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

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 stared at the peppermint tea and dry scone in loathing, and was thankful that the morning sickness seemed to disappear by the time that midmorning came. I was Stephanie Plum, a mutt with a Hungarian and Italian and American heritage. I had shoulder-length brown curly hair and blue eyes, a cute little nose, and was unremarkable in every way…and I was eight and a half weeks pregnant.

The father was Ricardo Carlos Manoso, aka Ranger. He was, as my grandmother said, a tall sip of iced tea on a hot day. He was six inches taller than my 5'7" frame, was Cuban-American in descent, had dark hair and eyes and tanned skin, and had muscles everywhere. I know. I've looked. He was a tough street youth who had developed into a suave security specialist. Named Ranger after his position in the US Rangers, he had left the army a few years ago and started a security company that provided all manner of security services, from staffing trained security guards to designing, implementing and monitoring security systems, to developing firewalls and other cybersecurity measures, to bodyguarding, to skip tracing. There were two offices: the head office here in Trenton, and a satellite office in Miami. In the past, his head office had worked with the Secret Service, the FBI, the CIA, state police and the local Trenton Police Department. I would assume the same was true of his satellite office. His company had grown from just himself and his best friend to a team of now over one hundred and fifty people in just Trenton alone, and it was a growth that didn't appear to be abating.

I should know. I worked part-time for Ranger as a researcher, and it was my responsibility to research all the potential companies that we were pitching our services to, in addition to investigating all our clients' employees to search for security risks. I did that by using an incredibly invasive search engine that we had designed ourselves. In-Spect did good things for us. It was the cornerstone to our service and could find out anything from the date you took your first step to the results of your last gynecological exam. I found that out the hard way. I had put my name through the search engine once for a lark and was shocked at the information that came up. I had learned things about myself that even I didn't know.

So I worked part-time doing research for Ranger. The other half of the time, I worked as a bounty hunter for Vincent Plum Bail Bonds, a company that was started by my cousin. He was a perverted creep who was a surprisingly good bondsman, and a few years ago he let me blackmail my way into the role as a bounty hunter. I had been desperate for a job. Vinnie had been desperate for a bounty hunter and, although he didn't think that I was suited for the job, his desperation and my juicy bit of gossip that I held over his head made him give me a few files to see what I could do. I'm not sure who was more surprised when I captured them. So he gave me a few more and so on, and now, a few years later, I was still chasing skips.

I liked having the two jobs. Being a researcher provided me the stability to do things like pay bills, while being a bounty hunter provided the excitement and variety that I craved. However, with having an increased need to get research done due to Ranger signing on so many companies, mixed with the decreased ability to roll around on the ground with the skips as I cuffed them due to the pregnancy, I had been working almost solely on Rangeman work and asking the Rangeman patrol staff to pick up my skips. I kept telling myself that I had to get used to it. After I had the baby, I didn't think Ranger would be too fond of the idea that I was skip tracing again. I missed the work though, so in addition to being queasy, I was desperately unhappy.

Ranger and I lived in the penthouse of his ultra-secure seven-story office tower in the heart of Trenton. It was a large apartment in a large building, but due to our corporate growth the building wasn't big enough. Ranger had just finished purchasing an empty plot of land that was beside our building, and next year he was intending to build another office tower on the space. The new tower would be about the same height – seven floors, but each floor would be larger than that in this building. In this building, the footprint was just over three thousand square feet. In the new tower, he wanted to double the footprint – which, since Ranger and I would have our apartment on the top floor, would mean that our apartment would be just under seven thousand square feet, including the balcony. The concept was boggling. Already I thought that our three thousand-square foot apartment was large.

I didn't know what we would do with all the space. Ranger had talked about putting in four bedroom suites in addition to a master suite, a family room, an office for him, an office for me, a sunroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen and a laundry room. I was just glad that Ranger wasn't suggesting that I clean the place. He said that we could hire people to do that. Since I had never enjoyed cleaning, no matter how much I liked things being clean, I greatly appreciated his intention.

