Tainted Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Three

by Moore, Mary B.

  “No, but putting Flunitrazepamin someone’s drink is,” Levi said, sounding pissed off.

  Beau shot me a confused look and subtly pulled her phone out, most likely to search for it. If she could figure out how to spell it, she was a genius – something which I had to accept she was when she looked up at me with wide eyes.

  “What? What’s that?” Carly asked, her hand shooting up to cover the front of her throat. Behind her, Chris shifted on his stool under the weight of Archer’s hand still, shooting a glance at me every so often.

  “Flunitrazepam,” Beau spoke up, clearing her throat. “Also known as Rohypnol, a date rape drug. If used in excess, it can impair balance and speech, and is commonly used in suicide. If used in pregnancy…” she broke off and took in a sharp breath, “it can cause Hypotonia, or floppy baby syndrome.” She’d just gotten the final words out when she took a step forward and grabbed Carly by the hair, pulling her toward her. “So help me God, if you’ve drugged her…”

  “She hasn’t,” Tate growled, not moving a muscle to help the woman. “Have you?”

  “No, no, I wouldn’t do that,” she squealed as Beau gave her hair a savage tug. “I swear. You were the only one who was meant to drink it,” she screeched, pulling her hair away from Beau and pointing at…

  Archer?

  Even the Townsends looked shocked at this. We’d all been looking at Tate expectantly, but when we’d realized she was pointing behind him at his brother, it took a minute for our brains to catch up.

  It was mine that got their first though. “Bitch, are you out of your mind?”

  No sooner had the last word come out of my mouth, Archer asked the question we were all wanting the answer to – well, aside from mine, because seriously! “Me?”

  “Yeah, you. I’ve been trying to get you to notice me for years. In high school you even sat in front of me, and where did that get me?”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah,” she sneered, which seemed to be an unfortunate go to expression for her. “I did. Then, I dated your best friend – nothing. Picked up another friend – nothing. I kept trying and trying, even going for your brothers – nothing. Oh, but every other bitch would do, wouldn’t they? Bonnie, seriously?”

  The surprise left Archer’s face in the blink of an eye, and it was replaced by a look that would have melted all of the ice in the machine behind me in seconds. “What did you do to Bonnie?”

  Her screeching laugh was forced as she threw her head back. “She was there too, don’t you remember?”

  Taking a step toward her, he repeated, “What did you do to Bonnie?”

  With a satisfied smile, she held her hands up beside her and shrugged. “Nothing, but bitch couldn’t hold her alcohol. Maybe something was off with the tequila?”

  “Something’s off with your brain, more like,” Levi mumbled, shaking his head in disgust.

  Madix Blue, Noah’s brother-in-law, appeared beside Carly just then, scaring the shit out of her. They say it’s the tall ones who manage to go unnoticed – actually, no they didn’t. I just made that shit up because I hadn’t seen him standing there and he was six-foot-eight so it was embarrassing to have missed him.

  “That’s my wife’s best friend,” he told her coolly. “Which means she’s a member of my family. Now, I’m going to call her while you stand here, and if she doesn’t answer, or she even sounds like she’s stubbed a toe…” he didn’t need to finish the threat.

  Hell, even my ass clenched, and I hadn’t done anything!

  As Madix dialed the number and held the phone to his ear, his eyes not leaving Carly the whole time, Tate left the group and walked around the bar to stand beside me. “You ok, baby?” he whispered in my ear, giving my stomach a gentle rub. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Chris watching, mouth pinching when I leaned into him and nodded.

  If I was honest, this was freaking stressful, I needed to pee (shocker), my feet were feeling hot, my ankles were stiff, and my vagina hurt like a mother. Not that I’d say any of that out loud though. Tate and I had shared a lot, but we weren’t at the stage where I could comfortably discuss my bladder and sore vagina. Sure, he knew it happened, just like he had to know at some point during the day I pooped and peed, and vice versa, but it was done secretly – like farting, which FYI pregnancy made you do more of too.

