Tainted Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Three

by Moore, Mary B.

  That was the year we hadn’t all gone with them because of a new site being opened in the company, and we’d walked in the next morning to posters of my smiling parents covered head to crotch in body paint, boobs and moobs everywhere. I don’t think any of us had recovered from it. To make it worse, they’d had a copy printed on a massive canvas which was now hanging in the hallway on the top floor of my parent’s house.

  “Your family are awesome,” Beau mused, obviously thinking of the photo. It had also featured on the front page of our newspaper here, so few people had missed it, even the ones who didn’t have the internet.

  Mental bleach hadn’t been invented, trust me we’d all searched high and low for it, including calling up some laboratories. So, I deflected and asked the question I really wanted the answer to after last night. “You think the same about Rich?”

  As in Rich Suave, aka Rico Suave, our right-hand man and one of the weirdest guys I’ve ever met in my life. He was a Gonzales County native but hadn’t gone to the same school as us, so I hadn’t really known the guy until he started working for Townsend Oil. Now he was a part of the family, and I lived to fuck shit up for him. Not nastily, but like accidentally messing up his perfect appearance, kicking up dust as I walked past him, putting a cap on his head to mess his hair up… it was an obsession. He did the same to me, although he swears he doesn’t, but when chocolate pudding ends up splattered across the ass of your jeans when no one else was around at the time? Yeah, didn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

  All the humor dropped from her face, and in its place was nothing but ice. “We don’t discuss him.”

  Not one thing in her tone, appearance or her words invited me to ask the next question, but I was a glutton for punishment. “Why?”

  “Maybe ask him?”

  I’d definitely be doing that.

  I was a little shit, I really wanted to know, and if I hadn’t seen a flash of hurt, I would have pressed harder for the details, but that hurt was like a smack around the head for me, so I reeled my curiosity in.

  “There are more home prediction tests,” I gestured to my phone. “There’s garlic…”

  “Pass,” she gagged. “And I know Lily’ll pass, too.”

  “A ring on a string being dangled over her belly?”

  Both of us looked over at the bedroom door and then back at each other. “She might worry if she wakes up and both of us are standing over her with a ring on a string. Like a voodoo version of Gollum.”

  “Fair point,” I hummed and looked back at the screen. “Luna did baking soda in her pee, that’s a lie. Oh, but here’s a Chinese version of the Mayan one.”

  Sitting down on the couch, I looked through the instructions and hit the link to take me to where to do the test.

  “What do you need?” Beau asked, reading the screen over my shoulder.

  “Holy shit, this one is weird,” I muttered. “I’ve got to find out her Chinese age.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  Hitting the next link, I read the screen and sighed. “Why must everything be so complicated?”

  Snatching the phone out of my hand, Beau did something and then looked at me. “There was an easier link. The answer is twenty-three. Now all we have to do is calculate the Chinese month of conception. You’ll have to do that one because it looks like you have to put in the date that y’all did the horizontal hula.”

  Like I’d ever forget that one.

  “May seventh.”

  Putting it in, we waited for the results. “Huh, what was I doing on the seventh? It’s weird to think you guys were bumping uglies, and I was probably washing my hair or something,” she chuckled and then picked up her own phone and opened up the calendar on it. “Oh, shit, no, uh that was a bad day for me.”

  If it hadn’t been for how red her face went, I wouldn’t have paid it any more attention, but I just had to. “Why?” And then I felt it pertinent to point out, “And if you say no reason, then be warned I’m just going to keep on asking.”

  Glancing quickly at me, she looked the other way. “I had a bikini wax done, and it hurt, so I was up most of the night putting ice packs on it.”

  “On what?” I was back to being engrossed in the screen on my phone because we had the results for the Chinese month, and even though I was interested in Beau’s answer, I was about to find out what result the Chinese gave for the gender of my kid.

  “You know – where they waxed.”

  Going through the pink and blue squares on the chart and making sure I was on the right line for both of the details that had been calculated, I still didn’t get what she was talking about. “You got your bikini waxed? Does ice get it out?”

