April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme)

DANI APRIL

Copyright ©

Chapter One

Raven looked out at the nightclub and stuck her tongue out when she saw how crowded it was. Not another night working in this place, and it was Friday night too, their busiest night of the week. That stupid band was up on stage, playing off-key like it always did. The lead singer knew the owner, and that was the only reason they were allowed to play here. That and the fact they were loud, and the loud music packed the dance floor.

My God, Raven thought. She was a college graduate, she shouldn’t have to handle this stuff, she should get to work in an office and sit through long corporate meetings that bored the hell out of her but paid really well. Working the nightclub scene was just a big hassle, always had been, but it was starting to grate on her nerves more than ever after she graduated from college and was still stuck there with no better job prospects in sight.

“Hey, sweetheart?” called one of her customers from a corner table. “How about another round of shots for me and my boys over here?”

“Coming right up, sir,” Raven told the customer in the corner table.

She went back to fill her myriad drink orders at the bar. Susan, another waitress at the nightclub and one of Raven’s only friends, sidled up next to her with her own drink orders to fill.

“I think that guy over in the corner likes you,” Susan teased her.

“He is kind of cute,” Raven admitted, “but not my type.”

“What kind of tips you bringing down so far tonight?” Susan asked her as they waited for the bartender to fill their orders.

“Don’t ask,” Raven said, feeling self-conscious because her tips were always the lowest.

“That bad, huh?”

“Yeah,” Raven shrugged. “You know me.”

“You got to be friendlier to the customers.”

“I serve them their drinks,” Raven protested. “I don’t spill any on them. What more do they want?”

“A smile would be a place to start.”

“I have a phony smile for all my customers.”

“Yeah, but it is phony. They can tell.”

The bartender set Raven’s drinks out for her, and she picked them up and started making her rounds back across the crowded floor. When she got to the corner table there were catcalls all around because their next rounds of shots had arrived.

“You’re Raven?” the cute guy, who was the leader of the group, asked her, reading her name tag.

“Yes. That’s my name,” she told him as she set their drinks about the table.

“That’s a really sexy name,” he told her.

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Do you go to school over at the university?” he asked her. “I thought I’ve seen you around before.”

“I used to. I graduated last semester.”

“Cool,” the cute guy exclaimed, and somehow Raven knew that he was being just as insincere as she was. “What did you major in?”

“Computer science.”

“What are you doing still working here?”

“Jobs are hard to find. The economy sucks.”

“I might be able to help you,” the cute guy said, handing his business card to her. “I’m a supervisor at my company. We’re always hiring IT folks. Why don’t you give me a call sometime?”

Raven took the card without looking at it and stuffed it in her tip pocket. “Can I get you all anything else?” she asked, ignoring the cute guy.

“You really don’t want to be working here with an IT degree from the university,” the cute guy persisted. “Call me up. We could get together and have a drink and talk about my company.”

“I’ll come back later to check on you guys,” Raven said, flashing her phoniest smile, and walking away from the table.

She hated guys like that. They wanted to be in control. Raven was an only child and a certified tomboy and she enjoyed being the party in control. The guy over in the corner was cute and well built. He probably had a good job and might have even been smart, but as far as Raven was concerned he had one flaw she could not get past. He liked to be the boss, and that wouldn’t work for her. He might have wanted a relationship or he might just have wanted to get in her pants, but whatever he wanted, it didn’t matter to her because she had no interest in him.

The cute guy had flustered her, and she was not watching where she was going and ran right into one of the other waitresses. Her drink tray came back into her chest and spilled the drinks down her blouse. Now she would smell like a mix of Jack Daniel’s and light beer for the rest of the night.

“Hey, watch where you’re going,” the other waitress told her.

“Shit!” Raven exclaimed.

She had to hustle back to the bar and get her drinks refilled, and didn’t have time to go and wipe the stinking drinks off her clothes. She caught a man and woman, two of her customers, at a table near the dance floor laughing at her. Her blood pressure boiled to an unhealthy level, and she wanted to go over and wring their necks. Very funny, they got a free comedy show watching her spill drinks all over herself, and yuppies like them probably wouldn’t even leave her much of a tip. Not that any amount of tipping in the world could compensate for the type of night she was having.

“You look as angry as heck,” Tony, the bartender, told her as she came back up to his bar to beg for more drink refills.

“Just not my night,” she told him, and thought to herself that it just wasn’t her year, nor did it seem to be her decade so far.

“You got to learn to relax,” he told her. “Now if you’d taken me up on that offer to go down to Cancun last month you’d be in a whole different mental place right now.”

“I’m sure.” Raven gave another phony smile, this one only halfhearted since Tony was just an employee. The muscles in her face were almost worn out from having to force herself to smile when she didn’t feel like it.

