and tried not to laugh when I heard her huff at the nickname I’d called her.
When she’d first come into our lives, I’d called her Miss. Priss because we all treated her like a princess, and she’d hated it. She was so used to looking after herself and wasn’t a girly girl at all, so it took her a while to accept all the love and attention from my family. That was part of why I’d avoided acknowledging how I really felt about her for so long– she was meant to be protected and loved by us all, and not in that way.
From the sounds of her huff, she still hated that nickname. What she didn’t know was that she would always be my Miss. Priss and I would always treat her like she was fragile and needed protecting from the world.
Shrugging, he said goodbye to us and walked toward the office. Just as he got to the door, Luna gasped and then burst out laughing so hard that I had to hold her to stop her from dropping to the door.
“Holy shit, he’s Rico Suave!”
Rich’s shoulders tensed, and then he slowly turned his head toward us and scowled. He was indeed Rico Suave, seeing as how the word rico was Spanish for ‘rich’.
Shooting him a shit-eating grin, I did my best to move her still laughing body into the car. Once I had her in and had shut the door on her snorting and gasping, I rounded the front of the vehicle and waved at Rich.
“Later, Rico!”
“Eat shit, asshole!” he snapped and then slammed the office door behind him.
He’d been the topic of many jokes, made worse by the fact that when he didn’t have to be in dirty jeans or coveralls, he dressed immaculately. His shirts were pressed, his clothes matched, and his shoes were cleaned to an almost OCD level.
Surprisingly, not many understood the hilarity in his name, but those of us who did liked to spread that knowledge wide.
Then there were the smart ones like Luna who figured it out without any prompting or help – those were the best ones. Especially when they reacted like she had.
Getting in behind the wheel, I started the engine and began to reverse and then turn around so that I could take her to our next location.
She’d stop laughing and breathe deeply, then her breath would start shuddering again and she’d lose the modicum of control she’d had and start laughing again. It was a repetitive cycle for the next ten minutes. I didn’t mind it one bit. One of my biggest worries had been that what she’d been through with her dad would change her personality and that maybe she’d have PTSD, but every day she regained more of her old self and I found it easier to breathe.
The first thing that I did as we got onto the open road was to put my hand back on her thigh, holding it in place like last time. Part of me did it for badness, the other part of me did it just so that I could feel her laughter and not interrupt it. I hadn’t been able to hear her laugh like this in years and it was one of the best things I’d ever heard and felt.
“What were his parents thinking?” she snickered finally.
“When he was born, I don’t think Rico Suave was a thing,” I explained, taking the turn onto the road to where one of her favorite places in the world was.
“Oh shit, can you imagine,”
she started laughing again. “Your name suddenly becoming something like that?” I was laughing as she picked up my cell phone from the cup holder and started typing something into Safari. After a couple of seconds, her breath hitched making me wonder what the hell she was looking at. “Nooo,” she whined.
“What?”
“I forgot– Luna was a Harry Potter character!”
I tried to hold in my reaction, I really did, but I lost control and burst out laughing at the thought of the character in question.
“Hey, that’s cool,” I chuckled. “You can pick out Luna merchandise and you’ve got your name and Harry Potter’s linked together.”
I shouldn’t have laughed for as long as I did, but the sulking that followed this discovery was like kindling for the fire.
“Well, at least I didn’t have an ark,” she snapped. “And, you forgot the damn unicorns, you dick!”
Well, alrighty then!
Thirty minutes later when we pulled in front of Cinnabon, she finally gave up on the silent treatment and squealed.
“Am I forgiven?”
“Only if you get me a unicorn made out of Cinnabon,” she replied, already out of the car and closing the door in her excitement to get to her favorite place.
I doubted that her father had ever gotten her this stuff, especially after he’d done the dip out of town with her like a pussy.
That thought sobered me up and with a sigh, I got out of the car resigning myself to the fact I was going to have to find a way to get her a unicorn made of Cinnabon.
4 Noah
“Okay, what the fuck are you doing?” Levi snarled as he closed my office door behind him.
We’d gotten back an hour ago, and I hadn’t missed the glares he’d been shooting in my direction as Luna had settled herself down with her boxes of Cinnabon and a coffee. He wouldn’t say any of this in front of her though because she looked so happy and relaxed and, like me, he didn’t want to ruin that for her. Plus, she needed to put more weight back on. She’d always had curves on her tiny body, and although she wasn’t looking as emaciated as she initially had been, she still needed to gain more weight. Cinnabon wasn’t the healthiest choice to do that, I was well aware of this, but it made her smile, so I didn’t care.
Now that I was alone in my office and he wouldn’t spoil her cinnamon munching, Levi’s gloves were off.
Steepling my fingers and bringing my hands up so that my chin was resting on them, I gave him a blank look.
“To what are you referring to?”
His eyes narrowed even more than they had been, and he stomped up until he was leaning over my desk.
“Don’t piss me off even more, shit brain,” he snapped. “I know that I told you repeatedly from day one not to touch her. I told all of you not to touch her. So, what was that with the trip to the warehouse? And Rich said y’all looked mighty cozy when he pulled up.”
That betraying bastard. I made a mental note to tell his full name and the Rico Suave association to even more people. In fact, I might get a decal made up for the back of his truck that said, ‘My name is Rico Suave, and I heart Uranus.’
Eh, that was a bit lame. I’d have to ask my cousins for suggestions. They had evil brains that wielded magic of this kind all the time.
