Raid - By Kristen Ashley Page 0,74

“Do you think the swing can withstand this activity?”

“I don’t know. What I do know is I wanna find out.”

I bit my lip and looked back at the hooks.

I then stopped biting my lip and surveying the hooks because I was up, and then I was up, again being hefted on Raiden’s shoulder.

“Raid!” I shrieked.

“We’ll break the swing in another time, maybe when you’re drunk,” he muttered, walking to the front door.

“I was good,” I told his back. “I was just strategizing.”

“You don’t have to strategize a mattress.”

This was true.

We were inside and he’d started up the steps when I informed him, “You can put me down. I can walk.”

“Waste of time,” he replied. He turned on the landing, kept ascending and asked conversationally, “So, clue me in. When am I Raiden and when am I Raid?”

I held onto his tee and stared at his back a second before I asked, “Sorry?”

We entered my room and he made for the bed. Five strides (I counted) and I was on it and he was on me.

Only then did he explain, “In the beginning all you did was call me Raiden. The first time I seriously tested you and that sweet pussy of yours,” he grinned when I frowned and went on, “you let Raid slip. No one calls me Raiden. Not even my Mom. Now you’re usin’ ‘em both, and I’m tryin’ to sort out where your head is at with which is which.”

I thought about this and then shared, “I’m not certain there’s rhyme or reason to when I use one or the other.”

“Is there rhyme or reason to anything you do?”

For a second I contemplated my eyebrows (which I couldn’t see, but I tried) before I looked back at him. “Not really.”

He’d been smiling when my eyes came back to him, but after I spoke, his smile faded. He cupped the side of my face with his hand, thumb sweeping my cheek then my lips before he said quietly, “My reward.”

I let that slide through me as I turned my face and kissed the palm of his hand.

After I kissed his palm, I said there, “I love it that you think that.”

“Know it,” he corrected and I looked back at him.

“Sorry?”

“Don’t think it, Hanna. Know it.”

That slid through me, too, and I melted (more) underneath him.

“One more thing before we tear each other up,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

Then, even with all that had happened that day, and especially all that had gone on the last twenty minutes, as usual, Raiden Miller still managed to rock my world.

He did this by saying straight out, with feeling, “Thank you, baby, for forgiving me.”

Slowly, I closed my eyes.

I opened them, planted a foot in the bed, rolled him and straddled him, closed them again and kissed him.

Raid kissed me back.

Chapter Fifteen

Big Dick

Six weeks later …

I was carrying Spot out of the vet to my bike, or more like struggling to keep upright under the burden of his weight, when my phone rang. I put him in the basket. He sat on his ample behind, said, “Meow” and faced forward, telling me he was ready to roll.

You could have colored me stunned when Grams and I (well, mostly me, Grams just sat there offering suggestions) grappled for a half an hour trying to get Spot in his kitty carrier. This didn’t work and ended with Spot desperately shoving his kitty face into the corner of the latched screen door and pushing it open enough to force his fat cat body through it. As I chased after him, he heaved his big body onto a porch chair then the porch railing where he jumped into the basket of my bike, making the bike sway precariously. By a miracle, it held. Spot sat down, turned his head and stared at me.

We’d already learned the hard way through earlier tussles pre-visit to the vet that, for reasons only known to Spot, he only accepted rides in Grams’s Buick. So even though Grams never drove it anymore, it was Spot’s checkup day. Therefore I rode to Grams’s house and was going to take the Buick and Spot into town.

Shockingly, Spot seemed absolutely fine in my basket. I tested this theory, rode around in Grams’s driveway awhile, then into town. He rode with me, happy as a clam, kitty nose pointed to the wind rushing through his fur. The vet receptionist wasn’t pleased we showed with no carrier, but she was no stranger to Spot and had learned