Kristen Ashley - Raid

Hanna nodded and he jerked up his chin.

Then he walked out the door, closing it behind him. He was on the steps when he heard it lock.

Raid sat in his Jeep and didn’t pull away until the downstairs lights were off and he saw her shadow moving behind the filmy curtains of her bedroom.

He drove to his place. He tagged the afghan and walked up the side stairs, unlocked his door and moved in.

He pulled off his clothes, yanked the comforter off his mattress, untied the satin ribbons around the afghan and threw it out on his bed.

Then he climbed under it.

He’d been right when he first touched it.

She’d been right when she said it would keep him warm.

Heaven.

Then Raiden Miller fell asleep under the warmth of Hanna’s cashmere, and for the first time in a long time he didn’t have a nightmare.

Not even one.

The next evening…

“Leave it to you, when I’m lookin’ forward to my plans for after the fuckin’ movie, you find a double feature,” Raiden grumbled.

I threw a nervous smile over my shoulder at Raiden, who was carrying a big bucket of popcorn in the crook of his arm and two huge sodas in his hands. He was following me down the aisle of the Willow Deluxe, our theater in town that, against the odds of competition from the huge cineplexes only forty-five minutes away in Denver, stayed in business.

This was mostly because the town liked it. Then again, the citizens of Willow just liked Willow.

Our town was one of those strange exceptions to every rule. We had not gone the way of one-stop convenience and bulk buying economy.

We had a butcher. We had a fruit and veggie shop. We had a non-chain hardware store. We had a grocery store that everyone went to that was family owned and had been for over fifty years. We had a florist, a craft shop, three gift shops, a coffee house, Rachelle’s Café, a pizza joint that did great Italian on the whole, a biker bar, a cowboy bar, a Broncos fans only bar and more.

Including the Deluxe, which was a not-for-profit and stayed in business as well as continued renovations due to the generosity of a town that wanted to keep its old-fashioned, hometown feel.

I loved the Deluxe.

I loved my town.

But my smile was nervous because of what I suspected Raiden’s plans were for after the movie, not because I was still worried and wondering if he was really into me.

No, even if last night, or more accurately, super-early this morning he had not made that very clear, earlier that evening he’d made it even clearer.

Needless to say, Raiden’s idea of “slowing this down” clashed with mine.

In other words, before the movie he took me to Rachelle’s for dinner, and even before that, he’d told me to call his sister to get his number, which, of course, I did not.

He had to know, since Rachelle was at the café a lot even in the evenings, that she might be there and see us together.

And she’d been there.

I’d been at that café a lot and never seen Raiden there with a woman.

Making out with one outside, yes.

Inside, never.

And neither had anyone else, like KC or my other friends, all of whom followed Raiden’s actions like, well, what we were: crazy, creepy Raiden Ulysses Miller stalkers.

So it was not lost on Rachelle (or me) what Raiden taking me to her café meant.

However, this was the least of my worries, when, after she saw us together and her eyes bugged right out of her head, she came rushing to us, exclaiming, “Ohmigod! Hanna! I haven’t seen you in forever! Look at your hair! I love those highlights! They look great! And it’s so long! I barely recognized you.”

Raiden gave me a brows raised look as he pulled out my seat, and I belatedly avoided his eyes as I sat.

“And you’re so tan!” Rachelle went on, stopping at our table. She put two fingers to her cheek, tilted her head and gave me a once over before enquiring, “Have you lost weight?” Then she answered her own question, “No. But definitely toned up. I am so getting my own Schwinn if that’s what it can do.”

I tucked my hair behind my ear and chanced a glance at Raiden to see his lips quirking and his eyes on me.

Rachelle seemed not to notice the looks Raiden and I were giving each other or the fact that neither of us spoke.

Instead, she cried, “Don’t order! You’re both getting the special. Tonight’s special kicks ass, if I do say so myself.” She turned to her brother. “Beer for you, bro.” She turned to me. “Hanna, white wine or diet root beer?”

“Root beer,” I answered.

“On its way,” she replied.

She then bounced off, Raiden’s burnished highlights shining in her long, swinging, brunette hair.

Unfortunately, albeit a gentleman (at times, when he wasn’t cursing or angry and backing me up against walls), Raiden didn’t let this pass.

“So I didn’t notice you or I didn’t recognize you?”

“Whatever,” I mumbled to my knife and fork, which were rolled in a pink paper napkin and rounded with a sticky tabbed slip of paper in robin’s egg blue; one of Rachelle’s Café’s many signatures.

Raiden roared with laughter.

I quit avoiding him, lifted my head to watch and my discomfiture fled because I enjoyed the show. So much I ended up grinning at him.

He ended his laughter with his face getting soft when he saw my grin, his lips ordering, “Come here,” but his body not giving me the chance to comply (or not).

He stretched a long arm across the table and hooked me at the back of the neck. He pulled me across, met me halfway and touched his lips to mine before he let me go.

This was not lost on the many patrons or Raiden’s sister. I felt it and saw it.

So much for going slow.

That was the only thing uncomfortable about dinner, except Raiden told me he’d share about the “job” he was working in town “later”, and he did this in a way I didn’t question at the time, but made me slightly troubled.

Mostly we talked about what went down with Bodhi and Heather. Or more to the point, Raiden quizzed me about my less-than-stress-free day after the police arrested my friends and raided my kitchen warehouse, a large part of that day being taken up with the police escorting me through my warehouse and asking me questions then taking me to the station to ask more and giving me updates in return.