Currently, our apartment was maintained by Ella, Ranger's housekeeper and staff chef. She did a fabulous job and was far more of a housekeeper than I could ever hope to be. But with the increase in staff size, doing the daily and weekly cleaning in Ranger's apartment as well as preparing three meals and snacks for the onsite staff was getting to be too much for Ella to do herself. When we moved to the new tower, Ranger intended to ask Ella to concentrate just on food preparation. As he said, cleaning the apartment didn't require any special skills, but preparing the food did and staff would be very unhappy if Ella was no longer in charge of the meals.

Ella was the only person we had told that I was pregnant, although when Ranger's mother guessed I had confirmed it. I didn't think anyone else had guessed. Of course, with just being sick in the morning, I'd been able to hide it. While the morning sickness didn't help me keep down breakfast, I was able to keep some food down by lunch uncomfortably and relatively comfortably by dinner and, since those were the two meals that I often had with other people, I was glad that I could hide my pregnancy. We didn't want anyone to know for the first three months, partly because of the risk of miscarriage and partly to give us time to get used to the concept. We hadn't planned a pregnancy, and we were still reeling. I was reeling more than Ranger, but that made sense. I would have to make the biggest changes to my life.

Ranger's concerns revolved around safety issues. Ranger owned Rangeman, but he was a former Ranger and a trainer for PMC – Private Military Contractors – an elite and covert team of people that mostly worked for government doing all the shit assignments that the government wanted either an arm's length from or didn't think were possible. The people who worked for PMC were the best of the best. While Ranger periodically was brought in to lead a team on a rescue mission, the majority of the time he was responsible for training personnel in one of two areas – to do extractions like the kind used when rescuing a kidnapped victim, and to be an effective bodyguard. While his participation in PMC was fairly innocuous now, it hadn't always been so. Before, while working for PMC, he had led raids into various drug lord compounds to shut their operations down and was a bit worried that the drug lords would push back and target him and his family for his involvement. He had told me all that a few months ago, but more recently he told me that he also had to be careful because, as a Ranger, he had been part of the team that had been responsible for taking the dead Osama Bin Laden to the ship for burial at sea. The al-Qaeda had wanted to bury him themselves and, in retaliation, had targeted all members of the SEAL team that had killed Bin Laden, and the Ranger team that had transported him. Ranger had lost a few of his friends through the al-Qaeda response to what had happened. Not one to easily share his personal feelings, he had only recently started to talk to me about that mission and the impact the subsequent deaths had on him when I had startled him one day. He had been thinking about his mission and, when I startled him, he attacked. He didn't hurt me, but he felt incredibly guilty. He said that he had never talked about it before with anyone other than his mission's teammates. Personally I thought it was about time. What this all meant, however, was that Ranger was especially anal about his personal security which, in turn, meant that I needed to be careful. Ranger was always concerned that his professional life would come back and bite him on the ass.

It didn't help that a couple of years ago his daughter from his first marriage had been kidnapped. Julie had been eleven at the time, and somebody had tried to steal Ranger's identity. To help him do that, he stole Ranger's daughter…and then he stole me. Ranger saved us but it was a scary time in our lives, and it seemed to make a deep impression on Ranger. He had been terrified that something like that could happen again, and had become even more worried about it after the wife of a friend of his, someone he had worked with at PMC, had been abducted a few months ago. Following that abduction, he had become very concerned about my safety. To make Ranger feel more comfortable, I now wore a tracker in my watch, and I drove one of his cars. I didn't really mind either concession. I had been stolen enough to appreciate having the reassurance that Ranger would know that something was wrong and that he or someone from Rangeman would come to rescue me in the event that I ran into trouble again. And his cars were nicer than anything I could afford. For that matter, so was the watch that my tracker was in.

So Ranger was concerned about having children because of the perceived danger. I was concerned about having children for other reasons.

I had never wanted children. I don't like children per se. I like my nieces because they were the people they were, not because they were children or because they related to me. I had never felt the warm fuzzies when I held a baby, never thought a bratty child was cute, never thought a child sticking a pea up his nose was funny. I didn't like changing diapers although, to be honest, who did? Kids when they smelled sweet and clean and needed books read before bed were nice, but screaming babies in the middle of the night who were convinced there were monsters in their closet despite what you said, weren't as much fun. I knew Ranger would be a good father and I'm sure that I could be a good mother. I just wasn't certain I wanted to be.