“You know Denise, the girl who ended up going down there with me,” Tony explained to her as he poured her drinks. “She had a great time. She said it was the best time of her life. We had incredible sex all weekend.”

“That’s good to know,” Raven told him, feeling slightly nauseated at the thought of Tony having sex with anyone. Tony was definitely not her type.

After she had finished serving her next round of drinks, she got a chance to hang for a moment with Susan back at the food order counter by the kitchen.

“Do you see that guy over by the front door?” Susan asked her.

Raven looked over by the door but couldn’t see anyone, at least not anyone she wanted to see. There was just the confusion of the crowd all around.

“He was asking about you,” Susan told her. “He knew your name and everything.”

Raven looked again. The nightclub was a dark and loud place, and packed with the Friday night crowd, it was hard to pick out any one individual. Raven still couldn’t locate the man.

“He wanted to know if he was sitting at one of your tables, which obviously he wasn’t because I was his server,” Susan continued as she waited for her chicken wing orders to come through from the kitchen. “Then he wanted to know which tables were yours and asked if he could change seats and go to one of your tables. He was sort of weird.”

“Well I don’t see anybody like that out there now,” Raven said. “So maybe he left.”

“He’s probably moved over to your station by this time.”

“Just my luck,” Raven said. “Thanks for warning me.”

“Put that phony smile back on,” Susan commanded as her chicken wing order arrived. “It looks better than the frown you’ve got now.”

Raven flashed her smile. Susan laughed and went away with her order. What a horrible night and it was only half over. Could it get any worse than this? Raven didn’t feel like crying so much as she did laughing at herself for being such a miserable failure. Some days it really came down hard, and this was one of those days, but why did days like this always seem to last forever? She just wanted it to be over so she could go home, crawl into bed, read a romance novel, and then pass out and sleep for the next twenty years.

The nightclub stayed open until : a.m. on Friday, and it was already after two, so the crowd was slowly starting to thin out. After six straight hours on her feet without a break, Raven was so ready for the night to be over.

“We’re all going to an after-hours party over at Tony’s apartment downtown,” Maylene, one of the other waitresses, told Raven as they were getting ready to close. “We’re all going to get really stoned. You should come with us.”

“Sounds fun,” Raven said, though it sounded nothing of the kind to her. “But don’t you find Tony just really gross?”

“He is, a little I guess,” Maylene admitted, “but you know his uncle owns the club, so it can’t hurt to go over to his pad every now and then and see what’s happening.”

“I just can’t,” Raven told her.

“Okay, suit yourself.” Maylene stuck up her nose at Raven and moved away.

Raven thought that maybe Maylene and Tony would make the perfect couple. If they ended up as a couple, she hoped they would be happy. Sometimes she thought that kind of happiness was only meant for other people and never for her. She was just too sad and tired that night to think about going to any party.

“I need you to stay and clean up after we close,” Leroy, the club manager, told her as she was getting her last drink orders filled for the night.

“I stayed last night,” Raven protested. “Get one of the others to do it tonight.”

“They’re going to Tony’s party. You’re not,” Leroy told her. “Anyway you’re getting paid for it, so quit complaining.”

“But it’s not fair!” Raven said, pushing her luck with her boss. “I’m tired and I just want to go home and lay down. I’ve been on my feet for six hours.”

“Tough cookies, cupcake. Life ain’t fair. You’re staying to clean up. End of discussion.”

“Damn!” Raven swore under her breath and headed back out on the floor, burdened down with what she hoped would be her last orders of the night.

Then she saw him. He was a beautiful guy, maybe a year or two older than she was, tall and slender, with rather long, dark hair and an honest look out of his eyes. He was wearing cowboy boots and looked out of place sitting by himself over in the corner, sitting at the same table that Mr. Cute Guy had occupied with his buddies a couple of hours earlier.

Raven hurried to bring her drinks to her customers, and then she went over to the guy’s table.

“We’re closing in half an hour,” she told him. “But if you like, I can get you a fast one before you have to go.”

He was squinting at her chest in the darkness of the night club. She realized he was trying to read her name tag. After he had read her name, he looked up at her with an uncertain smile on his handsome face.

“
You’re
Raven White?” he asked her.

“Yeah, I am,” Raven said, taken aback by the question. “How’d you know that? My tag only has my first name.”

“I’m Connor.” He stood up and offered her his hand.

Raven didn’t know what else to do but to shake hands with him.

“Have you heard the news yet?” he asked her.

“No I haven’t,” Raven said suspiciously, wondering if this guy was some kind of nutcase. “What news is that? Are we at war or something?”

“Oh, that’s good,” Connor said. “I wanted to be the first one to tell you.”