Hail No (Hail Raisers Book 1)

by Lani Lynn Vale

  “What do we do now?” I asked, wondering if he cared if we got the bed messy.

  Because I could feel it between my legs. It was pouring out around his cock now, which was quickly deflating inside of me.

  Was it supposed to happen that fast?

  Porn never showed that stuff…what happens after.

  Should I get up and run to the bathroom? Should I grab for the sheet that I could feel around my ankle? What about my shirt?

  I’d just about decided that my shirt would be the best option when he dealt with it for me, handing me a t-shirt—his—and ordering me to catch it as he lifted me by the hips.

  I did, and covered not just me, but him as well. Except, by doing so, I also ended up grabbing him by the curlies, too, causing him to curse when he lifted me off of him.

  “Oww!” he cried out, pausing midair in his attempt to unseat me from his cock. “You have my fucking hair down there in your iron grip.”

  I bit my lip to keep from laughing.

  “If I let them go, you’ll get your…errrm, stuff…all over you,” I informed him. “I’m not any good at this yet.”

  He started to laugh, and then pushed me over to my knees, cursing only a few times as I practically ripped his pubic hair straight out.

  “Jesus,” he grunted. “Remind me not to do that again.”

  I would’ve laughed, really, I would have, but I was scared for the integrity of the shirt I was currently holding over my vagina.

  “Ready for a shower now?”

  He watched me, eyes resting for a few long moments at the shirt between my legs, before he nodded.

  “Yeah. Probably should,” he murmured. “I think I still have dirt in my hair. Another shower can’t hurt.”

  The moment his big body was at my back, I smiled…and then led him to the bathroom.

  Nothing had ever felt more right, yet so wrong, than they did right in this moment.

  Chapter 15

  Before coffee: Hates everybody.

  After coffee: Feels good about hating everybody.

  Evander

  “So, are you ever going to tell me what you did to get a prison sentence?” she asked quietly.

  I didn’t want to talk about it.

  But this was the first time she was talking in well over an hour without breaking out in a crying jag, and I’d do damn near anything to get her to stop doing that.

  “Do you want to hear what they say happened, or what really happened?” I questioned.

  She turned her head to stare at me, and I let my eyes roam over her face.

  Her eyes were puffy from crying, and her cheeks were still wet from the most recent bout of tears that’d wracked her small body.

  How someone as small as her could hold that many tears, and cry that hard, was beyond me.

  I wanted nothing more than to throw my arms around her shoulders and pull her securely in to my chest, but I knew that she didn’t need what followed me around like a black cloud.

  I had the worst luck ever—hence, my prison sentence.

  “Tell me what happened,” she ordered.

  I sighed, knowing that this was going to hurt, seeing the look on her face when she heard what I did to get a prison sentence, but I chose to tell her anyway.

  It was better to get this out of the way now so I didn’t get even more attached to her than I already was.

  “I was driving home one night after work when I saw a woman walking down the side of the road.”

  She raised her brows at me.

  “That sounds familiar.”

  I snorted out a gruff laugh.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Except, what I didn’t know, was that she was a prostitute.”

  Her mouth dropped open.

  “You…you picked up a prostitute?” she screeched.

  I nodded.

  “Saw a girl on the side of the road. Picked her up because she was in fucking heels, and I felt sorry for her,” I mumbled. “It was dark, and she was on the main road that didn’t even have a shoulder for her to walk safely on. Then, I realized that she was pregnant. So, I picked her up, and immediately got her to a shelter. I dropped her off and didn’t think another thing of it until I arrived at work the next day to find the police there waiting for me.”

  “And what happened then?” she pushed, turning on the step to face me.

  “I was arrested for the kidnapping and assault of the prostitute that I tried and failed to pick up the night before.”

  “But…wouldn’t admitting that she was a prostitute send her to jail, too?”

  I nodded. “Yes, and she got herself beat up while she was at it, too, so it could look all official and shit.”

  “And what? Did she have any witnesses?”

  I nodded my head.

  “One.”

  “And who was that?”

  “The police chief.”

  Her mouth dropped open.

  “Hostel’s police chief?”

  I grunted in reply. “The one and only.”

  “So the man in charge of all the police in our town is dirty?”

  I nodded again.

  “What about all the other police officers?”

  I shrugged. “Don’t know, and honestly, don’t care.”

  “Why are you back?” she asked. “If they got you once, they can get you again.”

  I grinned then, showing my straight white teeth to her.

  “I wasn’t going to run and hide,” I admitted. “Doing that would show the dirty bastard that he’d won, and I’ll be damned if I give him that out.”

  She grumbled under her breath. “Did you figure out why she accused you of all that?”

  I grimaced.

  “There was a drug dealer down the street from here that always did his deals right outside my house. Him and another guy would pull onto my property and do their business at the end of my drive. I was pissed off that the little fucker kept doing his shit on my street, let alone in front of my house, so I beat the shit out of him and told him to move along,” I murmured. “He didn’t take too kindly to it, so he got one of his girls to play the damsel in distress card.”

