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. ”
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.”