“They found ice?” Raiden asked, his mouth still full of Rachelle’s delicious (she was not wrong) grilled turkey and swiss sandwich with a thin coating of French dressing and chili oil infused cream cheese.

I nodded. “Apparently lots of it. Though, they didn’t share how much.”

“And Joe was cool with you?”

Joe was Sherriff Joe who had been Sherriff Joe since I was about twelve.

I nodded again. “He asked me not to leave town, but he told me he knows I’m not involved.”

“Did he explain the operation?” Raiden went on.

Another nod from me.

“He said the dogs found little baggies of crystal meth at both the bike shop and my place, most of it at my place hidden under the floorboards, but apparently they bagged the drugs at the bike shop. Evidently, Heather packed it with my afghans and shipped it to drug people that were around my boutiques. They got their drugs and hand delivered my shipments to the local shops so no one would be the wiser. Though if the USPS sniffed it out, which thank God they didn’t, they’d trace it back to me and I’d have uncomfortable questions to answer, but Heather and Bodhi would be long gone. Sherriff Joe said Bodhi told the police all this when they interrogated him. They shipped it everywhere, all over the country. Some of my shipments were drug free because they didn’t have a dealer to ship to in that area, but a lot of them were tainted. Bodh”

None of this made me happy, most especially my friends duping me and putting me in danger of being arrested for a felony I had no knowledge of, but also me being such an idiot. Heck, I actually paid Heather to do it. But there was nothing I could do about it except feel relief it was over.

The other part of my day was spent calling the boutique owners that were in the areas the police suspected the drugs were shipped to and, luckily, Bodhi was right. None of them were the wiser. They had no idea and Sherriff Joe advised me not to tell them.

“What’s done is done and unless they read the Willow Chronicle, they’ll never know and don’t need to know.”

I decided to take him up on his advice.

For some reason, Bodhi had used his one phone call to call me, and when I picked up he said, “Banana.” Banana was his what I once thought was sweet, now I thought was unoriginal and grating, nickname for me. “Please don’t hang up. Heather and I wanna ex—”

I’d hung up.

I also told Raiden about this call.

He seemed less happy about it than I was.

“Any more attempts at contact, honey, you disconnect and call me immediately. I’ll shut that shit down,” he’d ordered and the way he did, in his rough and commanding voice edged with more than a hint of anger, I just nodded.

Close to the end of the meal, Raiden had asked, “How’s Miss Mildred about all this shit?”

This was another part of my day I didn’t like, and it was the part I didn’t like it most of all.

“She was shocked,” I answered, a quaver in my voice. I cleared my throat to wash it away. “Upset for me. Worried in general about the state of the world. Rocked that something like this could happen in Willow. Shaken that it happened, and that it happened to me.” I locked eyes with him and concluded, “Not good.”

“Church tomorrow?” he asked, and I nodded again. “She got someone with her tonight?”

“Eunice, her widowed neighbor, is over. They’re watching movies.”

“Good,” he muttered.

“I’m going to keep a closer eye on her for a while,” I told him. “She acts eighty, which everyone knows is the new sixty-five, but she’s not and I can’t forget that. I did manage to talk her into not calling my folks or Jeremy.”

At that, Raiden’s brows shot together before he asked, “Why the fuck did you do that?”

“Uh, sweetheart, Grams freaked. You think I want my parents to freak?” His chin weirdly jolted back when I said the word “sweetheart”, but I ignored that and kept going. “Like Sherriff Joe said, it’s over and they don’t need to know, which, for them, means they don’t need to worry.”

“Baby, not sure that’s a good plan,” Raiden noted gently.

“Sat with Grams and saw her face, Raiden, her hands shaking,” I replied and finished firmly, “It might not be good, but it’s my plan.”

He let it go for which I was grateful.

Now we were at the Deluxe after he’d paid for dinner and tipped his sister. He paid for the tickets and paid for movie refreshments we did not need after a big sandwich and Rachelle’s Colorado-wide famous seasoned shoestring fries.

I knew without worrying even a second about it that this date, without a doubt, was going well, and after our two kisses I was nervous, but excited, about what came after the movies.

But first, I got two movies.

I slid down the aisle and did it babbling, “Film noir night. My favorite night of the year at the Deluxe. And best of all, this year, Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown.”

I sat, immediately tossed my purse in the empty seat beside me and shifted up the armrest—after a huge fundraising drive, the Deluxe had updated their seats two years before. They rocked. They reclined. You could lift up the armrests. They had cupholders. They were awesome.

I reached up to Raiden and divested him of my drink and slid it in my cupholder. As he folded into his seat I relieved him of the popcorn and plonked it down in the area between us that was freed by the raised armrest.

Perfect for both of us to get to.

I also kept blabbing.

“My two favorite noirs, though Touch of Evil and Double Indemnity are up there, and Chinatown is a little creepy, you know, considering the whole Faye Dunaway-John Huston thing, which is gross. I won’t ruin it if you haven’t seen it but… serious ick. I mean, it also isn’t classic noir because it was released in the seventies, but it still kicks noir booty. And Sunset Boulevard is otherwise known as noir lush, this, obviously, according to me. But Billy Wilder may be my favorite director and screenwriter of all time. Sunset Boulevard. Double Indemnity. Sabrina. The Apartment. Some Like It Hot. Noir. Romance. Comedy. He was the master of it all. Seriously, sheer talent.”