  “And you fell for it, hook, line and sinker,” she guessed.

  I nodded. “I sure the fuck did.”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” she murmured. “There are checks and balances in the system to prevent this from happening.”

  “The so called ‘system’ failed me,” I told her bluntly. “A cop could’ve done a little more digging and gotten to the bottom of it, but since what the detective found out fit me, and my background seemed to fit the situation, he didn’t bother to look any further,” I groaned. “I also couldn’t afford a fucking lawyer, so I had one appointed to me. The only problem was that his wife was pregnant, and he didn’t want to find a way for me to get off, because he kept comparing the prostitute to her—whether I did it or not, so he chose to slack off. I fired him and tried to represent myself, but that didn’t go all that well either.”

  “So you served time for assault, robbery and kidnapping?”

  I nodded. “Assaulting the pimp was never one of the charges against me. Apparently, he allowed me to go to jail as a punishment for beating the shit out of him since he knew that he couldn’t take me in a fight. One that he knew I’d be willing to give him if he’d wanted it.”

  “So you beat the shit out of her pimp, two other guys that were with him, and were punished by going to jail for assault, kidnapping, and what…murder?”

  “Not murder,” he disagreed. “The detective did do something right. Found out that the prostitute had lost her baby the previous night in the ER. She was scheduled to have a D&C the next day.”

  All Kennedy could do was shake her head.

  “And where was your brother during all of this?”

  I grimaced. “That detective I was talking about?”

  Her mouth dropped open in anger.

&
nbsp; “He did not.”

  I shook my head. “No, the detective wasn’t him. But he’s best friends with him. You know that guy whose truck I recovered from Lowe’s?”

  She nodded, eyes wide.

  “That’s him.”

  “What a douche,” she grumbled, still shaking her head. “You should find a better lawyer. You could get compensation. You could get money from the state for wrongfully convicting you and sending you to jail!”

  I grunted. “Takes money, darlin’.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “But that’s not fair!”

  I laughed humorlessly. “Didn’t anyone tell you that life wasn’t fair?”

  Plus, I was doing something about it…just not through the legal system.

  “Well, if I had money, I’d hire a lawyer for you. A private investigator, too.”

  I dropped my hand to her head and curled it around her neck before I pulled her to me.

  “Don’t get yourself caught up in this,” I told her, mouth only inches away from her, making us eye to eye.

  She narrowed her eyes, and I squeezed the back of her neck lightly.

  “Trust me on this. With the chief of police, Fowler, being dirty, and that shitty Detective Mueller, you really won’t get anywhere with this. Dumbass number one will fuck you over for a pretty penny, and Detective Mueller already dislikes you for having anything to do with me over him.”

  “Not to mention he’s obviously a shit detective.”

  I shrugged at her words.

  She wasn’t wrong.

  “Leave it be,” I ordered her.

  She looked away, but I turned her back to face me with my hand that was still on her neck.

  “Promise me that you won’t get involved in this,” I said. “When I leave here…you need to leave it that way. You need to stay the fuck away from me and not look back.”

  Her face became thunderous.

  “I’m not staying away from you just because there are dumb people in this town who don’t know their assholes from their elbows.”

  I squeezed her neck and got up, grabbing my jeans from the floor.

  After shrugging them on, I reached down to the floor for my socks and sat on the bed before putting them on.

  “You’re leaving?”

  I didn’t bother to look at her.

  If I did something stupid like that, I might very well decide that I wanted to stay.

  And I couldn’t stay.

  It was already bad enough that I’d fucked her—without a condom I might add.

  Something so fuckin’ stupid I couldn’t even begin to count the ways.

  “Yeah, I’m leaving,” I told her. “Better for you if I’m not here.”

  She touched my back. “Will you come to me tomorrow?”

  I finished putting on my socks and reached for my boots, dislodging her hand.

  “I don’t know that that is a good idea,” I told her bluntly. “The more we’re seen together, the worse things will get for you. If you need me, you can call. But no, I won’t be here.”

  Which made me feel like utter shit.

  But this was her life we were talking about. Her sister was dying, yes, but she had to go on living. And she had to keep doing it in this very town that was as corrupt as fuck.

  So no, I wouldn’t be putting her in any more danger than I already was.

  My plans were already set into place.

  And she wasn’t a part of them.

  Once I slipped my second boot on, I got up and walked out without another word.

  I did stop once I made it out of her drive to call a contractor to come fix her roof, though. It wouldn’t do to have her living in a place that was dangerous. I couldn’t keep her safe from me by staying away and fix her house at the same time.

  Time for plan B.

  Chapter 16

  I love how fresh my bathroom smells when I kill a spider with an entire bottle of Febreeze.

  -Meme

  Kennedy

  The day after Evander walked out, I was literally broken.

  I was standing outside of my sister’s hospital room, and I was looking in at my dad at her bedside, along with her three kids, my brother, as well as my brother-in-law.

