Mad Gold (Providence Gold 2)

“I’m sorry,” she croaked. “I thought you were ignoring me after we’d had sex.”

I could understand that, but I needed to know exactly why because with Dahlia, there could be many reasons and I needed to know what I was dealing with. “Why?”

“I didn’t hear from you and you disappeared,” she whispered, gnawing on her lower lip and lowering her eyes to look at my neck. “I called you a maggot dick too.”

If that’s what she’d called me when she’d been thinking I’d done that, it didn’t bode well for any future arguments, because even through the exhaustion and confusion I found that funny as fuck. I knew from my arguments with Luna that laughing in an angry woman’s face had disastrous consequences though, so I kept that inside.

There were so many moments in life when you had to rationalize things to pick the best emotion to go with. Because I cared about her as much as I did, I didn’t want to say something that could be inflammatory to the situation. If I’d been in her shoes, the hurt would still be there, and I hated the thought of Dahlia hurting because of me.

“Why would you think I’d do that to you?” I asked softly. “I know that the situation could make anyone feel that way, but do you not trust me normally?” I kept my voice in the same even tone throughout. I wasn’t even sure that the question made sense, but I was just so damn tired that it was the only way I could word it.

Still nibbling her lower lip and avoiding eye contact, she reached out to my t-shirt and started playing with one of the folds in the material where it had bunched up when I’d sat down. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s more that I’ve had shitty luck in the past, and when I didn’t hear from you I was hurt and thought the same thing was happening again.”

When she explained about her high school boyfriend dumping her because of the fountain and her other ex dumping her after their first time together, it made sense. It pissed me off that they had treated her that way, but I could understand why it would make her assume that I’d done the same thing.

Choosing my words carefully, I replied, “I don’t know what the future holds for our relationship,” her eyes lifted to mine and she couldn’t hide the hurt in them. That all changed with what I said next. “I know what I want it to hold for us, though. And I also know that I wouldn’t ever do you wrong like that or hurt you, baby. What we’ve got, I really like and in a way that I want to keep it. Do you understand?”

I only just finished the last word when she launched herself at me and kissed me hard. The memory of kissing her and how she’d felt both inside and out during our night together had kept my anger, frustration and anxiety in check over the last week. Now, I felt some of it rearing its head in the back of my mind because my memories had apparently been shit – her taste and her lips were way better than I remembered. And whoever the asshole was doing this, had cheated me of a week of them.

I was adding that onto the pain I was going to cause who was doing it when we caught him. I wasn’t a cop anymore, and although I still had to act within certain boundaries, both legally and morally, I was going to make sure that the fucker paid before I handed him over to the police.

It confused me how people viewed explosives, because the fact was they were deadly. Terrorist acts had opened the public’s eyes to how much damage they could do, but a lot of people still used them for random things or didn’t respect them as much as they respected a gun. Big mistake! When I’d been a cop, I’d been called out to a scene where a group of four teenage boys had found how to make a small explosive on the web. They’d followed it using easy to find shit, and it had gone off immediately. It left one kid with burns over one side of his body, one with only one eye and massive burns, and one with burns and missing an arm because he’d been holding the last chemical they poured into the container. The fourth kid had been holding the container itself and he ended up losing both arms and was now unrecognizable. They hadn’t been intending to hurt anyone, they’d only been intending on attempting to mine for gold after watching a television program where they’d done just that to get down to the pay dirt and wanted to try it too. But people still had a high level of arrogance and disrespect for explosives, assuming they could make their own. Especially because the internet labelled a majority of them “a safe method for creating an explosive” and then gave a list of reasons you’d need it to make it more appealing to the reader. Gardening, ice fishing, house renovations, swimming pool construction, gold mining, farming, water location, ant nest destruction… it was all there. Assholes! And then we have someone who has salty feelings toward an oil company, who finds something like that online and uses it to fuck up an operation. The world was a weird place!