Everything about her stood out, but it was her personality had always made her seem inches taller than she was and that had attracted a majority of the males in our school to her. Not once did she look at any of them in that way though. She had been oblivious to how interested they were, so convinced that she would never be worth anyone’s attentions, and assuming that they just wanted to be friends. Most of them had been devastated by the friend zoning, but I hadn’t given them the chance to argue against it. None of them were worth her love or her trust in that way.
One day she’d come over and when she’d leaned to pick up her drink, I’d seen the raw red lines and dark bruises on her arms when her sleeves were pulled up.
I’d questioned bruises many times over the years, but she’d always been so convincing in her explanations. These were obviously not accidents, and they looked like they’d be agony.
When the truth had come out, thanks to my parents and Noah, Dad had visited her asshole of a father and had threatened him. We’d thought it had been dealt with and that seeing as how her eighteenth birthday was just around the corner, we could bring her to come and live with us after it.
Then, it had all gone to shit.
She wasn’t answering her phone and then didn’t turn up to school, so I’d gone to her house and had found the place trashed and her gone. Dad had hired someone to try to find her, but that bastard had managed to hide his tracks from everyone.
That had been almost four years ago, and I hadn’t heard from her since apart from birthday and Christmas cards. I’d missed her and had felt like a part of me had been missing since.
When she’d called tonight, I’d known it was her. I’d felt antsy all day, like something bad was going to happen. Normally I sleep like the dead, but tonight I’d been tossing and turning and had just decided to say fuck it and get up when my phone rang.
The closer I got to her location the more the pit of dread and fury. What state would she be in when I got to her?
Three hours later…
“Levi?” my brother answered his phone on the first ring.
“Get Dad to call Doc and tell them to meet us at Archer’s,” I said grimly, stealing a glance over at the tiny bundle curled into the passenger seat of my car.
I’d wrapped a hoodie from the back seat around her and had placed another one I’d thrown in the trunk yesterday under her head so she could lean on it.
She looked more fragile than I’d ever seen her look and the tiny pieces that she’d managed to tell me about what she’d gone through had made my stomach turn.
“Is she okay?” I could hear my dad on the phone in the background and figured that Noah had the phone on speakerphone.
“The only word I can say to that is a huge fucking no.”
“How bad are we talking?” his voice was croaky, and I knew what he was asking– the same question I’d been asking myself and had approached reluctantly with her.
“She says no, but from the looks of it, she was beaten daily and pretty much starved the whole time.”
When she’d told me she hadn’t been raped or abused sexually, I’d wanted to cry with relief.
“How long ‘til you get here?”
I’d stopped at a gas station to get some painkillers and a drink for her after I’d picked her up. I’d initially pulled in under the ruse of filling up the tank, intending to use the bright lights of the forecourt to look over her injuries, at least the ones that were visible.
Once I’d seen the bruising on her face and the pain in her eyes, I’d gone in and bought what they’d had available, Advil and Tylenol, and had demanded that she take them.
I wouldn’t be taking the risk of driving fast on the roads home in case we got stopped, or I hit a pothole and jarred her, so it would take me at least two hours to get back to Gonzales County.
Relaying this to Noah, I hung up the phone and focused on the road in front of me, grinding my teeth the whole time.
I was going to kill that bastard.
2 Noah
I’d thought the wait between when Levi had called me the first time to his follow up call was painful but waiting for him to pull up in front of my brother’s house was worse.
We all had houses on a huge plot of land with big gaps between them and Archer’s was the right in the center of them all. We’d gotten the idea from how my uncle’s ranch was laid out with my cousin’s houses on it, and I loved it.
There were some smaller houses dotted throughout where some of the people who worked for us lived when they needed to, so it was the best place to go to in situations like this. People usually assumed that you’d go furthest away from the road, or to the main building, and Luna’s father was such a basic piece of shit that he’d go straight to those areas - if he had the balls to enter our property.
I actually hoped that he did come looking– I had a lot I wanted to say and do to the bastard.
“Doc’s ten minutes out,” my older brother, Archer, informed us, hanging up the phone. “We get her in and take her to the bedroom down the hall. The men have their guns and are patrolling out of sight. Anyone who enters the grounds will trip the alarm and the first team will make their way to its location leaving the others to focus on their areas. The most important thing is to assess her medical needs and make her comfortable or transport her to the hospital if need be.”
Really, he would have been an asset to the military, but Archer had an issue with people telling him what to do, so he’d never joined.
Looking at my family’s faces, I saw the anger I was feeling reflected on them. Luna had been one of us since Levi had brought her home the first time, and we’d all missed her since Rick had taken her.
“Let’s get her settled first,” Dad held my eyes as he told me. He knew that I was fighting against finding out the last location of her father from her as soon as she got here so I could go and deal with him. “As soon as he finds her gone, he’ll do the dip and disappear again until he can track her down.” A man like Rick Cleaver didn’t hang around, especially not with the number of people he owed money to. He would panic when she wasn’t there and move until he had a plan to get her back. “Get her settled, get her safe and then we plan.”
