Forever Mine (Providence Series Book 1)

by Mary B. Moore

  “Excellent.” This time, the phone was hung up on me, but that was okay.

  Looking at the panting beast beside me, I stroked his head and reached for one of his pig's ears, “It’s all coming together Jonas, my boy. Soon, very soon.”

  It had taken time to plan, but so far it was going perfectly.

  * * *

  Hanging up from the asshole, I looked toward the hospital. I was glad that the female survived because she was hot and might come in handy in the future if I was without entertainment. I wonder if she enjoyed my gift? It had been a pleasure organizing it.

  As it was, I’d been watching my beauty in Piersville since I took this job. All that was holding me back from taking her was that the contract was still ongoing, and I couldn’t have any complications.

  Looking at my watch, I saw that it was time for her to leave work, and then she’d go home for her bath. I never missed that show.

  With the other one injured, I didn’t have to worry about missing an opportunity, I could take my time and enjoy it as she washed herself for me. There were some jobs that you hated, and some that you loved; this one was most definitely the latter.

  29

  ____

  Maya

  I’d been out of the hospital now for a week, and my side wasn’t hurting me anymore. I’d only had a couple of bad headaches, and it wasn’t easy getting around with a broken leg and arm, but Ren had set everything up so that I never got stuck. He’d had a meeting that he couldn’t get out of today, so I was being babysat by Cole, who had insisted on watching Casino Royale and was currently comparing his base jumping abilities to Bond’s.

  “I could do that,” he said as Bond jumped from one crane to another.

  “Uh huh!”

  “Meh, I’d have knocked him out in three punches. One to the gut, one to the jaw and then bam on the side of the head and nighty noodles out he goes. Look at all the shit it caused because he doesn’t have that skill,” he bragged pointing at the screen.

  Rolling my eyes and turning back to the screen I caught sight of something huge crawling up the wall and screamed louder than I think I’ve ever screamed in my life. It was like an eight-legged dog!

  “What? What?” Cole yelled jumping up and standing on the bed with his arms in a karate pose.

  “That…that…what the shit is it?” I sounded hysterical but come on, it was the size of Dash who was now running around the room barking up at his boyfriend.

  An even higher pitched scream than mine pierced the room, and my head snapped around in the direction it came from. Cole was standing with his hands on either side of his head with his fingers tangled in his hair. “Kill it…kill it!” He screeched, dancing on the bed and pointing his finger at the beast on the wall.

  Call me ridiculous, but his reaction was that hysterical and unexpected that I forgot about the Tyrannosaurus arachnid behind me and lay staring at him as he jumped up and down squealing before bursting out laughing.

  “Why are you laughing? It’s going to eat us!” He shouted jumping up and down hard enough that my body was bouncing with him on the mattress sending waves of pain through me. It didn’t distract me from the show in front of me, though. “Oh my god it has stripes! It’s trying to trick us like those fake sharks! It’s in my hair, it’s in my hair,” he squealed as he bounced.

  I was trying to get air through the laughter and pain, but so far all I could get were these tiny little gasps. I couldn’t stop laughing as he continued on about tigers and pretending to be a house cat before it ate our brains. Just as I was about to start panicking at the lack of oxygen in my body, I heard Ren’s pissed off voice shouting over Cole’s theatrics. A thud followed, and suddenly the bed stopped moving, and Ebru was beside me telling me to breathe.

  “What the fuck were you thinking you God damn fucking skippy McTaintlicker,” Ren roared in Cole’s face.

  “There’s a fucking Rottweiler on your wall,” Cole yelled back flapping his hand in its direction.

  As calmly as I’d ever known was possible in the presence of a spider as big as a horse, Ebru walked up to it, smacked it onto the floor and stomped her foot before turning around and raising a brow in Cole’s direction.

  “Well then, I won’t call Animal Control,” Cole said with a sniff and walked out of the room.

  “I guess now is a bad time to take your blood pressure and pulse then?” Ebru sighed as she went over to her bag and started pulling out what she needed. Cole walked back in with a shovel and a garbage bag in his hands and made a huge production of scraping the Stegosaurus corpse off the floor. Wiping it with an antibacterial wipe and depositing all of it into the bag he headed back towards the door.

  “Where are you going?” Ren growled at him.

  “To call the Guinness Book of World Records,” he said continuing out the door without pausing once.

  “It was the size of my thumbnail,” Ebru huffed making me wonder if her eyesight was good enough to do medicine. That spider was fucking huge.

  I need to tell Tony that someone finally had him beat on the spider Oscars. Damn, I wish I’d recorded it.

  * * *

  Two weeks later…..

