The following story is a work of fiction that features characters developed by Janet Evanovich. No money has been earned through writing this story. Any similarities to real events or persons are entirely coincidental.

Although a stand-alone, this book builds upon the previous books in my series. The first one is a bit cupcake-y, but the rest are pure babes and develop the relationships between the characters. For maximum enjoyment, I suggest that you read them in the following order:

22 Caliber

Trigger Happy 23

Morelli's Argument 23.5

Ranger 23.75

Threatening 24

Fixation 25

Security 26

Sneaky 27

Date Night at the Movies 27.1

Meeting Maria 27.2

The Intervention 27.3

Envious 28

Dickie's Demise 28.1

Mob Matters 28.2

Altercation at Giovichinni's 28.3

Numbskull 29

Toxic 30

Obit 31

In recognition of the fact that I'm a binge reader and don't personally like to wait for updates, I will try to post at a minimum at nights on a Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday schedule (although it could be on a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule, depending upon where you live in the world), barring unseen life events. However, in the past I have periodically posted extra chapters to celebrate achieving some personal milestone – or just because I like the way the sun is shining that day – so you might want to watch for those. Since I do that relatively frequently, if you are enjoying the story you might want to follow it rather than continually check back.

Reviews, as always, are greatly appreciated. I have a few people who regularly review for me, and I'd like to thank you for that. Your reviews have given me the confidence to write another story. As a thank you for leaving reviews, for every 25 reviews I generally post an extra chapter on top of my three times per week schedule. I appreciate all reviews and try to respond to each and every one. Please note that I cannot respond to reviews that have been posted by guests.

Thank you for reading my story. I hope you enjoy it!

~ Sarah ~

Chapter One

I shut down the last store site on my computer and sighed with relief. I had selected gifts for my family, Connie and Lula, Ranger, Julie, Ranger's family, and Ella and her husband, Luis. Connie and Lula were two people that I worked with. Ranger was my fiancé and Julie was his thirteen-year old daughter, Ella was our housekeeper and Luis was our corporate caretaker. My name was Stephanie Plum, and I was pleased to say that, aside for a few small things for Ranger's stocking, I was finished my Christmas shopping.

This would be my first Christmas with Ranger. Also known as Ricardo Carlos Manoso, he was incredibly sexy and I didn't know why he was with me. He was Cuban-American in descent, and had short dark brown hair, dark brown eyes and a heart-stopping smile. He was six inches taller than my 5'7" frame, and had an actual six-pack and all the other muscles that went with being in optimal shape. Women drooled when he walked by. I was no exception to that rule. He listened well, saw much, smiled little and laughed rarely, although he had smiled more often and laughed more frequently since I had moved into his apartment. He said I made him happy.

I remember reading an article in some woman's magazine that said that couples who got together were about the same level of attractiveness. In other words, it said a studmuffin wouldn't settle with a dog. I proved that study to be wrong. Ranger was the total opposite to me. I had shoulder-length brown curly hair and blue eyes and was average in build and looks. Ranger says that I'm beautiful and sexy, and all I can say is that I think he needs glasses. Unlike Ranger, there was nothing remarkable about me.

Ranger and I had known each other for years and, over the years, had become best friends. We had been dancing around a romantic relationship for almost as long as I have known him – even while I had been going out with my ex – so when I broke up with my former boyfriend, it was natural for Ranger and me to start dating. I had broken up with my ex eight months before, started officially going out with Ranger two months after that and had moved in with Ranger two and a half months ago. Our relationship had been developing slowly over several years, but when I broke up with my ex the momentum on our relationship dramatically gained speed like a rising exponential graph. Now, eight months later, I was engaged to him.

About the same time as I moved in with Ranger I became pregnant, although I didn't know it until I had lived with him for almost five weeks. Once I knew, however, my life changed drastically in every way and it had been a struggle mentally, physically and professionally. I had never wanted a baby. I didn't even like babies. In fact, I had been fighting against the fact that I was pregnant until I almost lost the baby. However, like most people when something is almost taken away from them, I decided that I really wanted it and jumped on board the baby wagon with both feet. Or would that be the baby carriage?

Physically, being pregnant was tough. I felt sick all the time. Now that I was ten weeks along, I had thought that it would have started to abate by this point. Apparently, I was wrong. At the end of every day I prayed that the day that had just finished was the worst day, and that I would soon be travelling down the far side of the hill. And every morning I would realize that I hadn't yet reached the crest. Despite spending a significant amount of time hunched over the toilet, my pants were starting to get tight and I was living in yoga pants that had more forgiving waistbands than my uniform fatigues. However, they say that there is always something good in everything, and the good news was that my breasts were expanding beyond the holding capabilities of my bra. Since I was fairly average in size, I could use all the help that I could get.

Professionally, it was even tougher than it was physically. I had two jobs. The first was working as a bounty hunter for my cousin, Vinnie. Vinnie ran Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, one of a few bonding agents used by felons in the Trenton area. When a felon was arrested, there was a period of time between the arrest and the hearing, and most of the time the felon didn't want to wait in jail while he or she waited for their hearing. Most of the time, the judge awarded bail, or the ability of the felon to pay a sum of money to the courts for the chance to roam free before their trial. When the felon showed up for their trial, the money was returned to them.