At that moment Doc arrived, a good friend of Dad’s who knew Luna and her story well.
He’d treated some of her injuries over the years we found out, but she’d always had a convincing story and she hadn’t visited him often enough for him to worry that it was her father who was causing them. In hindsight, he should have been suspicious, but then we all should have.
I don’t know how long I paced for, ignoring my family as they chatted amongst themselves, but a tap to the shoulder snapped me out of my seething.
“Car,” my brother Tate murmured, pointing at the headlights just visible in the dark.
It felt like hours, but would really only be a matter of seconds, as I waited for them to reach us. We all had our hands on the guns in the waistbands of our pants - just in case Rick really was that big of a deluded dick - and moved them away at the same time once we saw Levi behind the wheel.
Pulling up in front of us, his face was grim as he got out of the car and walked around to the passenger side.
Initially, it looked like a bundle of clothes until you saw the long dark curls on top of it and realized that there was a person under it.
Opening the door, he reached in and the click of the seatbelt being released was followed by him gently lifting the bundle out and walking toward us.
“Doc’s in the back room,” Archer informed him.
Stopping in front of me, I saw the conflict going on in Levi’s mind before he passed Luna over to me.
“Don’t drop her or bump into anything and make sure you place her gently onto the bed,” he ordered, trusting me to keep her safe while he did whatever he had to do. “I need to talk to the others and then I’ll take over.”
Spinning on my foot, I held her close to my chest and walked carefully in the direct
ion of the room that Doc was waiting for us in.
“Take your time,” I muttered, not taking my eyes off the door of the room I needed to go to as I walked. “I’ve got her.”
Ironically, my initial reaction to fly off the handle died down, replaced by a deeper anger and the desire to make her father pay painfully.
To do that, I needed to plan and make sure I got her justice.
When we started to remove the layers around her and saw how skinny she was and the bruising to her body, both Doc and I sucked in our breaths and looked at each other in horror.
I thought I’d felt violent before, but actually seeing the damage and her appearance inspired a level of violence in me that should scare her father.
Luna
Three months later…
This was torture. It wasn’t as bad as the last almost four years had been, but it was a different kind of torture all in itself. I was so tired of constantly having to tell people where I was going, although I knew why and was beyond grateful to the Townsends for caring so much about me.
But still!
And my brother Madix’s constant phone calls or lectures when I hadn’t called him back were driving me nuts.
What made it even worse was who was up my ass a majority of the time when Levi wasn’t around– Noah.
When I’d first woken up after Levi had collected me, I’d almost had a panic attack when I didn’t recognize the room or the man leaning over me. Almost immediately Noah had picked me up and placed me gently on his lap.
It had been quite dark, and I hadn’t recognized him with the beard he had now, so I’d been about to scream my ass off. The instant I smelled his familiar scent, I calmed down enough to see that the other man in the room had been the doctor who had treated me for so many years when I was growing up.
Then I remembered being collected by Levi and falling asleep after he’d given me some painkillers– it’s amazing how the mind works when you’re under stress. I still didn’t know why I hadn’t remembered the incident with Levi first or realized that I was at the Townsends, instead recognizing Noah’s scent.
Bizarre but true!
I was like a sniffer dog. Or maybe he was a scratch and sniff– one of those ones you keep scratching because it smells so good.
Actually, that was kind of gross. Scratching someone and then sticking your nose in them and taking a deep breath. Ew!
Once the doctor had checked me over, he’d asked that I go in the next day to have x-rays done of my body. When we’d protested, he’d said he could keep it all on the down low and that he’d put them under a different name too. The man had a plan and wasn’t taking ‘no’ for an answer.
So, Levi and Noah had both taken me to the hospital, and we’d been relieved to find out I didn’t have any long-lasting or life-altering injuries. There were some old ones that were just visible, but again they weren’t life-changing.
Since then, I’d had a constant chaperone. I was passed between the members of the family, but my regular ones were Levi and Noah.
This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that being around Noah drove me crazy.
I wanted him.
I didn’t want to want him.
I wanted him to want me.
I’d walked around with a fake smile on my face for years and hadn’t thought twice about doing it. I’d hated my father even more for the situation and not being able to beg people to help me get away from him, sure, but I’d been doing it for most of my life by then. It was second nature.
This wasn’t.
I was tired of constantly having to smile when all I wanted to do was throw myself at his feet and cling on like a howler monkey. Did they cling on to people?
I padded back into the kitchen to see my best friend at the counter getting himself set for our walk to work.
“Yo,” he shouted, even though I was only a couple of feet away from him in the kitchen.
Sighing, I tapped him on the shoulder making him shriek and spin around to face me while holding his chest.
“What the shit? You scared the Jesus out of me,” he rambled out so quickly that it almost came out as one word.
“I scared the Jesus out of you?”
Shrugging, he turned back toward the coffee machine and continued pouring. “I could have Jesus in me.”
Leaning back against the counter, I picked up the cup of coffee I’d left there while I went to find my sunglasses. Really, there was no missing the cup and the steam rising from it, so his overreaction was even crazier. That was Levi though, and it was one of the many reasons why we all loved him as much as we did.