  “How did you find out she roofied you?”

  “Shit wasn’t adding up, so we went back to the bar on Sunday and Levi did some dumpster diving and found one of the bottles. We got lucky that there was still some tequila left in it for them to test, apparently.”

  Watching as Madix murmured into the phone, his eyes going more glacial with whatever he heard, I chanced a glance at Carly who kept turning around to look at Archer.

  “He doesn’t have any rabbits, does he?” I murmured to Tate, nodding my head in his brother’s direction.

  “Hm? No, not that I know of,” he replied distractedly, half listening to me, and half listening to whatever Madix was saying.

  “Might wanna let him know never to get one.”

  “Well,” Madix said raising his voice slightly and getting all of our attentions on him. “Seems she had to have her stomach pumped.”

  I wasn’t an evil mastermind, I just wouldn’t have it in me to do anything that necessitated being one, but if I’d been in Carly’s shoes, I’d have been grasping onto any excuse and bullshittery that I could.

  Not her though.

  “Is that it?” she asked pouting – freaking pouting! “The guy said she could go into a coma if I gave her enough, and it was in every cocktail. Add on the tequila shots…” the last bit was said more to herself than anything.

  How anyone could act like someone not going into a coma and needing their stomach pumped was an inconvenience to them, I’ll never know – yet, there she fucking was, sulking over it.

  “Is she ok?” Archer’s gruff voice asked as he stepped forward, forgetting Chris now.

  “We’ll talk later,” Madix replied, not taking his eyes off her.

  “Maybe we didn’t give her enough?” Carly muttered to herself. “I mean, he said to use the whole bottle, but I split it between the two bottles of tequila, and then there were her cocktails…”

  That’s when all hell broke loose and snapped her out of it as two of our police pushed through from where they’d been standing behind the Townsend wall. As they notified her that she was under arrest and what for, she screeched and jumped at Archer, “No!”

  In a movie, it would play out that a superhero swooped in and wrapped her up in their superpower, or a hidden cop would catch her, or maybe even a bomb would go off (thank God it didn’t). In reality, she tripped over Chris’s foot, losing her footing, and landing face down on the wooden floor.

  Face. Down. On. The. Hard. Wooden. Floor.

  There was a sickening crunch that had me tossing my cookies in the sink behind the bar (totally unsanitary, but I had no warning and made the most of what I had available), and all the men holding their hands up to their mouths.

  “Damn!”

  “Oh, shit!”

  “Fuck me, I’m going to be sick!”

  “Well, hell! I wanted to do that.” This came from Beau, the blood thirsty witch.

  “Now, how the shit am I going to get that out the wood? I’m going to have to call Stu to come and sand it down, then get the whole area re-varnished!” Came my dad’s voice out of nowhere. “Anyone want to tell me why I’m having to do this, by the way?”

  Fourteen

  Tate

  It was after all of the drama, after we’d cleaned the blood out of the wood (although Lily’s dad was right and he was definitely going to have to get the floor redone), after I’d helped Lily get her puke out of her hair, after Carly had been arrested and taken to hospital… it was after everything, and now I was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking it all over.

  During the drama, Chris had managed to walk away. No one had seen him after Carly’s fa
ce had met the floor, and he wasn’t at home or answering his phone. Even though the police had told us they didn’t want him in connection with anything, I still didn’t trust him.

  I still had so many questions, and zero answers. The questions for Carly hadn’t even been answered, seeing as how she’d had to be taken into surgery to fix her nose and her teeth.

  “I can hear you thinking,” Lily murmured drowsily, her hand coming up to stroke my new tattoo.

  For years I’d mulled over what I was going to have tattooed on me, and where. I’d meticulously planned it all out from a young age. On the ribs on my right were my family’s signatures, not all of them like my cousins, but my parents, siblings and my grandparents. If I’d gotten the whole family, I’d be covered head to toe. Underneath them was the original logo for Townsend Oil Company. It was an old-fashioned drilling rig, with a T over it. Hardly inventive, but back when my family first started drilling for oil, it was all that had been needed. I loved it and was proud of where it had all begun. I was planning to have the baby’s foot and hand prints tattooed on the ribs on my right-hand side too and had already told my guy I’d be doing it as soon as he was born. Tanner was ready and would fit me in whenever I wanted, so that was all sorted.

