Tainted Gold (Providence Gold 3)

SixteenLilyI was now thirty-seven weeks pregnant. Remember the old lady from the Titanic saying it had been eighty-four years? Well, that’s the length of time that had passed since I’d last seen my feet, my vagina, the floor and since I’d last been comfortable. For the last eighty-four years, I’d waddled like a penguin, my vagina had split into a thousand pieces, I’d been sick every time someone asked for ketchup, I’d heaved when I’d smelled onions, I’d peed every five minutes… pregnancy was for the birds.

There was no grace and dignity with pregnancy, none whatsoever. You know those photos of famous people in the magazines, wearing tight dresses and heels with a huge bump – lies, all lies!

And, I now had the precious words of wisdom that had been thrown at me by every woman who’d ever had a baby, that there was even less dignity giving birth. Oh no, a team squatted at your vagina, shoved their arms up it, it opened up to the size of a bucket, and then you shit yourself and had a baby.

Fucking awesome!

“Oh, when are you due?” a woman wearing an obnoxious perfume said as she grabbed – yes, grabbed – my stomach and gave it a shake.

Keeping my face blank, I cocked my head and asked, “What do you mean?”

“The baby. When’s the baby due?” she gave my belly another shake.

This was hugely irritating to me for many reasons. She didn’t know me, so why would she grab hold of my belly? Also, she was shaking my baby around and doing fuck knows what to its developing brain. And finally, my bladder, which I’d just emptied, was now screaming at me again.

And that was why I did what I did next and let the tears that never seemed to be too far away visibly build up. “I’m not pregnant. Why would you be so mean?”

The woman went bright red and flicked her hair over her shoulder as she looked down her nose at me. “Well then, maybe you should wear clothes a size bigger.”

Oh, that bitch!

“Maybe you should go back to your surgeon and tell him to even up the fake tits sticking in opposite directions on your chest?”

It was the hormones, I swear! I’d never been this bitchy in my life, and I didn’t seem to have an off-switch for them. Ninety-nine percent of the time I was smiling and happy, but for that other one percent, I was a freaking mess. It was also probably down to the fact that Annie wasn’t working tonight, meaning I had to dish out the bitch myself instead of letting her do it for me. The woman just had a way with words that no one could ever match.

“Go lose some weight, you fat cow!” she sneered and then walked away.

I was about to yell something back, but Dad’s hand closed over my mouth stopping it before I even started. It was closing time, and she’d been the last of the patrons, so really it wouldn’t have been that bad if I’d yelled what I’d wanted to. Apparently Dad didn’t feel the same way sadly.

“Let her go,” he rumbled. “She’s not worth it.”

Turning around to face him, I looked up at him, and then burst into tears.

“She called me fat,” I wailed into his chest. “And… and… she had a really bad boob job.”

My head started moving as he burst out laughing. “She really did,” he agreed, laughing even harder. “Why don’t you go clean up and sit down in the office. That man’ll be here to pick you up soon, and he won’t like it if you’ve been crying.”

Grinning into his chest, I wiped my face with his soft flannel shirt, then wiped my nose with it too. Dad still hadn’t warmed up to Tate and only referred to him as ‘that man’ or ‘asshole’. Deep down, I knew he liked him, but he held a mean grudge, and knocking his daughter up warranted a lifetime of it, apparently.

Going onto my tiptoes, I gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Ok. If you need a hand just yell.”

“Will do, cupcake!” he nodded, lying out of his ass, as he pushed me toward where the door to the office was at the end of the bar.

I stopped before I got to the end and shouted over my shoulder, “You need to call him by his name one day, old man.”

“I do,” he yelled back, locking the front door of the bar. “I call him asshole.”

I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. “I mean his real name.”

“Never!”

God, but I loved that man. I also loved Tate and knew he had a lot of time for Dad too, regardless of what he called him. I’d asked him why one night and he’d said it was simple – he was my dad, he loved me, he was important to me, and Tate understood why he acted that way. He’d also added that if we had a daughter one day, after the son he was so sure we were having was born, he’d act the same way if a guy did the same thing to her.