The question seemed to be moot though. Whether I wanted to be pregnant or not, I was and I was slowly acclimatizing myself to the concept. Ranger said that we could do things to make this situation work for us. In the new apartment, we were building a separate suite for a nanny. He said that having a live-in nanny would let me continue to work as much as I wanted while still providing a high quality of care for our baby. He wanted to continue to have someone in to clean our apartment and do the laundry. He said we could get the nanny to cook our meals when we didn't have time. I was still acclimatizing myself to those concepts as well. I come from the Burg, an area of Trenton characterized by hard-working families raising a multitude of children. If the mother didn't stay at home with the children, she went out to work and the children were cared for by a neighbor. Mothers didn't have nannies; mothers didn't have cleaners; and, mothers definitely didn't have chefs. When it was just Ranger and me, Ella felt like a mother and I didn't mind her doing everything for us so that we could concentrate on our jobs. We were a team and we each had our part. However, with becoming a mother myself I felt a little like I was already failing in the role just by not doing everything. Ranger said that being a supermom didn't make you a super mom, and in his eyes he felt like I could have it all.

But just like I wanted to do a good job as a mother, I also wanted to do a good job as a researcher and a bounty hunter. I think that I would be bored as a stay-at-home mother. I know I was bored doing research constantly. I liked and was proud to be a bounty hunter, and I didn't want to give it up. Did that make me selfish? Probably. I just didn't understand why I had to give up anything just to have a baby. After all, Ranger didn't have to give up anything. And I knew, no matter what Ranger said, that I would have to give up something.

Tears came to my eyes. I was always crying lately, and I didn't like it. Who wanted to be a watering pot?

Ranger entered the apartment. He had gone down to the gym for a workout. I normally got up after he had returned to the apartment and had gotten ready for the day, but with feeling so queasy in the morning lately I had been getting up when he went down for his workout, having my shower and slowly eating some breakfast when he was gone. It would take me an hour to consume the smallest amount of breakfast, but it ensured that I could finish getting ready when Ranger was eating his. This meant that the food smells from his meal wouldn't upset my stomach. I had devised this new schedule the week before when Ella had brought up Ranger's meal and the smell of the cheesy eggs made me spend the next fifteen minutes hunched over the toilet.

"Babe", said Ranger as he came into the kitchen. He looked down at the half-filled cup of peppermint tea and the scone that had one bite out of it. "Nothing's sitting well this morning?" His hand came down and massaged the back of my neck.

"No", I said in disgust, as I dropped my head down to give him better access to my neck and leaned into him. "I'm not even hungry, but I know I should eat. I keep telling myself that the scone will settle my stomach, and the peppermint tea is supposed to help. But every time I get them close to my mouth the smell of them makes my stomach lurch."

"Why don't you skip breakfast and go back to bed?"

"That feels like wimping out." I sighed. "I can do this."

"Babe."

"Seriously", I said. I broke the tiniest bite of scone off and resolutely put it in my mouth, chewed and swallowed. But seconds later I sprang to my feet and ran to the powder room, and lost the little I had eaten at breakfast.

Ranger held my hair out of my face and rubbed my back as I heaved, and when I was finished he wet a cloth and washed my face. "Better?" he said quietly.

I moaned and massaged my sore stomach. I had thrown up every morning for the last two weeks, and my stomach muscles were sore from the effort.

"Come on, babe. Lie down and I'll massage your stomach to ease the muscles before I head into the shower. Then you can rest until it is time for you to get dressed."

He pulled me to a standing position and walked with me into the bedroom, helped me down on the bed and pulled the duvet up to my waist. He undid the sash on his housecoat – I had been wearing his because wearing his clothes always made me feel better. Maybe not physically, but there was something about wearing his clothes that made me feel safe and secure. Ranger said that he liked me wearing his clothes too. Not only did he find it incredibly sexy knowing that his clothes were touching my naked body, but he also said that he found it reassuring to know that I wanted to wear his things and that I took comfort in them. I wondered if I would find the same reassurance if he wore my clothes, but then the thought of Ranger wearing my pink fuzzy housecoat was too ridiculous a picture to contemplate and I smiled.

"Are you planning on telling Morelli today?" said Ranger.