However, a significant number of felons didn't have the cash available to pay their bail. That's where the bail bondsman came into play. For the price of fifteen percent of the price of the bond and the provision of some collateral, the bondsman would lend the felon the money to pay the bail. When the felon showed up at court and got the bail money back, they returned the money to the bondsman and the bondsman returned the collateral – but the bondsman kept the fifteen percent.

Some felons, however, decided not to show up for their hearing, and that made the bondsman very cranky. Without that money returned, they couldn't earn another fifteen percent. To get their money back they sent out a bounty hunter, aka me, to capture the felon and return them to the justice system. For that I got two-thirds of the bail fee, or ten percent of the price of the bond. Those ten percents added up over time and, although it wasn't a lucrative career, it paid the bills and was something I enjoyed most of the time – and I figured that, if you could say that you liked a job most of the time, it was a good job.

I had blackmailed my way into the position a few years before when I had lost my job as a lingerie buyer. I was just as happy to have lost that job. I had gotten into lingerie buying in the hopes that I would be given free samples. However, the position failed me and my lingerie selection remained composed of T&A shorts and numerous t-shirts that were too stretched out or too stained to wear as regular shirts. Unlike being a lingerie buyer, being a bounty hunter suited me. I didn't have to wear heels or nylons, I had flexible hours and perhaps most importantly, I was able to make regular runs to the Tasty Pastry for my daily doughnut fix.

However, it wasn't unheard of to roll around on the ground as you were restraining a skip – and that was the tamest thing that had happened to me. I had been shot, stabbed, kidnapped, firebombed, punched, bitten and bruised all in the line of duty, and because of that Ranger and I had decided to have me focus on my second job while I was pregnant.

My second job was working for Ranger as his lead researcher. Ranger was the CEO and owner of an ultra-elite security company called Rangeman. They provided all manner of security services, from system design to installation to monitoring to cyber-security to providing security guards to providing bodyguards to skip tracing for all the violent skips that I was too nervous about capturing myself. Housed in a discreet seven-story office building in the heart of Trenton, the company had in the past worked for the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the Secret Service, and the local and state police departments. There were two offices – the head office that I worked out of in Trenton, and a satellite office in Miami. The company was getting known nationally as having the best system designers, and they'd been used by places like the MoMA, the CURE Insurance Arena, and the White House.

The company had grown dramatically from the two people that it had been when I first met Ranger to the over one hundred and seventy-five people in head office alone that it was today, and it was showing no signs of stopping. Ranger was signing on companies faster than he could keep up, and he was constantly in a hiring mode. It didn't help that his Operations staff were – except for me – only veterans and only male. This significantly reduced the pool of potential employees. Even so, Ranger had developed a skilled team that was very good at their jobs.

With having trouble getting staff, Ranger had recently decided to hire females into his positions as security guards. He would still prefer to hire former veterans, but hiring females would greatly help out his labor shortage. He had about a hundred security guards on staff, but he had recently signed on three new clients who wanted security guards for their multi-location companies, and he was in the position that he needed to hire many more guards to cover their needs. The Sales department had identified ten more potential clients who wanted to hire Rangeman security guards as well. Personally, after seeing how he was struggling to come up with suitable staff, I thought that it would be a good idea for Ranger to open up his hiring requirements so that his staff wasn't all former military – at least for the security guards, anyway. I believed that it was the only way that Ranger would be able to get enough feet on the ground.

Although his administrative and support staff weren't all military men, many of them were…and like his Operations staff, all of them were male. There were only two staff members who were female. I was one. Ella, the staff housekeeper who looked after Ranger's apartment and laundry and made the food for the staff, was the other one. This meant that Ella was viewed as the staff mother and I was viewed as the cosseted little sister. The guys were a great team and together we formed a family of sorts.

Again, knowing how difficult Ranger was finding the hiring of suitable staff, I thought he needed to open up his hiring practice for administrative and support staff as well. It wasn't a bad idea anyway. I didn't know how Ranger had gotten away with only hiring males, but with his increased work with various governmental agencies, I thought it would be good for his staff to have a more diversified representation. I think Ranger had come to the same conclusion, as when he reworked the exercise facilities he was intending to put in both male and female change rooms.

In my role as researcher, I was responsible for inspecting the details of companies and the lives of individuals. I did this first for the Sales Department in a more cursory view, so that they could focus their sales pitch. This also helped us decide whether we wanted to accept that company or that individual as a client. As Ranger says, we ran a clean shop and we wanted our clients to be equally as clean. We wouldn't work for terrorists or drug dealers, and although when Ranger was growing his company he had been known to work for members of the mob, he no longer worked for anyone engaging in criminal activities. He chose, instead, to go after work with the various alphabet agencies. Ranger was a good person, an honorable person who played by his own set of rules, and he felt that the alphabet agencies were a much nicer clientele that used a wider range of his skills in a more legal manner. He didn't mind bending the rules, but he didn't like to actually break them.

