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.

I have written a number of books in this series. Out of the previous books, 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

Tamper 32

Theft 33

Forced 34

Fiesta 35

Step 36

Snatched 37

Exhumed 38

Nativity 39

Fraud 40

Orientation 41

Televangelist 42

Therapeutic 43

Foxy 44

Foul Play 45

Solicitation 46

Support 47

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 daily, barring unseen life events.

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

~ Sarah ~

Chapter One

Julie, Tia, Grace, Alix and I drove along the road, looking for the laneway leading to the large chalet in the woods in Vermont that we had rented for the next two months. It was July, and the five of us were playing hostages in a training exercise for my husband's tactical response team.

My name is Stephanie Plum. I am the Research Director for my husband's company, Rangeman. We are an elite security company with clients ranging from all the alphabet agencies to numerous police departments to large corporations, from small Mom-and-Pop operations to individual citizens. We provide a number of services, including research, investigative work, cybersecurity, bodyguarding, and the staffing of onsite security needs. We are a medium-sized company, about four thousand employees, with seventeen locations across the States. We were getting known as the best-of-the-best. We had all five large-scale system designers in the U.S. on staff and had designed systems for the United Nations, the White House, MoMA, and others. Ranger, my husband, was now known as the preeminent security specialist in the country.

As a lesser-known service, Rangeman has four tactical Emergency Response Teams. Each team was composed of ten members plus a unit commander. All members were former Special Forces and were trained to handle anything from hostage negotiations to search and rescues to eliminations to extractions to executing high-risk search warrants. They were, outside the military, the best-trained tactical teams in the country. Two teams were designated as the national response teams, and had recently been hired by the FBI to provide backup support to the Hostage Rescue Team. The other two teams responded to local matters.

The two national teams were doing a joint training exercise. The chalet had seven bedrooms, multiple beds, featured a pool, and was located in a large treed acreage on the side of a mountain. It would provide the isolation needed for the team to "rescue" us without the neighbors getting concerned, and it would provide the space for all twenty of the ERT members to sleep as they celebrated a successful capture after they found us. We had booked the space for July and August, but we were hoping that the men would be able to find us quickly. We also hoped that the men would find us with enough time to stay and enjoy the facilities for a bit before we had to go again.

Julie, Tia, Grace, Alix and myself were the 'hostages'. Julie was Ranger's daughter from his first marriage. She was soon going to be eighteen, had just finished her first year of college, and was both brilliant and beautiful and was one of the nicest people that I had ever met. Julie was a lot of fun and we'd been planning this holiday for a while. I had brought the mud masks and nail polish, and Julie had brought the chocolate. We were going to have a good time.

Tia was three, and Grace and Alix were almost two. They were Ranger's and my daughters. The six of us were a very close family, and we loved spending time with each other. The only bad part was that we were going to miss Ranger. However, he was the unit commander leading the rescue teams to find us, and we would have to wait until we were rescued before we saw him again. I could only hope that it was soon. I never did like being away from him much. Ranger and I had a great marriage, and he was both my strength and my other half. When he wasn't there, it felt like a piece of me was missing.

Julie and I had made the arrangements for the 'hostage' location ourselves, and had deleted them from our computers. Ranger didn't know where we were going. No one in the company knew where we were going. We had made it as hard as we could think of. Even so, I gave them a week before I saw them. I didn't think it would take them long, no matter how hard we tried to cover our tracks. They were that good.

The landlord of the chalet had already stocked the fridge with food, and had arranged for a grocery service to come and deliver more each week. I had opened up another credit card that Ranger didn't know about. He should be able to find it easily, but I hadn't made it too easy for him. I put it in my mom's name at my parents' address. I had also taken out two thousand dollars in cash so that I didn't leave a credit card trail, and I had paid for the chalet anonymously in advance.

It would certainly be interesting. In addition to the pool, the chalet had a hot tub, a large kitchen, fireplaces, several living areas and dining for twenty-four. I had trouble envisioning a dining table that would seat twenty-four and was looking forward to getting to the chalet even just to see that. The fact that my bladder was bursting was another reason to hope to get there soon.

Julie was working for the Research Department with me over the summer, and we had brought our computers with us so that we could still work a bit. With being the Director, I wanted to be able to keep in touch with my department so that I could solve any problems that my two managers couldn't address. Which meant that I wouldn't hear from my department at all. My managers were excellent at what they did, and were well capable of running the department in my absence.

Besides that, although the kids had never watched television, we had started them playing preschool games on the computer. All three kids enjoyed that. Tia was able to read already, and she loved playing 'I Spy' games on the computer that allowed her to read, practice her ability to observe things, and learn the location of the letters on the keyboard. Grace and Alix weren't able to play those types of games yet, but since they were just learning their letters and numbers they loved letter recognition and number recognition games and would often play them together.