  They were all talking quietly around Trixie’s bedside, and I wondered if I should even bother going in.

  They’d obviously been there for a while.

  Food was on the table in the corner, and there were three beds made up at the back of the room.

  The kids were all sitting on the bed in the corner of the room, all of them huddled onto one cot, staring at an iPad that the eldest boy, DJ, was holding.

  DJ was the first one to see me standing there, and the moment he did, his eyes lit up.

  “Aunt Kennedy!” He handed off the iPad to his sister, Lucy, who discarded it, too, and started running toward me.

  I dropped to my knee in the hallway and opened my arm as two wiggly bodies hit me with all the force that an eight-and-a-half-year-old and a four-year-old could muster.

  The last one to hit me was little Jaxon, and he wormed his way in between his brother and sister and put his sticky hands on my neck and offered me a kiss.

  “Where have you been?”

  That was DJ, and his tone of voice sounded accusatory.

  “I was told that visiting hours started at eight. I would’ve been here earlier had I known that I could, bud.”

  DJ looked into my eyes to gauge my sincerity.

  “The doctors let us in here all night since mommy’s sick.”

  My heart clenched.

  “Are you okay, buddy?”

  He nodded, but I could tell the only thing that was keeping him strong was the fact that his brother and sister were standing with us, rapt attention on his every word.

  Not that the four-year-old, Lucy, or the three-year-old, Jaxon, really had any clue what was going on.

  Likely, they never would.

  One day, Trixie would be here and the next she wouldn’t, and they’d never understand what happened.

  “I’m here now, buddy. Have y’all had something to eat?”

  My eyes went to Darren, who was practically glaring at me.

  “No, they haven’t had anything in a couple of hours.”

  I looked at Trixie, who was in the bed lying deathly still. “Do you…do you want me to take them to the cafeteria for a while?”

  Darren’s jaw clenched. “Yeah, that would be good.”

  I bit my lip and nodded, then turned my head down to stare at Lucy. “Do you want to go to the cafeteria and see what yummy food we can find? I hear they have awesome cookies!”

  I had her at the word ‘cookie’ and knew it.

  She nodded enthusiastically.

  The girl was a cookie monster.

  “Cookie!” she agreed. “Jax, do you want a cookie?”

  Jax would do anything his brother would do, so I looked at DJ and raised my brows. “You want to go?”

  He looked at his mother who was still in the bed, her face bruised, and her hands and arms covered in gauze. “Yeah, that would be okay.”

  I stood up from my kneeling position and held out my hand. “Let’s go.”

  Jaxon and Lucy grabbed a hand, and DJ followed on the other side of Jack.

  “You want to talk about it, buddy?”

  DJ shook his head quickly, averting his eyes so that I couldn’t gauge his honesty.

  My stomach tightened even more.

  “Did you make it to baseball last night?” I asked him, hoping to change the subject.

  “Dad asked if I wanted to go…but no. I didn’t. He was angry that I didn’t, said I had an obligation to the team. But I didn’t want to go.”

  I clenched my jaw. That’d been why I’d never gotten the call to take him. Go figure. Who would’ve thought to call the person that was waiting for your call and tell them that you no longer needed them?

 
“Did someone call your teacher to tell her that you wouldn’t be there today?”

  He shook his head. “No. Dad already got a call from the school for it, too. They said it would be an unexcused absence.”

  I stopped in front of the elevators and pressed the up button, stopping and turning to face him. “How about we call when we get to the cafeteria. I’ll explain to them what’s going on, okay?”

  He looked relieved.

  Darren and Trixie didn’t put the same importance on school that most parents would.

  Baseball, yes. The farm and doing chores, absolutely. School? That would be a big fat no.

  Trixie and Darren barely graduated high school, and they felt that school, although a necessary evil, wasn’t something that was crucial. Especially if there was farming business to be done or they needed the extra hand that DJ could offer.

  How my sister got her nursing degree still baffled me. Then again, it baffled me that she didn’t use it. I would have.

  It was sad, really. Although farming was our way of life, I didn’t think that it needed to be the way of life for everyone.

  Hell, my own personal story of how my meager farming income was killed off—literally—in a little less than a few hours was proof enough that you should always have a backup plan.

  Sure, I had gone to college and graduated with a degree in business, but I hadn’t worked an office job with a boss in well over a half decade.

  “Sounds good, Aunt Kennedy,” he hesitated. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  My face softened at the sweet boy’s words. “I’m here if you need me. If you ever need me…just call, okay?”

  DJ looked away before I could get a gauge on how he was really doing, but the small glimpse that I did see was enough to tell me that he wasn’t doing anywhere near as well as he was making himself out to be.

  Dammit.

  I’d have to have a talk with Darren.

  After this was all over. I’d have him keep an eye on DJ to make sure that things didn’t get out of hand.

  ***

  Turns out, the cafeteria did have amazing cookies. We all had two, and when the cafeteria workers got a load of Lucy’s beautiful blue eyes, they gave her some hot ones from the back. And a glass of milk.