Forbidden Gold (Providence Gold 5)

“That’s my cap!” Gramps snapped as he jumped away from me to avoid the mess.

Yeah, it was his cap that had a big old hole in the back and mesh on the top to keep his head cool in the sun. Basically, I’d just used a colander to catch my puke.

“I’ll get someone in to clean it up,” Parker sighed, eyeing me carefully. “Did you eat anything you’d cooked today?”

There was my get out of jail free card, so I used it and lied out of my ass, nodding while I finished emptying the contents of my stomach into the flipping useless cap.

When I was done, I held it out. “You can have it back now.”

“I’ll pass,” Gramps muttered but took it out of my hand anyway. The thump of the lid of the trashcan followed it, and I can’t say I blamed him for throwing it out.

When Chris and Parker were done, they sat back and looked at their work. Apparently a lot of the wounds hadn’t needed stitches, but two had needed one to close them up, another one had taken three, and the big one had required nine. Awesome!

Standing up, Chris patted me on my shin. “At least when you do something, you do it properly, Ari. I’m giving you an A for effort.”

“We’ll go and let the family know she’s not going to lose her leg,” Grams sighed, grabbing Gramps by the arm and tugging him to the door. “Chris, want to come with?”

Waving bye, he followed them out, but I caught the look Grams gave me just as the door closed. She knew! I didn’t even know for sure, so I don’t know how she did, but she fucking knew.

Fuck my fucking life.

Lowering my head with a soft thud onto the mattress, I went through what I was going to do.

Get a test. Without the results, I didn’t know how much panicking I needed to do.

If it said yes, I needed to get a second test just to make sure.

Find a spot somewhere no one would find me and scream.

Book a flight to the nearest airport to Mount Kilimanjaro to do number 3.“Ari,” Parker’s amused voice sang as he leaned over my face. “Is there something you need to tell me?”

Chewing on my lower lip, I considered the question. “I’m taking a vacation, and I haven’t told you yet. Do you know what airport is nearest to Mount Kilimanjaro?” Then something else occurred to me. “Do you know what country it’s in?”

Smiling softly at me, he held up a white stick. “Go pee on this and bring it back to me.”

In all of my twenty-nine years, I’d never taken a pregnancy test. We’d never even had any scares. I’d kept my birth control appointments to the day… I hadn’t ever done anything wrong until now.

Here’s something else: I wasn’t afraid of having a baby for the reasons I used to be. Nope, I’d worked on getting past that since the week after Parker had told me he loved me. My new fear was passing on Townsend genes to an innocent human being. Laugh all you want, but that shit was real. We’d been shot in the ass, some reacted weirdly to painkillers and anesthetic, my cousin whirled his dick around like a baby elephant discovering his trunk for the first time when he had anything more substantial than Tylenol, scrotox—the list was endless. Heck, even the people who married into the people turned from normal to freaks. And then there were the kids, those poor, poor babies and their messed up little minds.

“The sooner you go and take this test, the sooner we’ll be able to celebrate that we took the best part of you and the best part of me and made it into one human being,” he said gently.

I wasn’t sure he was in his right mind saying that, but I took the test and limped over to the bathroom in the corner of the room I’d been put in.

That’s where I learned how awkward it was to take one. Men had it easy—they could stand, aim, and spray. Women had to sit down to pee to begin with, then we had to hold the test under us to pee on it, but we couldn’t see if we were hitting it.

What kind of fucked up contortionist designed this shit?

“Will it mess up the results if it touches me?” I yelled, trying to adjust my position to allow for optimum pee on target scoring.

“No, but try not to do it anyway!”

“Well, we only get one shot at this,” I reminded him. “I can’t just recharge my bladder to fire again, it takes time. If you want this result now, it’s going to be on a wing and a prayer.”

I could actually hear his sigh through the door, but then it opened, and he walked in with a specimen pot. A freaking tiny specimen pot.