So I researched potential clients for Sales. Then, when they were signed on as clients, I researched the background of each person who worked for our client companies. Once the company was up and running with us, I researched all potential new employees for the companies. I did all of this using In-Spect, our in-house designed search engine. It was incredibly invasive and looked at everything from financials to work history to medical history to social media to friends and family. It could tell you everything from your Apgar score at birth to the page you last searched the internet for and everything in-between. I had run my own name through the search engine for a lark a few months before, and had been shocked at what the search engine had pulled up. The only person I had never been able to pull any information up on was Ranger. He was a ghost.

Each search took, on average, half an hour. It took about ten minutes to pull the information, another ten minutes to analyze the information, and the last ten minutes to write up my findings in a summary report and link the search results. The odd search took less time; many took more, especially if I found something using the In-Spect search engine that bore further investigation. Since Ranger was signing on about two companies a week, many with large staffs of one hundred or more people, I had been run off my feet and, although I missed being a bounty hunter, I was too busy to be bored.

With Rangeman becoming known as the best of the best and because we had such a talented staff, the local Trenton Police Department paid a retainer to Rangeman to have them act as consultants to the force. For this, they got access to one of the Rangeman Emergency Response Teams. Rangeman had two ERTs that were on-call one week out of every two, and they were trained to respond to all manner of emergencies. They were all former special tactical unit personnel, whether they were former Rangers, SEALs, Delta Force, whatever, and were highly trained soldiers. Each team was comprised of ten soldiers and a unit commander. For two weeks per month the unit commander was Ranger. For the other two weeks of the month Tank, Ranger's right-hand man and his Vice-President of Operations, was the unit commander. With the ability to respond to an emergency within ten minutes and able to do anything from hostage negotiations to search and rescues, the TPD wanted to have the ability to call upon their expertise when it was needed. The plan was to increase the number of ERTs to four, and have them each work one week per month. Ranger thought that would be more fair to staff, but he wasn't planning on doing that until he had the space to house everyone.

With paying the retainer, the TPD got access to me as well. Periodically, if they were unable to find a lead on a particular case, they would bring some names to me and have me run the names through the In-Spect program. It added some variety to my day, so I enjoyed it. The bad part was that it made me very busy, and we've since brought a part-time researcher on board. Miguel was the person who did the job prior to me taking it over eight months before and, although he preferred doing patrol, he had been accommodating about helping me do the research. He said that he didn't mind doing it part time as long as he could still do patrol each day.

To help us successfully work with the TPD, a detective in the Crimes Against Persons division was assigned as a liaison. Joe Morelli was a good person and a good cop. He was also my former boyfriend and one of my closest friends. Ranger and Morelli had always had respect for each other, but they more recently have started to become friends. Ranger said that he will never become a close friend of Joe's. Joe had too much of a temper and Ranger, with his calm and steady outlook and cool belief that there was no room for anger in life, didn't like surrounding himself with hotheads. But he respected Joe's abilities and he respected the friendship that Joe and I have. He had worked hard at developing a relationship with him and now gets along with Joe well. So Ranger was glad to work with someone he respected as much as Joe, Joe was glad to have the promotion that came with being the liaison, and I was glad to have the ability to interact with Joe on a regular basis. Even though I wasn't going out with him anymore, I still cared deeply about him.

About two weeks ago I had been working incredible hours. Before Miguel started working part-time with me, I was getting behind and trying hard to catch up, and Ranger and I got a scare when I started to bleed. We were worried that I was miscarrying, but after a couple of days the bleeding stopped. I was in the middle of working on a case with Morelli, and Morelli and I identified the felons and sussed out the evidence needed. The next day, Ranger and I were going to the obstetrician's and while Ranger was parking the car, one of the people we were accumulating evidence on saw me and, angry about my role in his arrest, tried to abduct me. I was able to restrain him, but while I was rolling around on the ground with him he kicked me hard in the stomach – and I started bleeding heavily. For the last week I had been restricted to lying down for twenty hours a day. I was bored and unhappy. Miguel, who had been taken off patrol completely to fill in for me, was bored and unhappy, and the only good thing I could say about it was that it had given me a chance to get my Christmas shopping done.

I was appreciative of the fact that I hadn't had to go out to do my shopping that I had done so far. Like most New Jersey citizens, I looked at Christmas shopping as a competitive sport. Finding the closest parking spot to the mall, butting into lines, snatching the last of a particular item – it was a sport that I was good at. I, however, didn't find any great joy in it. The canned Christmas music, the screaming brats, the throngs of people just didn't do it for me. I usually left my shopping until the last week before Christmas. I was one week early in getting my shopping done or, as much as I could do from the sofa in our apartment, and I was quite proud of myself. I thought I might have to do more online shopping in the future as well. It was a much saner way of getting my shopping done. Dangerous, because it was easier to spend money, but saner.