"When will we be there?" said Tia from the back seat. It was the age-old whine from the backseat that every parent had heard at least once in their lives. I was lucky in that it was the first time I had heard it on this trip. Since I was trying not to leave a trail, I had rented a minivan under our babysitter's name to drive up to Vermont. With the drive being as long as it was, I had split the driving into two days just to give the kids a break. Even so, four hours a day in the car was a long time for little bodies. Hell, it was a long time for myself as well, but when you are attached to a toddler car seat, movement is restricted and it was harder to stretch your muscles. Julie had them doing stationary exercises so that they didn't get stiff, but even so the toddlers were getting a little whiny.

I pulled into a driveway, checked the instructions again, and started down the laneway. I drove up to an enormous, but beautiful, chalet, and was pleased to get out of the car. I danced on the spot for a moment, dug out the key code from my backpack to get into the chalet, and ran up to the front door. "We'll unpack in a minute", I said. "I've got to go."

"Me too, Mama", said Tia, and she ran up behind me. I quickly entered the code, ran into the house, found a bathroom, turned on the light for Tia, and knew my pants wouldn't remain dry if I had to listen to her peeing. I hustled upstairs and quickly found another bathroom, turned on the light and, as I ran across the tiles to the toilet I undid my shorts and pulled down my panties on route. I sat and, with a sigh of relief, emptied my bladder. Nothing ever felt as good as going pee when your bladder was about to burst. As I wondered if bladders bursting was even possible - and then thought that, if it was, mine had been pretty darn close - I finished, pulled up my pants at a much more sedate pace, washed and dried my hands, and left the room.

I walked down to the front door again, and peeked in rooms and explored the different areas. I smiled, pleased with the space. While it was far too large for just the girls and me, it would be a good size for when the ERTs arrived. We would be able to have a lot of fun, and Ranger may be able to run more training exercises in the surrounding wood. Just judging by how far we had to travel through the trees once we got off the county road, there was a lot of wooded territory that we'd be able to use for training purposes.

Julie, Tia and the twins were already emptying the back of the minivan. Julie was giving small and unbreakable things to the twins to carry. It was very cute to watch them. If the item was too big for their little bodies, they would work together to get the item up to the house. I was proud of both their problem-solving and their teamwork, and I told them that.

Tia took her backpack of toys out of the van, got Julie's help putting it on her back, and carried her sisters' backpacks up to the house. She carried them in, dropped them on the floor with a sigh of relief, and came down to the minivan again. I pulled the suitcases of clothes out of the van. There was one each for us, with another one for Ranger. When the toddlers got back, I pulled up the handles for their suitcases, showed them how to pull the suitcases behind them, and followed them up the path to the house again. The three toddlers pulled their own suitcases and I pulled Ranger's and mine. Julie grabbed the computer bags, locked up the minivan, and pulled her own suitcase to the door of the house.

"I think what we should do first, everybody, is take off our shoes, explore the house and figure out which rooms we want to claim, move our stuff into them, do a few minutes of stretches, and then make some lunch. What do you think about that?"

"Yeah!" said Grace.

"Splore", said Alix as she hurriedly took off her sandals. When we all got our shoes off, Alix held one of my hands and Grace held the other, and Tia held Julie's hand as we walked from room to room.

In the basement was a large room with a wooden floor which would be suitable to play soccer in if it was raining out. Another room had a television and a fireplace, and two sofabeds that some of the ERT members could use. There was an exercise room that seemed to have a number of machines and exercise options in it, a full bathroom, a games room with a pool table, and a walkout to a large patio. When we opened the door, we could see that the patio extended down the house and around to the outdoor pool. There were steps down to the patio from the decks above.

We went back into the house and investigated the main floor. There were two living spaces, a large dining room, an enormous kitchen that looked like it was the hub of the house, and a laundry room. There was a library with an assortment of books - children's and adults' alike - and an office. As Tia had already discovered, there was also a powder room on that level. The two living spaces and the kitchen had a walkout to the deck. Stairs down to the pool were at one end of the deck and near to the stairs was a hot tub.

The second floor held four bedrooms, each with their own bathroom and king bed. The third floor held the other three bedrooms, again each with their own bathroom. Each of the third-floor bedrooms had a queen bed and three sets of bunk beds. "Mama!" said Tia when she saw the beds. "I sleep up high!"

I laughed. "No, peanut. You and Gracie and Lixi will be sharing a king bed so that you can sleep in the room next to me, and on the other side of your room will be Julie's room. That way, if you have a nightmare, you can go in either direction to get help."

She pouted. "I would like to sleep up high."

"I know, but I would like to sleep in a big bed. Wouldn't you like to sleep in a big bed as well?" She thought about that for a moment. "It's the same kind of bed that Daddy and I sleep in at home. Won't you be a big girl to be able to sleep in the same kind of bed that Daddy and I sleep in?"

Tia smiled. "Yeah!" she said.

"Gwacie too?" said Grace.

"Lixi?" said Alix.

"Yes, girls. The two of you will be sleeping in the same bed as Tia. You will be having sleepovers with each other. Consider it training. You will probably have many, many sleepovers with your friends as you get older."

"Seepover?" said Alix.

"That's when you go to your friend's house, sometimes by yourself and sometimes with many friends, and you tell stories to each other and you play games and you eat food and you do each other's hair. It's a lot of fun."

"Yay!" said Tia.