Joe Morelli was a detective within the Trenton Police Department. He also happened to be my ex-boyfriend. I'd had an on-again, off-again relationship with him for almost as long as I have known him. It started when I was in kindergarten and he wanted to play choo-choo with me. He was always the train and I was always the tunnel though, and since he never let me be the train it wasn't a game that I enjoyed playing much. By the time he took my virginity behind the counter of the Tasty Pastry when I was sixteen, I decided I liked the idea that he was the train and I was the tunnel. However, after he took my virginity he didn't call me, and I didn't like the idea much again. So when I saw him the next time, when I was eighteen, I jumped the curb in my father's car and ran him over. I broke his leg, an injury he says he remembers every time it rains. When I started skip tracing, Joe had run into problems with the law. Despite being an officer at the time, he was charged unfairly and I was the person who was sent out to retrieve him. I helped him exonerate himself, and that was the true start to our relationship. Over the years he had turned from a wild child into a respectable law-abiding citizen and was someone I had a lot of respect for. He was a good person and a good cop.

About seven months ago, Joe and I broke up for the final time. It was a breakup that had been coming for a while. I had been stuck in limbo, stuck loving both Ranger and Joe and unable to decide between the two of them. I still love them both, but Morelli's temperament meant that I was constantly feeling defensive and upset by his propensity to yell. He frequently told me that I was a disaster magnet and he didn't support the view that I could ever take care of myself. When we broke up, it felt like a weight had been taken off my shoulders, and I have since decided that although I love him, it is more a love that I have for a close friend than it was for a partner. Maybe because of that realization, it was a breakup that I handled much better than Joe. He had just recently stopped asking me to get back together with him.

He has now said that he understands why I did what I did, and I think he is now happy that we have broken up. Like me, he has done a lot of soul searching to decide what he wants in his life, and a disaster magnet like myself isn't it. I'm glad he's reached that point. Out of our relationship we've been able to retain the good parts of the friendship that we had as a couple.

But since we had just broken up seven months ago, and since I had always said that I didn't want kids, Ranger's and my pregnancy would come as a shock to Joe. Ranger and I had decided that Morelli should know before anyone else. He needed to not be taken by surprise when other people tell him in a few months.

This was important, not only because it was the right thing to do, but because Morelli and Ranger had a good working relationship. Ranger's company provided a level of service that the Trenton Police Department couldn't provide, and the TPD had used our services a few times recently. The Police Chief, Neil, had been so impressed by the quality of work that Rangeman did, however, that he decided to pay a retainer to Rangeman so that he could augment his force when needed. Ranger's men were better trained than most police officers, and for the price of two average officer salaries, the TPD was getting access to an emergency response team, a team of ten talented soldiers and a commander, at any time. We had better equipment, could outshoot and outmaneuver the TPD officers, and could mobilize faster than the Sheriff's Emergency Response Team, and that made us a valuable addition to the team.

In addition to access to our ERTs, the TPD wanted access to me. With the search engine we designed in-house, we had better information than the TPD and when they had a thorny case in front of them they wanted the ability to have us search for information. This brought more interesting work to Rangeman, which was good for me. When I was just researching potential employees and looking for problems with a series of people who didn't do anything wrong, it tended to get a little boring.

When Ranger set up the cooperation between the TPD and Rangeman, he suggested having a liaison to handle all issues, and because I already had a good relationship with Morelli and because Ranger already trusted him, he suggested Morelli as an appropriate liaison. Ranger was happy with this arrangement, as he knew Morelli would be reasonable about his requests and would refrain from demanding too much from me. Joe was happy because it meant an increase in salary for him and the ability to keep his eye on me in a more professional way, and I was happy because I trusted Joe and knew that I could work with him well.

So we had a good working relationship with Morelli and a good personal relationship as well, and neither Ranger nor I wanted to do anything to potentially rock the boat. We had decided to tell Morelli what was going on, and since I had planned on having lunch with him later that day, we had decided to tell him then.

"I'm nervous. I don't know how he'll take it."

"He might not be happy, but no matter how he feels he can't change things. He might just need a few days to get used to the idea. Just be prepared for him being upset."

"I know. I don't want to hurt his feelings."

"I understand, but if his feelings get hurt, you can't do anything about it. It wasn't like you planned this, and you didn't do this to hurt him." Ranger's massage felt good, and I closed my eyes in bliss. "Go to sleep, babe. I'll wake you before I leave for the day." And because that sounded like a good idea, I did.