Forever Mine (Providence Series Book 1) (10 page)

"Do you put him in the naughty corner too?” I wheezed from my position flat out on the floor.

"Smart ass,” he said laughing and gently lifted me back to my feet before dusting off my back - apparently my ass got a majority of whatever muck there actually was given how long he spent rubbing it.

“Hey man,” Cole shouted walking toward us with what I was now realizing was his signature grin on his face. “Stop molesting the poor girl.”

"I was dusting her off Cole. Fuckin Dash knocked her off her feet when she got out the truck,” he snapped.

"Hey Cole,” I gave a small wave and tried not to laugh.

"Hey gorgeous, you okay?
 
Dash didn't hurt you did he? You still have some dirt on you by the way - here let me help,” Cole said reaching towards my ass.
 
As always, before he could reach me a huge hand connected with his head stopping him. “Why do you always have to go for the head bro?” He whined rubbing at it and pouting. “I used to be smart enough for Harvard and now I’m lucky if they’d take me at UCLA!” I noticed he’d shouted the last bit towards the gorgeous Amazonian that he’d been talking to when we arrived who was now standing next to a seriously hot guy with tattoos.
 
Oh my God, it was like looking at a work of art.

“YEAH?” She yelled back at him. “That may be, but they’d sure as shit let you into Juilliard - to sweep the stages and clean the toilets."
 
I decided there and then that she was frigging awesome, what a response.
 
I was struggling to keep my eyes off the guy who was standing beside her, though.
 
He must have been over six and a half feet with dark hair, muscles everywhere and although his eyes were on us, every time she shifted beside him he moved with her like they were in sync or he just didn’t want her away from him.
 

“Stop staring at my best friend or I swear I’ll drown him,” Ren growled in my ear making me snap out of my perve moment. God Amy was gonna love it here!

“Sorry, I was trying to figure out what his tattoos are?” I’m a genius!
 
Speaking of which, I looked at Cole who was scowling at the beautiful girl - guess he couldn’t think of a response.

“Ava,” Ren called. “Meet Maya."
 

The beauty walked towards me with a graceful walk that was almost float.
 
If I had her height I’d be all limbs and look like a baby giraffe learning to walk, but not Ava - she had this natural sensual grace when she walked, and it was helped by the fact she was curvy and filled the bikini she was wearing perfectly. The tattooed god or ‘TG’ as I would now forever refer to him as, in my head and to Amy because I’m not stupid, followed closely behind her with his eyes on her backside. It made sense that they were together, to be honest, they’d have the most beautiful Amazonian sized kids.

“Hey sweetie, I’m Ava. I’m glad to finally meet the girl I’ve heard so much about,” she said, leaning in and giving me a quick hug.
 

“You too Ava! It’s great to meet you,” I replied looking over her shoulder at Cole and Mace who had their eyes on her ass as she bent over to give me a hug making me giggle.
 

“Right,” Cole thundered snapping out of his Ava-ass trance. “Let’s get shit set up. Ava thanks for the 20 seconds of heaven moment where you bent over - I’m going to add it to my memory of you undressing and revealing your bikini, you rubbing lotion into yourself” while he was saying this he was edging away from Mace like he was going to run into the water. “And then there’s the time…” Mace launched himself at Cole just as he ran to the lake and dove in leaving Mace standing on the bank clenching and unclenching his fists.
 

As Cole surfaced, he shouted, “I’ve now got enough footage for eight minutes and sixteen-seconds of my Ava spank bank!”
 

Mace, who had turned around and was taking his first step back to us, turned back and ran into the water after Cole, who gave an honest to God scream and started swimming away as fast as he could.
 
Ava was shaking her head and laughing so I joined in unable to keep it inside anymore.

 
Ren

While I’d been unloading all the shit from my car and stopping Dash from trying to hump a trash can, Ava had shown Maya where to get changed, and I’d finally got the chance to appreciate her in that bikini just as Cole limped up with Mace behind him scowling.
 
Cole was whining about needing his lungs pumped and showing off the cut that ‘needed stitches’ which was a scratch making me want to suffocate him - slowly.
 

That's one thing about Cole - he’s a hypochondriac and a serious whiner.
 
You get a cold- he has chronic flu, you get the flu-he gets Ebola, he bumps his leg - he needs a cast or crutches, he grazes himself-he needs stitches; he cuts himself-he needs an amputation and transfusion. It’s fucking exhausting and I dunno how my mom didn’t give him to a convent or something, and here he was trying his skills on Maya.
 
Thankfully she just found him funny, which made him pout even more, and then continued talking to Ava and Mace.
 

Mace wasn’t looking happy, so I made a mental note to talk to him later to find out what was going on.
 
We’d been best friends since we were five and had gone through a shit load together, but where Ava was concerned Mace didn’t tell me anything, and I wondered if perhaps that was what the problem was?
 

After a while, we all sat down talking and Maya was sitting between my legs and leaning against my chest as I rested my chin on her head and I loved the natural closeness and familiarity that we already had.

“Jesus shit,” Cole yelled from beside us making us all jump and turn to see Dash humping his side as he tried fighting him off. “Get him off me. I’m getting molested by a fuckin’ dalmatian! Call the pound, fuckin call an exterminator and a priest,” the last word faded at the end as Cole ran back towards the lake with Dash hot on his heels, by which point even Mace had tears running down his face he was laughing so hard. Just as we calmed down he yelled out, “I need the afternoon after pill! And a priest - I want the priest;
 
I feel so dirty and used,” and started scrubbing himself in the water while Dash looked at him from the bank wagging his tail.
 

I’d been given Dash by my brothers and sister two years ago, and Cole had come up with the name because he said he looked like morse code with dots all over him. Unfortunately, my dog took to his name immediately so I couldn’t change it. Fortunately, he now wound Cole up constantly.
 