  I woke up to a sliver of sun coming through the curtains of the sliding doors at the far end of the bedroom. Because my left side was busted, I always slept on my right side facing Ren with my leg and arm on one of the body pillows. Opening my eyes I saw that his side of the bed empty. His Dad had been talking about an issue on the West side of the Ranch, so I guess he’d gone to help out.

  He never left me for long, but when he did he rang regularly to check on me. He’d also been there for all of my doctor’s and hospital appointments. Last week I’d had the staples in my leg and arm removed. My surgeon had tried a new approach when he cast me and had cut out a window so that the wounds could be checked regularly. He’d then wound an Ace bandage over the panels once they were put back in the windows. Once the staples were removed, though, they’d put a new cast on to hold it all in place properly, so they’d cut my temporary cast off during this appointment.

  When the technician had walked over with what looked like a small handheld circular saw, Ren had immediately stood up in between us and laid down the law.

  “Hell no!”

  “This is what we use to remove casts. It’s perfectly safe,” the technician tried to reason.

  “Yeah and what if you sneeze? Or someone comes in and says boo? You’ll jump, and she’ll be a limb down,” he argued. “Not that I wouldn’t love you whatever way you are, baby,” he’d punctuated with a wink.

  “Ren, over here please.” I pointed to my right side.

  “Baby, have you seen this thing? Bruce used one of these once when he was cutting down wood for the fence, and you’ve seen the tip of his pointy finger or lack of one,” he held up his hand with the index finger folded down at the top to make a point; or lack of one, no pun intended.

  “Honey, a horse broke free and jumped next to his head surprising him. It’s not the same thing,” I tried to reason with him.

  “And you’re telling me something similar wouldn’t ever happen here?” He was still holding up his hand with the tip of the index finger folded down.

  The technician coughed beside us getting Ren’s attention again. “Mr. Townsend, I’ve cut yours and your brothers casts off since you were little. Not once did I cut you, and never have I cut anyone.”

  Ren scowled harder and then stomped over to my side watching the technician like a hawk as he cut my casts off. I thought he was going to pass out when they took the staples out and covered the wounds with a dressing, though. He’d kept saying that it was ‘barbaric’ as the doctor took the staples out with a special device. By the time the end was in sight and they were putting new casts on, I was ready to kill him and kept wondering why I hadn’t asked Colette or Christie to bring me. Oh yeah, because I was never given a choice.

  After visiting Luke again, I spoke to his doctor; he was getting stronger. My f
amily, Ren’s family and bizarrely Isla’s best friends who were living in her house while she was away had kept him company the whole time, so he was never alone. I left the hospital feeling like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Ren was still grumping about the barbaric cast removals when we got home but stopped when I’d tried to get out of Hulk myself.

  Smiling at the memory, I moved my hand and froze when something sparkled on it. Lifting my hand I blinked a couple of times, but it stayed there on my finger never disappearing or losing its sparkle. Why did I have a diamond on my finger? Did Ren…no, men ask; don’t they?

  “Ah good, you’re awake,” Cole said from the stairs scaring the shit out of me. “Whatcha doing?” He jumped onto the bed, bouncing me up in the air. Thankfully it didn’t hurt as much as the spider incident.

  “Do you see this?” I moved my hand from side to side, looking at the different sparkles.

  “What? Holy shit, when did you…” he jumped back up again and pointed at my hand.

  “I don’t know?”

  Walking up to me, he bent over and sniffed me. “I don’t smell alcohol. Did you get drunk?”

  “No!”

  “Roofie?”

  “No.”

  “High?”

  “For crying out loud, Cole, no no no no. I woke up, and this was on my hand!”

  “Wait, so he didn’t actually propose?”

  Shaking my head, I looked back at the ring and finally took in the design. It was a very simple thick band in white gold with a large enough diamond that you couldn’t miss it and immediately thought ‘ooooh’. Not that big that it looked tacky or people immediately thought ‘fake’ and ‘flashy bastard, though. I loved it!

  Looking back up at Cole and seeing the pissed off look on his face I figured it might be best to stop talking.

  “You need the toilet?” I was passed the point of feeling embarrassed by him seeing me first thing in the morning or helping me to the toilet on bad days. We’d done it so many times.

  “Um no, I can do it.”

  “I’ll be back in a minute, stay up here,” he lectured me for the billionth time as he headed toward the stairs.

  One time I’d tried to do the stairs myself. The way they acted it was like I’d been swinging from the banister. Yes, I’d lost my balance, and if Cole hadn’t been there I would have fallen, but it was his fault for yelling at me as I’d taken a step down and scaring me in the first place. I didn’t have it in me mentally to argue that with him today, though, I had a rock on my finger to think about.