  “I want mine on you too,” Lily told me, rubbing the tip of her finger over the names to show what she meant.

  What she didn’t know was that I already had that booked – tomorrow.

  “You already have a spot.”

  Lifting her head up, she looked at me in confusion. “Huh?”

  Moving so that I was helping to support her weight with my free hand in case she got tired, I used my other one to pick up the hand that was resting on my stomach, and moved it over the tattoos she’d just been talking about.

  “This side was for my family. I’m going to get their kid’s names added a little further behind it, here.” I moved her hand to the back of my ribs to show her before moving it to the side that had nothing on it yet. “Here is where our son’s hand and foot prints are going to go, along with his name, weight, time and date of birth.” She was looking at the areas as I pointed them out, but I never stopped watching her the whole time. How someone as beautiful as her could be with someone like me, I’ll never know, but fuck me if I didn’t thank all that was Holy every day. “This spot right here,” I moved her hand over where I figured my heart was, but hell if I knew – I’d only just passed biology, “is yours.”

  Her eyes shot up to mine, and I saw the tears building in them. Damn I hoped they were happy ones.

  “Mine?”

  Nodding my head, I lifted up a hand to catch a tear that escaped with my thumb. “Yours. Dean is doing it tomorrow.”

  Her lower lip started to tremble hearing this, but I didn’t expect what she said next. “Please tell me he isn’t the one who did your tattoo backwards? I mean, I love that you’re getting it done, but it’s really confusing, you know? Does he do normal tattoos too?” she was sobbing by the end, and I wasn’t sure if that was because it meant something to her, or if it was because she was worried about me having another back-to-front tattoo done.

  Bursting out laughing, I caught her up in both arms and lifted her up my body. Her bump seemed to have doubled in size since this morning so it was a struggle to find a position that didn’t rest all her weight on it, but we got there in the end – after about five minutes of adjustments.

  “Yeah, baby, he does normal tattoos. He’ll also be sober and not feeling the effects of tequila with drugs in it.” How he’d tattooed with that shit in his system confused me, but he’d done tattoos on seven of us that night, including Dad and Gramps.

  Thinking about Gramps took the humor out of the situation for me. His heart attack had scared us all, but it had also reminded us that he wouldn’t be around forever. A world without Hurst Townsend in it just didn’t seem doable. Even now he was a big presence, and a vital part of us. When we’d seen him in the hospital, Parker shocking him with the paddles and trying to save him… a piece of us all had died that day. It wasn’t meant dramatically either – it really had. You go through life thinking you had an infinite length of time ahead of you, but you really didn’t. No one lived forever, and this had shown us that. So, the naïve part of us that took it for granted had died, and now it felt like we were all sitting on the edge of our seats just waiting for that call.

  Fuck, but I hoped that call never came.

  Lifting my hand, I rubbed over the area with his signature and took a deep breath in. Dad had phoned Gramps to see if he’d had any tequila with us, but thankfully he hadn’t. He was on medication and still recovering, so he’d had one beer that had lasted the whole night, and that was it. This was amusing though because it meant he’d had a tattoo done by a drunk guy when he was sober. Only Hurst Townsend!

  It had also made me question why he didn’t figure out that someone had drugged us. Dad had asked him the same question, and apparently we’d all just acted like we were drunk, so he’d assumed by the bottle that it was some modern over-proof tequila or something. Finding out the truth, he’d felt like shit.

  “Hey,” Lily called, pulling me out of my depressing thoughts. “You ok?”

  “Yeah, just thinking about Gramps.” When her face fell, knowing from going through it with her dad what it felt like, I added, “Plus I need your signature, date of birth, and blood group by tomorrow.”