My dog never humped anyone besides Cole, and I swear he did it with a doggy grin on his face that wasn’t one of humping satisfaction - more of evil humor.
 

“Maya, you’ve got to come with me to Sheeve’s on Friday,” Ava said breaking through my thoughts.
 
What the fuck, why would Maya go there? “It’s a club that plays all sorts of music and it's so much fun.”
 

After ten minutes of discussion with Mace and I biting our tongues, so we didn’t look like unreasonable assholes, it was decided that the girls were hitting Sheeve’s leaving both Mace and I looking like we’d just swallowed acid at the prospect.
 

We spent the rest of the day having fun in the water and enjoying the sun. I had the bonus of having a wet Maya rubbing against me as often as I could get it to happen, as well as laughing whenever Dash decided to show his affection to his date - Cole.
 

We were just setting up the fire to cook dinner when Mace growled, “What the fuck?"
 

Following where he was looking, I saw Ava speaking to a guy by the water and laughing.
 
Looking back at Mace I saw he looked more pissed and tense than I’d ever seen him which made no sense to me because although they’d been sitting together today, they never touched each other and if anything she seemed quieter around him than when he wasn’t around. I wasn’t sure what was going on between them, but I knew that they had a rocky past because of some stuff that Mace had let out when he was drunk, which wasn’t very often. There was no doubting that there were feelings between them so why they never acted on them I’ll never know.
 
I don’t even think that it was because of Gia, Mace’s sister, because she was the queen of trying to set them up but for some reason they refused to give into it.

“S’up man?” I watched the tic in his jaw become more pronounced and the muscles and veins in his arms starting to bulge.

“Is she fucking doing this on purpose?” He ground out.

“Who Ava? Seriously Mace you need to calm down before you pop something. What’s going on with you two? You watch her the whole time, but when she sits or gets too close to you- you move away.
 
You’ve been quiet and miserable for weeks, and I really wanna know if you’re okay and what’s going on man.”
 

I hated seeing him like this.
 
When we were kids he’d been the happiest and easiest guy; he laughed his ass off at everything, joined in all of the parties, was confident and the best guy to be around. His dad was an asshole who had abandoned him and his sister and left them with their alcoholic mom who was the biggest bitch I’d ever come across in my life to date, and that was saying something. He’d joined the military out of High School and spent six years doing whatever it was that he did.
 
A year before he left the military, we got news that he’d been badly injured and was being medevacked to a hospital thirty minutes away; for days, he was in and out of surgery.
 
Gia and Ava were wrecks, and I remember walking in and seeing her whispering to him and stroking his head before I turned around and walked out again leaving them to it, but when he woke up, she came out of his room in tears and left.
 

Four months later he was redeployed, and when he came back he was a totally different guy; don't get me wrong he was still the best person to have in your life and the most loyal man I knew, but the happy go lucky guy that I’d grown up with was no more. I don’t know what happened to him or what he went through, but whatever it was it took the real Mace away.
 
He and his sister had spent a majority of their time at our home, and my mom babied both of them and treated them like her own, and I know my mom worried about him too.
 

“He’s fucking touching her,” Mace hissed and I turned to see what he was talking about.
 
The guy had Ava’s hand and was writing something on it with a sharpie. Where the hell did he get that from? Who carries a god damn Sharpie on them at a lake? Ava didn’t look as if she was comfortable with the guy to be fair, but I had a feeling that Mace was only seeing what his jealousy would allow him. “Fuck this,” he growled and started stomping towards Ava and the jock.

“What did I miss?” I heard Maya ask behind me and turned to face her. Pulling her close to me so that I could feel her body against mine, I wrapped her in my arms and tried to explain what was going on.
 

“Oh, he’s jealous. Are they together?"
 
I felt like the shittest friend in the world because even with all of this is going on, my attention was on her bikini clad body against mine and how much I wanted to kiss her, so I did. As our tongues brushed against each other, I pulled her even closer to me. Taking the opportunity, I slowly moved my hands over her, skimming the tips of my fingers up her spine before sinking my hand into her thick hair and grabbing a handful at the base of her skull so that I could gently pull her head back to deepen the kiss even more.
 
Capturing her responding moan in my mouth, I swept my other hand down her body to her thigh, making sure not to go so quickly that I scared her off. Thankfully she seemed to be at the same place that I was, and her arms wound around my neck bringing her harder against the worst and most painful erection I’d ever had my life. Blue definitely wasn’t my color, how the fuck do Smurfs survive with this shit?
 

I almost lost my mind and dropped to the floor when she started to rub against my hard on, but instead I grabbed a handful of her perfect ass and rubbed my torso gently against her. Just as my hand started to move around to cup her the biggest pain in the ass in the world claimed his title yelling, “Yo Ren, Maya - you staying for the campfire BBQ?"
 

Anyone else would have thought that it was an innocent and genuine question until you saw the shit eating grin desperate to break free on his face.
 

As always he couldn’t keep up the pretense long, “Or are you just roasting Ren’s weiner tonight?” Feeling Maya shaking against me I swore right then and there that I was gonna kill the little shit, but instead of tears, she was laughing and biting her lip.

“You find that funny do ya baby?” I growled staring at the lip that she was biting and thinking back thirty-seconds to when I was sucking on it.
 

“A bit,” she whispered back, staring at my mouth and making me groan. Her eyes flashed up to mine, and I saw the cheekiest look on her face. “And I’m thinking that revenge on that ass is gonna be sweet,” making me roar out a laugh. As we both turned around to look at Cole, his grin slowly fell from his face as he looked between us, gulped and then walked quickly back into the lake giving Dash a wide berth.