“What were you so delicately yo-ing at me for?”
“We need to head out after we finish these,” he lifted his cup in my direction, before bringing it back and taking a big gulp out of it.
During the day, the family either traveled to their oil machinery thingy’s, or they worked from the office building on the property. They’d explained the whole oil drills or whatever they were called to me many times over the years - and many times over the last couple of months - but I’d be damned if any of it made any sense or stuck in my head.
Since I’d arrived, I’d taken on the task of being the ‘administrative assistant’ for Noah and Levi. Basically, I filed, I wrote documents, I did all the administrative shit that needed to be done, apart from answering the phones– that I wasn’t allowed to do, just in case.
Finishing the last of my coffee, I rinsed out the mug and put it in the dishwasher.
Levi was a coffee freak of nature. The guy would drink the coffee while it was boiling hot, not even wincing or screaming. If it got below a certain level of lava temperature, he’d stick it in the microwave until it reached magma temps again, and then drink it. The rest of us would have been peeling off the burned roof of our mouths or sucking on ice cubes, but he didn’t even notice it. This meant that as soon as my cup was in the dishwasher, his followed it and we were making our way out of the door.
Halfway there, we bumped into Ariana, his sister who was younger than him by a year. Archer was the oldest at twenty-seven, then came Noah who was twenty-five. Tate, the drunken accident, was twenty-two. And, because they hadn’t learned from the previous three mistakes, their parent’s exact words, along came Levi and Ariana a year apart at twenty-one and twenty years old. Tate literally had been the drunken accident, and his dad Jer swore that was why he was as… unique as he was.
Ariana hadn’t changed in all the years I’d known her. She loved gaming and was a complete nerd, but you’d never guess it when you looked at her. Sadly, there was a stereotypical image of a gamer, be they male or female, but there were no glasses or Cheetos stains on this chick. She wasn’t skinny, she was curvy and tall with hair that reached near her bra strap. She was so freaking graceful too, and the sweetest thing about her was– she had no clue how beautiful she was.
Was she classically beautiful? No. She was unique in every way– the perfect definition of a Townsend if ever there was one.
Regardless of the weather, Ariana had to run first thing in the morning and that’s what she was doing at this moment, not looking where she was going and almost knocking me off my feet.
“Hey, eyes forward,” Levi snapped as he caught me when I flew backward.
Pulling her earbud out of her ear, she glared at Levi. That changed the instant she moved her eyes in my direction.
“Sorry, girl. I was in the zone,” she explained, jogging on the spot.
“How long have you been running for?” I had to ask.
She looked a hot mess!
Looking at her watch, she grimaced. “Uh, I’m not sure I want to say,” she looked back up at me and shook her head as she said. “I didn’t sleep well, so I decided I’d run it off.”
“Run what off?” Levi interrupted before I could ask the same question.
“Just stuff,” she stopped jogging and bent her leg up behind her and stretched instead. “I’m gonna head for a showe
r and then I’ll meet y’all up at the offices.” She switched out the legs and stretched the other one. “I’m so sweaty, shit the amount of boob sweat is insane,” she muttered, looking down at her chest and grimacing. Obviously, when someone says that, you also just have to look at the area in question. She was right, it looked almost like the Bat-Signal on her tank top around her boobage area. “Jesus, it’s like my tits are actually crying tears!”
“And on that note…” Levi reached out and grabbed my arm, dragging us around her.
“See ya in a bit!” she called cheerily at us as she jogged away, making me laugh.
“Run, Jennaaaaay,” Levi hollered, doing his best to imitate Forrest Gump but just sounding like a gimp.
“You know she does that just to mess with you, right?” I asked Levi who was still shuddering. “You also know that I’m pretty certain that Forrest didn’t even say that in the movie?” Just to make sure he was completely informed of this morning’s fuck-ups (so far), I finished with, “And that she probably didn’t hear you seeing as how she had her earphones in?”
“I don’t care,” he muttered. “It’s just wrong!”
The office buildings were a two-story wooden ranch-style house with a wraparound porch. It was absolutely gorgeous and even had a couple of bedroom suites in it for guests, and a living room with the most comfortable couches in the history of mankind. It really wasn’t a hardship working out of the building.
Just as we got to the steps leading up to the porch, the front door opened and none other than Noah held it open.
“What took you so long?” he asked Levi, but his eyes were on me the whole time. “Are you okay?”
His constant concern for me, albeit sweet, made me also want to throttle him– slowly. It caused a lot of emotional confusion for one, and also made me feel like I was a kid at the same time.
“She’s fine,” Levi answered for me as he closed the door behind us. “We bumped into Ariana. She’s just having a shower and will be here after it. I’m just gonna go and get a coffee,” he muttered, already heading the direction of the kitchen where the best coffee in the world was waiting. I’m not sure it had actually been voted on or had received the best coffee in the world accolade, but if it came down to it, it was a no contest win. Unsurprisingly, Levi didn’t even glance back at us. He had a one-track mind when it came to that stuff.
Until Fools Find Gold: A Providence Gold Series and Until Series Crossover Page 2