  “No, dick face. I had to put ice on my vagina because it was red and sore after they tore the skin off it with hot wax, okay?”

  “Sounds fun,” I muttered, still distracted. Then I saw the square that my results ended up on. “Boy!”

  “No, it was a woman, but I don’t think she’d ever used the wax on her own cooch,” Beau mumbled, sounding distracted herself. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her finger moving on the screen of her phone before she switched it off and shoving it down the side of the couch. “Asshole.”

  I wanted to answer, I really did, but this was the second result that said it was going to be a boy. What were the odds of the Chinese and Mayans agreeing on the sex of the baby? What were the odds that both were wrong? The last question was an easy answer – fifty-fifty – but the first question seemed a better one to ask.

  “It’s a boy!”

  “Again?” Beau asked, getting up and screaming. “Oh my God, I’m gonna be the best aunt ever. Ok, I need to start buying shit. What do boys like? What do they need?” she asked quickly, pacing back and forth.

  That’s when a tornado hit, tornado Lily. “The bunny was just about to run and cuddle the kitten who was eating cake,” she screeched as she stumbled into the living room, and then leaned into the wall with her eyes shut. “Now, he has to wait for the next bus, and it ran out of glitter,” she mumbled as she stumbled back to her bedroom and slammed the door.

  “She’s a heavy sleeper,” Beau explained, taking in my open mouth and the fact I probably hadn’t even blinked since the first word was screeched at us.

  “You think?”

  “She sleepwalks,” she shrugged, and then added, “and talks.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Snorting, she reached down the side of the couch and fished her phone out of the little gap between the cushions and arm rest. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Damn right I would. Getting up, I put Lily’s bag on the side table, making sure everything was back inside it, grinning at the cherry Chapstick tube again. “I don’t think it’ll take me long.”

  That was an understatement. I didn’t have an issue with her sleepwalking, in fact it was kind of cute now that I thought about it. I knew from my brother and cousins some people just knew when they met someone that it was meant to be, and although I wasn’t at the stage of declaring my undying love or asking her to marry me, I had a feeling that in time it would happen.

  I was just about to close it up altogether, when I saw a Ziploc bag with a bunch of white sticks in it. Lifting it out, I looked closer and saw crosses, lines and smiley faces on all of them. I was about to ask Beau what they were when I saw one at the bottom with the word ‘pregnant’ on it.

  “That’s a lot of piss sticks,” she commented behind me. “How many does it take a bitch to accept she’s carrying a kid in her belly that’s gonna tear her cooter in half in nine months?”

  I didn’t want to count how many were in the bag, but the answer was apparently – a lot of them.

  Laying the bag down on the table and moving the tests inside the bag so that I didn’t get pee on my hands, I got my phone out and snapped a couple of photos. I wanted to have memories of everything for the pregnancy. Videos, photos, casts of her belly, scans – you name it, I wanted it al
l.

  Moving toward her room, I stopped mid-step when Beau called my name, and turning around to face her, I raised an eyebrow. “Why are you being so cool about the baby?”

  “Uh…”

  “I don’t mean that in an asshole way. I mean – a lot of guys would call her a liar, running for the hills or demanding a DNA test before they got involved. Why are you being so cool?”

  She had a point, but at the same time, I’d had a lot of time to think about this while I was waiting to be released from the cell last night.

  “Lily’s from good people,” I explained, and tried to figure out how to word it properly as I walked back over to the couch and sat down. It wasn’t easy for men to verbalize shit like this because we either looked like a pussy or we looked like a dick. “She’s also a good person who goes out of her way to help everyone.” When Beau just stared at me, I continued, “I noticed her not long after she moved here, it was the first time I’d seen her and she kinda just stuck in my mind.”

  “Stuck in your mind?” Beau drawled, raising her eyebrow. Shit, Mom did that all the time, and I knew exactly what it meant – you’re full of shit.