“I don’t think I need to explain this to you, but for Luna’s sake, I will,” I measured my words, but spoke slowly to him. Sure, this was to piss him off, but it was also so I didn’t reach out and throttle the little shit. “First, I don’t answer to you. Second, she’s an adult so she can make up her own mind. Third, I never agreed to your Luna law…”
Just as I was gearing up to the rest of my list, he stuck his finger in my face. Most siblings would do what I did then which was to grab hold of it and pull it backward. The squeak that came out of him was mildly satisfying.
“Let go,” he yelled as I twisted his wrist back now too.
“Only if you promise to drop it.”
“Drop what? My hand?”
“No, you prick,” I growled, now twisting his digit back as far as I could get it to go. “Drop the shit with Luna. You know I won’t treat her badly and that I’ll make sure she’s safe, so let that crap go.”
After a second’s hesitation where I made a point of moving like I was going to bend his finger to the point of dislocation, Levi nodded quickly. Unfortunately, I hadn’t banked on him continuing to nod, so as I brought his finger back up again, it met his face that was on the downward movement of his next nod. This meant that his finger got shoved up his left nostril to an alarming depth.
Of course, this would be the moment that Luna decided to come in and ask what we wanted to be done with an email that had just come through.
Luna
Refusing to stop eating my cinnamon heaven, I watched Levi as he made a big show of shoving a tissue up his nostril and dramatically lay back on the couch in the office.
“There was no need for him to take it that far,” he whined.
I believed what Noah had said had happened. Levi had done similar things regularly since I’d known him. Granted, not as bad as his other brother, Tate, but dumb all the same. Because of this, I didn’t even have a second’s hesitation in continuing to enjoy my yummies– words were unnecessary.
“Hey, son, have you seen…” his dad, Jer, broke off with a sigh when he saw the dramatic condition of his son. Rolling his eyes at me, he just continued without even asking what had happened. See, he totally wasn’t a stranger to being a twat! “Have either of you seen Rich?”
I burst out laughing, almost inhaling my mouthful of heaven.
“Rico Suave,” I said hoarsely thanks to the cinna-crumbs that hadn’t joined the rest of the cinnamon bite when I’d stopped their descent into my lungs.
“Enough already,” the man in question snapped as he schmoozed into the room. That was the only way to describe how he walked– schmooze. It was like a smooth, sexy, masculine strut, but in a more gentle and natural way.
“Did your mom know?” I had to ask it, I just had to. No one would be able to not ask what the hell his mother was thinking, regardless of what Noah had said earlier.
“No,” he sighed, looking more exasperated than I’d ever seen anyone look. “She didn’t know. I don’t even think it was a thing when I was born.”
Always the fountain of knowledge, I reeled off the information that I’d found online. It was likely that she hadn’t done it on purpose because technically, our use of Rico Suave and what it meant hadn’t really been popular until around 2008. Before that, it was a South American rapper and weird shit like that. This knowledge just made it even better– it was truly some bad luck. Like your name becoming the slang for herpes or something like that. What were the odds of that happening?
There was a moment of awkward silence during which I continued to eat, and Levi made dramatic snuffling noises through the tissues up his nose. Eventually, it was broken by Jer.
“We need someone to supervise site three, Rich,” he explained. “There have been some issues and the current supervisor doesn’t seem to know whether he’s meant to scratch his watch or wind his ass.”
Rich swore and scratched his chin. “I can’t do it, Jer,” he huffed. “I’m on site two for the same reason for the next two weeks.”
“I can’t do it,” Levi said, sounding like a man with a cold. That totally over the top nasal voice like their nostrils and sinuses are backed up to their rectums. “I have to look after Luna.”
“I’m not a baby,” I snapped. “I can even shower and go potty all by my own self!” I made sure to say the last bit in a toddler voice, totally adding in a good measure of sarcasm. This wasn’t missed by Levi who narrowed his eyes at me (around the Kleenex).
“I’ll look after her,” Noah said from the doorway, making us all jump, apart from Rich. Yup, we were awesome at being aware of our surroundings. It was even more ironic considering that Levi had just been saying he had to look after me.
“I’m not
sure…” Levi started but was soon cut off by his dad.
“Great, so that’s sorted. Luna, you’ll move into Noah’s and Levi will head to site three.”
“I need a word with Noah,” Levi said, sounding pissed and glaring at his brother. I was too busy trying to swallow around the Cinnabon that had stuck in my throat at his dad’s announcement to think anything of it.
Seeing my predicament, Jer gently pulled me out of my chair and led me in the direction of the kitchen, closing the door behind him. At least, I assume it was because of my predicament that he did this. It could also have been to give his sons some privacy for whatever their problem was.
“Let’s go get a drink,” he suggested.
In all honesty, I wasn’t sure that the drink would do me any good. I was pretty certain I was a second away from dying.
Almost as if he could read my mind, he added, “You’re still getting some oxygen around it, so you’re okay. And, I took one of those first aid courses, so if it gets worse, I’ll just do the squeezing thing and you’ll be fine.”
The squeezing thing? Holy shit, I was gonna die. I’d survived my dad’s bullshit, only to become the victim of cinnamon roll consumption.
What were the chances?
Probably the same as being called Rico Suave.
Or Clark Kent.
Or Harry Potter.
Or Percy Jackson.
Or Christian Grey.
Or Juan King.
Either way, it was just downright bad luck because from the day it got attention everyone would reply with, “No way!”
And now I’d be known as the Luna who died eating a cinnamon treat.
I’d rather be one of the other guys, at least they got a movie!
5 Noah
As soon as the door closed behind Dad and Luna, I braced myself for Levi’s new inquisition.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he growled, pulling the Kleenex out of his nostrils and throwing them in the trash. “Didn’t we just finish talking about this?”
Until Fools Find Gold: A Providence Gold Series and Until Series Crossover Page 4