“I’m sorry, did I mess with your plans, Raiden? Were there more ways you could use me like Bodhi and Heather used me before you threw me away?”
At her words, Raid went completely still.
Then he asked, dangerously quietly, “Come again?”
She missed the danger, but she didn’t miss his words. “You used me and now you’re here acting like a jerk. Why?”
“How did I use you?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t go to the table, tell you I overheard, allow you to explain the intricacies of your plan of pretending you were into me so you could ascertain if I was in on my oh so very ex-friends’ fiendish plot to use my afghans as cover for transporting drugs. So I don’t know all the ways you used me. I just know you, like them, used me.”
“Pretending I was into you?” Raid whispered, and she threw up her hands.
“Raiden, I know,” she snapped.
“You don’t know shit,” he clipped.
“Really? So, you don’t notice me for months—no, for years—then suddenly you’re everywhere I am and how I’m,” she lifted up her hands and did air quotation marks, “linked to drug dealers or transporters or, uh… whatever you call them.”
“Yeah, babe, for years I didn’t notice you, then I did when two pieces of shit used a kind, trusting woman as cover for transporting dope.”
“Right, then, now that we have that cleared up, you can leave,” she announced.
Jesus.
“I’m not leaving,” he returned.
“Why?” she cried. “It’s over. You know I have no part in it. I don’t know your part in it. I don’t want to know your part in it. But my part is done. This is over. You don’t have to pretend anymore. Why can’t you just go?”
“I’m not pretending jack,” Raid bit out.
“God!” she yelled. “This is insane!”
Then she made a big mistake.
Huge.
She impatiently shoved her hand in her hair, not remembering it was up in a knot. She encountered whatever was holding it up, yanked it out and her hair tumbled in a shining mess around her face and down her shoulders.
Raid watched it, lost it, and advanced.
Hanna retreated, slamming into the wall at the side of the stairs.
Raid caged her in, putting one hand to her hip, fingers spread, pads digging in, one hand to the wall at the side of her head and he bent low so his face was in hers.
She’d quit breathing, which was good.
That meant she couldn’t spout more bullshit.
He forced his voice to gentle when he said, “I get you’re tweaked about this shit. I get you’re hurt that your friends fucked you over and how they did it, which is huge. What you need to get, honey, is that I’m not using you. I’m not pretending jack. I am into you.”
“Stop it,” she whispered.
Fuck him.
“Do not transfer the pain you feel that two people you let into your life and your heart fucked you to me, Hanna,” he warned.
He thought he had the upper hand. He thought if he could get her to calm down and see reason, they’d get past this.
So he was unprepared for Hanna Boudreaux rocking his world.
“I’ve crushed on you since I was six. We were on the same tug of war team three years in a row at Grams’s picnics. We were both out of class and alone in the hall at the same time second semester my freshman year, your senior year. Your locker was nowhere near mine. I don’t know what you were doing in that hallway but I’d gone to the nurse because I had flu and was getting my stuff to go home. You walked by me, looked at me and said, ‘hey’. I said ‘hey’ back, but I don’t think you heard me because you kept walking and didn’t look back. Until the pet store, that was the only word you ever said to me. ‘Hey.’”
Fucking shit.
“Hanna—”
“You left Willow then you came home and I went to Rachelle’s once a week, twice, three times just to catch a glimpse of you. You looked through me, dozens of times. Once you caught me looking at you and you jerked up your chin. You looked right at me and jerked up your chin. Then you looked away. Months later, I run into you in the pet store and it was like you’d never seen me before.”
Christ.
“I don’t remember that at the café,” Raid said softly.
“I know,” she replied. “When you met me, you didn’t know me at all, but I’ve been around for years.”
“Baby, me not remembering you doesn’t mean dick.”
“It does to me.”
He could see that. He knew she was that into him before she told him all that. No woman got that flustered around a man who she wasn’t extremely attracted to. And he’d liked it a fuck of a lot. From the minute she first tucked her hair behind her ear, hiding she was glancing at him to be sure he was still checking her out when she was with Bodhi and her bike.
And he liked it more than a fuck of a lot that she knew she was on his tug of war team when he was fucking eleven or whatever and remembered them walking by each other in the hall in high school years ago.
It was cute. It was sweet.
It was her.
He just didn’t understand the history of it, but Hanna explaining the length and extent of her crush on him explained a lot about her behavior the last week and a half. Raid could see that his not noticing her would cut deep.
He moved his hand from the wall to wrap it around the side of her neck. She tried to jerk away, but he dug his fingers in and pushed closer. This had the desired effect. She quit moving.
“A buddy of mine has some issues in Denver,” Raid explained. “Those issues leaked to Willow. He called me in, contracting me to find the supplier who’s been shifting drugs through Willow. This asshole is slippery. Every lead we got led to shit. He’s got soldiers everywhere, but he’s a ghost. Honey, you might have been at Rache’s, I might have seen you, but I had a lot of shit on my mind.”
“You thought I was involved with drug people and investigated me. You got involved with me to investigate me.”
“I got involved with you to get involved with you, but I also had to clear you of that shit so we could move on and get his fuckin’ guy.”
“Raiden, can’t you see how I can’t see that I’ve been around, you’ve even looked right at me and didn’t see me and now, all of a sudden, you’re into me, and how I can’t believe you’re actually, well… into me?”
“How the fuck can you make something that makes no sense make sense?” he asked back.
“So you understand what I’m saying?”
“I do and it might make sense, honey, but it’s still whacked.”
Her eyes rolled to the ceiling.
“Hanna, look at me,” he ordered.
Her eyes rolled back.
“I’m into you,” he told her.
“I don’t believe you,” she told him.
“Why the fuck not?” he asked.
“I just don’t,” she answered.
“Christ, honest to God, you think I’m a man who comes back to his hometown, a town his mother and sister still live in, takes the town’s beloved native daughter—who also happens to be the great-granddaughter of the town’s matriarch —out to dinner in order to play her, and I’d do that shit at Chilton’s where everyone can see?”
She blinked.
She hadn’t thought of that.
Thank fuck, he was getting somewhere.
Raid kept going.
“And you think I’m a man who lays out bullshit lines to cute, sweet, pretty women and keeps at it after a job is fucked just for shits and grins?”