  “Okay, my cousins and my brother have found someone, right?” I asked, hoping she had heard the stories, and that I didn’t have to repeat them all. It took a lot of freakin’ time to explain the Townsend family as it was, adding in wives and kids was like reading out Santa’s naughty list. I breathed a sigh of relief when she nodded. “So, their women are the Ying to their Yang’s, they suit each other perfectly and there’s a connection there that just makes you hope and pray that you find it yourself one day, even if you don’t want it at that moment in time. You also might be praying that you find it, but sometimes you don’t actually want it – does that make sense?”

  “Kind of,” she hedged, cocking her head and thinking it over. I’m glad she was making sense of it because this shit was like a riddle to explain. “I once wanted these pants that I saw online, so I ordered them thinking I’d look the shit. I looked like five pigs being stuffed into one sausage skin.”

  What the fuck?

  “Um…”

  “Meaning, sometimes what you look at having in life, isn’t always what you’re going to get. On that occasion, I spent ten bucks on a pair that I gave to Goodwill, and then went and spent eighty bucks on a pair, and they were perfect.”

  “Are we comparing Lily to pigs, sausage skins or your pants?” I asked slowly, struggling to keep up with where she was going with this.

  “All of it,” she shrugged. “Life before it for you was the cheap pants that took six weeks to arrive from China and made me look like I needed to lose a hundred pounds, when I only really need to lose like ninety-five. I settled for the promise of something thinking it was right for me. Then, I realized it wasn’t, and I went for the more expensive pair that were perfect for me.”

  Finally, someone who made me look sane!

  “If you say so,” I drawled, giving her the head nod that my family gave me all the time. Damn it felt good to do it to someone else.

  “You may continue!”

  “Obliged,” I snorted, leaning my back against the armrest of the couch now.

  In a way, it felt good to get all this shit out in the open. I could have approached one of the family, but at the same time, I couldn’t. We were a close bunch, but that closeness worked against us too because we had a lot of ammo against each other – something which we used all the time. These feelings were new to me and made me feel vulnerable, so I was reluctant to share them for now. Beau was close to Lily, so she would understand, hopefully.

  “Because I didn’t know Lily, I didn’t miss or appreciate the feelings that someone could bring, so I didn’t miss them, but I still wanted them. Then she walked into the bar, and it was like…” Shit, what was it like?

  “Like finding a pair of pants that fit like a dream and make your ass look like two buns in a hankie?”

  I said, “Exactly,” but inside my head I was looking at her like she was crazy and saying, ‘not quite’. “We were only in there for one drink, but I picked up on her mannerisms, her sense of humor, her eye color, everything. And, since then, she’s been stuck in my mind.”

  “But then she got together with the douche,” she guessed.

  “Yeah, she got together with the douche,” I hissed, shaking my head. I hated that asshole for so many reasons. “I still don’t get how he could cheat on her with Carly…”

  It was like going from champagne to sewage.

  “She wouldn’t put out,” Beau said simply. “In fact, the only reason she went on the dates with him was because he’d turn up at The Bar and either make a scene or make it impossible for her to say no. Did you know his reason for sticking it in Carly was because he never saw her after her dad had his heart attack?”

  Nodding, I ran my hand through my hair and tried not to show how happy I was about it all. That lasted all of five seconds. “I hate that she went through it, but I can’t lie and say I’m not happy as hell that it played out the way it did.”

  “No shit!” she chuckled.

  “Anyway, while I was away with my cousins, a friend of theirs almost lost his woman and his kid. I already knew Lily was special to me, but seeing how devastated he was, I realized that if I was in his shoes, I’d be the same way. Lily is different, she’s my someone special. I’ve had a handful of conversations with her, spent one night with her, and she’s carrying my baby now. But even though we’re doing it ass backwards and we haven’t had a chance to really get to properly know each other – I know she’s my special one.” When she just looked at me, I pressed, “Haven’t you ever met someone you know is special, and who you can’t get out of your mind? I’m not talking like as a crush, but someone who strikes you deeper inside.”

  For a second it looked like she was going to say yes, but then her face fell and went blank. “No.”