  Ren

  “I think we’re pretty much done here son,” Dad stood dusting his hands on his jeans. We’d been fixing some fences and following the tracks of the vehicle that had broken them in the dirt. Brett’s undercover security guys finished up placing hidden sensors on some of the beams before they put a thick wire above the fence that would surround the entire perimeter of the ranch, It would not only carry a small current but would work like sensors and alert us if it was breached.

  We weren’t taking any chances after finding out about the explosives and that there may be two different parties involved in what was going on. The day after finding out about Andy, I’d broken the news to Maya. As expected she had been upset and had felt guilty for his death. She’d withdrawn for a couple of days after it, and I gave her that space, not pressuring her to talk. She was coming back to her normal self now, though, which was a relief for all of us.

  As Dick was still a wild card and had shown an interest in Maya, Mace and I had gone to visit him, but no one was at his home. His neighbor, Dorothy, had told us that he hadn’t been seen for at least a week as he’d gone away on business. We were definitely going to tie up that loose end when he got home, though.

  Following Dad back to the truck, we both came to a stop as Cole pulled up on one of the ATV’s looking pissed, Dash chasing behind him, no doubt looking for some special one on one time.

  “What’s up, son?” Dad shouted as Cole jumped off the ATV and stormed towards us. “I thought you were meant to be with Maya?”

  “What she doesn’t deserve romance and flowers?” He snapped as he got up close to me and stuck his finger in my face.

  “What the fuck are you on about?”

  “You just threw the ring on her finger, you twat. Did you not think that she would want, or at the very least deserve a moment so special that she’d remember it forever and tell y’all’s kids about how their daddy proposed to her?”

  I looked over at Dad and saw him wince and shake his head as he looked down at his feet. Scratching the back of my neck, I started to realize I’d fucked up slightly. “Uhhh, was what I did bad?”

  “Oh no,” Cole said walking away from me and circling around. “No, when your daughter asks her how her Daddy proposed so that she can measure every man against him, Maya can say ‘well sweetie, half my body was in a cast and one day I woke up alone with a ring on my finger’. Then your daughter can find herself a guy who doesn’t even bother with a ring or hell even a wedding!” He was getting more irate as he spun out the story. I’ll admit I was starting to feel pissed at the thought of my baby settling for a cheap shit like that.

  “What the fuck am I meant to do? I don’t want my girl settling for some half-assed cock nut who can’t even be bothered to give her a memorable proposal,” it hit me what I was saying and that that was exactly what I’d given Maya. “I mean, you read all that romantic shit, give me ideas.” I was starting to panic.

  “Take her to the desert and dress up as a sheikh,” Cole said waving his arms around. “Or take her to Greece and be a Greek billionaire. That always works.”

  Both Dad and I stopped and stared at him as he spoke wondering just where exactly we all went wrong when he was a kid. I get he likes to read, but dressing up as a sheikh in the desert or as a Greek billionaire? Dude needed an add-a-dick-to-me done because right now I was pretty certain he was a majority pussy.

  “I gotta go,” I said running to the SUV with Dash, leaving Dad to take a rough ride back with Cole on the ATV. I had damage control to do.

  Throughout the whole twenty-minute drive home I had idea after idea going through my head. The most important thing I had to do, I had to right now. Pulling up in front of the house and seeing a couple of the undercover security guys ‘fixing’ things around the area, I ran into the house and up the stairs as fast as I could. Maya was lying on the bed with the remote in her hand while her phone beeped with text messages beside her.

  “Ren? Are you…”

  I cut her off lunging for her broken arm with the ring on it, pulled it off and walked away. Crisis averted; now to plan the proposal.

  30

  ____

  Maya

  Five days later…..

  I’d been struggling with the guilt of Andy’s death. When Ren had told me, I’d cried because he hadn’t deserved to die. Now that the shock had worn off, all I could feel was guilt like it was my fault somehow?

  Everyone had been supportive, and I’d had many long talks about it and was starting to accept what had happened wasn’t my fault. It was just hard to understand why someone would kill him?

  I was currently on FaceTime with Amy while Tony was getting us lunch, as she and Lucy now checked in daily.

  “So he just took the ring off your finger without a word and walked away?” Amy looked back at me from the iPad screen.

  “He ran in, took the ring and walked out whistling, Ames,” I shook my head. It had been five days since ring-gait, as I’d started calling it, and he hadn’t mentioned it again.

  “Maya, I know you love the guy and all, and yeah he’s really really hot, but I mean if y’all have babies, are they gonna have tails or walk in circles or something?” Amy said looking at me wide-eyed and twirling her finger around in the air beside her head. “The guy sounds all kinds of special, ya know?”