Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

Chuckling, he reached in and pulled my keys out of the ignition, before slamming the door shut and locking my car. “Nope, I was put on this earth to rescue you from a car that you killed, before the clouds heading our way burst open and drown you.”

“That’s a slight exaggeration,” I mumbled, following him into his car.

I might have started this all off by trying to play a game, but I’d had enough of men today, I’d had enough of rules today, I’d had enough of breaking the rules today… I’d just had enough. I needed to get to work so Dad didn’t panic and make himself sick, I had a lot to do at work, and even though I’d been a dick pretending I didn’t know him, I knew full well who Tate Townsend was, as well as the other members of his family. I might not have spent a lot of one-on-one time with him past quickly serving him on a busy night, but I still knew him and my dad liked his family. So, I was gonna blow one last rule to hell and back – never get in a stranger’s vehicle. Although, it wasn’t quite a stranger’s vehicle I was getting into, I guess.

Once we’d set off and my car was a speck in the distance, he asked the question I’d been dreading.

“So, wanna tell me how your car came to have a crater in the bottom of it?”

“Not really,” I mumbled, looking out the window so that he didn’t see me blushing.

‘Apparently not’ really wasn’t an answer a Townsend accepted, and I found this out when he asked me every thirty seconds until I exploded and told him the whole story – including what happened with my ‘ex’.

Tate“Just the tip?” I wheezed, still laughing over that part from the story about her ex-boyfriend.

“Yup, and that she looked just like me when we were complete opposites,” she repeated, making me laugh even harder.

It had been over an hour since I’d dropped her off at her family’s establishment, The Bar, and had been well over that since she’d recounted the tale of how she’d decided to break the rules and about her ex. Yet, here I was, still laughing about his desperate excuse, sitting on a stool at the bar drinking a beer with her.

The first time I’d laughed about it, I’d been worried that she was still upset by it all and that my laughing might upset her more, which wasn’t my goal. It was just so absurd that I couldn’t help it. But, she’d burst out laughing too, so I’d let rip freely. Even now she was grinning at me as I chuckled and wiped my eyes.

I came from a big family full of dumbasses, but even I had to admit saying that was one of the dumbest excuses I’d ever heard. And to follow it by trying to say she looked just like Lily when she hadn’t? Hearing the first excuse, you knew he was stupid AF. Hearing the second excuse? Guy needed a psych eval stat.

I was relieved we were at this stage though. Both of us pretending like we didn’t know each other when we clearly did had been a pain in the ass, but for some reason she wanted to play it that way, so I’d gone along with it when I’d seen her do her best to look like she didn’t recognize me.

The truth was, I’d been jonesing for Lilith James for a long time. As a thank you to her car for dying, I’d even text Dahlia to tell her to treat it to the works and have it detailed until it glowed in the dark.

“Y’all still talking about the douche?” the manager, who I knew was called Annie, asked as she walked past with a couple of empties in her hands. If memory served me right, she’d been in the same grade as my brother Noah, which would make her twenty-five to twenty-two years of age. Lily had said earlier that she’d graduated four years ago, so that would make her roughly the same age as me. Funny how these things worked out…

“Would anyone laugh this hard if we weren’t?” I replied, laughing but deadly serious at the same time.

“Unlikely,” she muttered, throwing the bottles into the huge bin on wheels behind the bar. “Just to say though, his car just pulled up in front.”

It was like someone had flipped a switch in Lily as she went from laughing and relaxed to tense and pissed in the blink of an eye. Pivoting slowly on my stool, I turned to face the door and waited.

That’s when one of the biggest douches in the history of douches walked through the door, and I knew this not just because of what he’d done to Lily and the fact he’d always been a douche, but because of what he’d done to my sister Ariana.