  Oh, Senor Suave, you’ve got a tale to tell me at some point!

  “Shame, it’s life changing.”

  Refusing to bend even with that, she pointed out, “You still haven’t told me why you’re so certain it’s yours. Like I said, in this day and age, a lot of men would call bullshit and demand a DNA test.”

  The answer to this was so simple to me. “Because she’s Lily. Like I said, I’ve noticed her, I’ve seen how she acts, and I’ve only just touched upon who she is as a person. But even with that, I know the baby’s mine. She’s not the type to go around doing what we did, and I felt like shit while I was away in case she felt guilty for doing it, or if she felt like I considered her less than the awesome she is. I feel like I need to make that up to her, because at no point did I look at her as a one-night stand.”

  “Good, because I’d kill you,” Beau told me straight faced. I didn’t doubt it for a second.

  “I know we need to get to know each other, and I know we need to take this slowly, but I also know that she’s different and special. I thought about the baby while I was in jail tonight…”

  “Maybe leave that out of the stories you tell your grandkids,” Beau suggested.

  “I tried to look at it from the point of view of – how do I know it’s mine? But not once did it make sense to me or even strike me as possible.” Unable to hold her eyes when I said the next bit, I focused on the hole in the knee of my jeans from the fight in the bar and started pulling at the threads. “I know people look at me as a joke, like I walk around with my head up my ass, but I don’t. In high school, my best friend had depression and tried to commit suicide. It wasn’t until I found him unresponsive in his bedroom that any of us, even his family, knew he had a problem. When they got him to hospital, they cut his clothes off, and he had deep cuts all over his legs and scars everywhere.”

  “Holy shit,” Beau whispered, shifting slightly, but I still couldn’t look up to see what she was doing.

  “He always went around with a big smile on his face and was the joker in our group, so none of us saw the signs.
During it, I started to think about shit like what problems I had, and I rationalized every single one that I had at the time, and not one of them was worth cutting myself or ending life for. I still do it, every damned day. Is this that big of a deal? No. Do I feel I have no way out? No. Would I be better off dead? Hell, no. I also got to see the effect it had on his family, the self-blame, the devastation, all of it, and I never wanted my family to have that.” I could still see it clearly in my head, his mom sobbing into her husband’s chest and blaming herself for not making him tell her every single problem that he had. “When I went home after it, my parents asked me if I’d ever felt like I didn’t want to be alive anymore, and for a moment I saw them in his parent’s shoes, blaming themselves for not doing more for me. I said no, and made a promise to myself that I’d never give them a reason to worry about me – well, in that way,” I added, wincing at what I’d put them through not just tonight, but over the years.

  Beau burst out laughing. “How did they take you getting arrested? They looked ok about it.”

  “Eh, they understood. They weren’t happy obviously, but they understood it. Plus, they found out they were going to be grandparents again, so they were onboard with that. We almost lost my grandpa six weeks ago, and I think it put life into perspective for them, so they’ve started to rationalize the weight and severity of things that happen, too.”

  “I was relieved to hear your grandpa was ok,” Beau murmured. “I’ve met him a couple of times when he’s been here and he’s a great guy.”

  Nodding my head, I didn’t voice what I really felt about it. Hearing the news about him had been like someone had sucked all the oxygen out of the world at the same time as tearing my heart out of my chest. My grandparents were my idols, they always had been, and although I knew life had an expiry date, I also knew that Hurst and Linda Townsend’s were decades away from theirs – something which I’d taken entirely for granted. Almost losing him had hit me hard, and if I’d stayed still after he’d collapsed and we’d found out how sick he was, I would have shattered – which took me back to the promise I’d made myself after Matt’s attempt at suicide in high school. If I’d shattered, would I ever have contemplated ending it all and putting my parents through what Matt’s had gone through? And at a time when they were going through hell at the prospect of losing Gramps? I didn’t want to even think like that, so I’d gone with Adam to find Scarlett and Tuck, and I hadn’t stopped the whole time.