Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

“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?”FourteenTateIt 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 face 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.