  Her eyebrows pinched together as she cocked her head. “Why do you need all of that?”

  “Because I want all of you on me,” I murmured, flipping us so she was underneath me on the bed now. “If I could have all of you around me all the time,” I punched my hips forward, grinding my cock that was waking up realizing his favorite buddy was this close to him into her. “I would. But I can’t, so I’m going to do the next best thing.” Then a thought hit me, “Unless you’d be ok with me handcuffing you to me? That way…”

  She burst out laughing at the suggestion (I’m not sure why). Every time the muscles tensed in her stomach, her pelvis would shift against me, making me harder until I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  She was only wearing another one of my t-shirts, so I scooted down her body, making sure to stop and rub my chin over her pussy.

  “Tate,” she choked, still laughing slightly, “what are you doing?”

  Pushing the t-shirt up, I went searching for what I wanted that had been rudely hiding from me. When I found it, I didn’t think the words were necessary, but I said them anyway. “I want you on me.”

  She could make of that what she wanted, I knew what I meant. Running my hands up her thighs, I closed my eyes for a second and just absorbed how soft her skin was. Everything about Lily was different and special, even the feel of her skin. When you think how often we tap someone on the hand, shake hands, hold someone’s hand or even brush against them, you rarely remember how their skin felt. With Lily, it was like it had been tattooed into my head – this time the right way around.

  “What are you thinking?” her husky voice broke me out of my skin musings.

  It seemed like I was always in a strange place when things about her struck me, but it was what it was. That said, I wasn’t going to voice what I’d been thinking, mainly because it reminded me slightly of Silence of the Lambs, and I didn’t mean it to.

  Instead, I said the first thing I could think of.

  “I can hear Chewy and Ozzy trying to get out of the kitchen.” It wasn’t a lie per se, I could and for a second I’d thought about how I already had to repaint the door to that room because of them. Not that I cared, I truly didn’t, because they were part of us.

  Proving that she knew me already though, she snickered. “Liar!”

  Grinning up her body at her, I went back to what I was doing, giving it all of my attention now. I knew she loved the feeling of my beard on her, she’d told me enough times, so I skimmed it over the top of her left thigh, watching when the goose bumps popped up on it.

  Trailing down to her pussy, I k
ept my focus on what I was going to do even when she groaned and tried to shift. I couldn’t see past her bump from my position, and that just made it better because she couldn’t see what I was going to do either. Maybe she could expect things, but she wouldn’t know until I did it – and I freakin’ loved that.

  Moving my hands to either side, I pressed down with my thumbs and pulled her lips apart slowly. Leaning in slightly, I flicked just the tip of my tongue over her clit, making sure it was just a tiny tap – knowing it would drive her crazy.

  “Tate, I don’t think you understand how horny being pregnant makes a woman,” she growled, trying to adjust her position trying to make contact with me. “The hormones drive you insane. In fact, I thought about your dick for a whole hour today.”

  I’d thought about her pussy all day today, so I had her beat. And the raging erection I was grinding into the bed was proof of that.

  “What did you think about when you were doing that?” I asked, intrigued by what she’d tell me.

  Please let it be something X-rated and not something clinical.

  Not missing a beat, I leaned in as soon as I said the last word, and used my tongue to draw out the question mark around her clit, making sure never to touch the sensitive nub directly.

  Groaning, she gave in and outlined it for me. “I thought about how it feels like silk when I hold it in my hand.”

  I rewarded her by inserting my right thumb into her, slowly moving it in and out.

  “I thought about how my fingers don’t meet when I do that.”

  Her next reward was my thumb lifting and putting pressure on her upper wall at the same time as the pad, rough from years of work because that’s how we were raised, focused on that special spot inside her. How the rumor that men couldn’t find it began was beyond me. It was rough, it was raised, it was right there, so I rubbed a bit harder over it.

  “Keep going,” I urged, leaning my face closer, so she felt my lips skimming her sex.