All recognizable characters belong to Janet Evanovich, I'm just playing.

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Chapter 3

RPOV

Awareness comes in stages. Flashes of last night fill my head, each one making my smile bigger. Steph's gained confidence and grown bolder in the last decade, making last night one hell of a night. With only two condoms in my wallet, we had to pace ourselves, but the creativity just made it even better.

Reaching out, the smile vanishes when I encounter cold, empty sheets. Lifting my head, I'm shocked that light is streaming in from a crack in the curtains. A glance at the alarm clock next to the bed has me groaning. 0927. It's been years since I slept this late. Levering myself off the bed, I catalog the silence coming from the bathroom and only my clothes on the floor while stretching. Stalking over to the closet, there are no suitcase or clothes, and the bathroom is similarly devoid of personal effects. Steph's gone.

A quick, hot shower does little to improve my mood. A final survey of the room fails to turn up any sort of note, not that I would deserve one. Tit for tat. I left her without a word, and now she's returned the favor. For someone who has lived trying to fix their Karma, how did I not see that coming?

Her perfume clings to my sweater, suffocating me in the elevator. In the lobby I detour over to the coffee shop and grab a bagel and cup of coffee to go. Heading back to Rangeman, my mind is all over the place, playing back the night, starting with realizing that it was Steph literally landing in my arms.

There's no way to pretend that the last ten years hasn't happened, because they have. In that time, she's moved on and reinvented herself, loved, been married and widowed, and picked herself up again. She's still the force of nature she always was. And me? The only thing that's really changed for me is geography. I moved to Miami, but I'm still holding everyone at arm's length while searching for redemption.

After a change of clothes, I'm back on the control floor, looking for Bear. I find him in conversation with Tate, who runs our HR department here. Waiting them out, my mind wanders back to the problem of replacing Bear as general manager. He's given me eight weeks' notice, and right now, there's no front runner. Atlanta's number two, Gleeson, is still too new in the job to take over the entire office.

Bear throws me a smirk and asks, "Late night?" after Tate moves on.

He laughs and heads to his office when I don't take the bait. We've known each other for a lot of years, and that gives him some latitude, but my private life is off-limits. "Anything to report?"

"Negative. No alarms overnight, no problems on patrols. One of the contractors I was set to meet with late this morning had to change up their schedule and meet earlier, so I have some free time until lunch if you want to go over the personnel files again, but I don't think you're going to find a candidate in there. My guys are good, and Gleeson will be great with time, but in my opinion, none of them are ready to take over, and that's a detriment to my leadership."

I wave him off. "You thought you had more time to get Gleeson up to speed and you had Jingles and Roddy turn down promotions, which nobody saw coming. If we don't have someone in place in time, we can transfer someone over from another office to cover."

The next two days are spent doing what we can to prep for a leadership transition. My focus is split, and it's pissing me off that I can't get Stephanie out of my god damn head again. Dinner in my assigned guest apartment is solitary. Quiet. Lonely. All things I don't usually feel. My hands hovers over my flight check-in information and at the last minute, I change the flight from Miami to Trenton.

I've avoided coming back here, choosing to take video conference calls rather than visit. It felt like too much of a risk to my sanity, taking a chance at seeing Steph with the cop for real. The town looks different. Businesses have changed, areas have gotten better or worse, and crime has taken its toll.

The Rangeman building still looks good; Tank has done a good job running the office. I haven't told anyone that I was dropping in, and by the time I've fobbed myself in and parked in a management spot, two men are waiting for me at the elevator. I recognize them from their files but haven't worked with them. They recognize me and exchange a glance before straightening up. Not bothering to explain myself, I move past them to the stairwell, knowing damn well that I'm on camera.

Chatter in the control stops when I step onto the floor. Men have come and gone, between transfers, moving on, and even passing away, but I recognize a few of the men as longtimers that were my hires. Zip and Zero say hello and get back to work, and Binkie, now a department head, comes out of his office. "Ranger! Is Tank expecting you?"

"Negative. He here?"

"Down in the gym assessing some of the contract workers that want to transition to full time work."

With a nod, I head down. I won't step on Tank's toes, but I'm still the boss and it's my right to sit in on a testing session. Heads turn my way when I step into the gym. Tank's entire body stiffens in surprise, but nothing shows on his face as he continues to bark out commands.

For an hour, I watch him put them through their paces separately and in duos and groups. Soon after I left Trenton, Les and Bobby transferred to the Boston office to serve as co-general managers, and we all have our different methods of testing and gauging the suitability of new hires. Tank is the most physically demanding, and those that are not up to par with his requirements are weeded out quickly, leaving him with four men that he'll carry forward for a more serious look.

He dismisses them, telling them to be back in the morning. When we're alone, he reaches into his cargos for his fob and disables the camera. We face off across the mats. "Something you want to say, Rangeman?"

"You knew Stephanie didn't marry Morelli."

He snorts. "Everyone knew. It wasn't exactly a secret. What's this really about?"

My hand forms into a fist at his nonchalance and unconsciously we move closer to each other. "Why didn't you tell me? You knew—"

"That you were never going to do right by her? Yeah. I knew. That was evident when you took off before even seeing if congratulations were in order. And if you remember, I tried several times to tell you, and you shut me down any time I brought her name up. You were very clear that my orders were to clean up your mess but keep the details to myself."

His arms are crossed over his chest, but he's wound as tight as I am. I came here spoiling for a fight, but his accurate summation of my actions and orders takes some of the piss out of my sails. "I saw her, the other night. In Atlanta. Ran into her at a restaurant." He waits, saying nothing, just watching me pace and run a hand through my hair. "She looked good. And she didn't shy away from asking what the fuck happened. My reasons sounded stupid when I laid them out."

"That's because they were. You didn't even leave her a Dear John note and lucky you, you were 1200 miles away and didn't have to deal with it."

My mind flashes back to the hurt of waking up alone in her hotel room. "Yeah, well, she returned the favor." At his raised eyebrows, I ruefully explain. "We spent the night together and she was gone in the morning."

The bastard throws his head back and laughs. "Good for her. She's been lonely since Derek died, and dating's been hit or miss."

What the actual fuck? "You knew she got married?"

"Of course, I did. I was at the wedding. They were good together, happy. Damn shame when he died. Really messed her up for a while." Seeing my shock, he throws me a look. "What does it matter if she married Morelli or someone else? That's why you left, isn't it? So she'd move on?"

"Sounds like you helped with that." My words are bitter, out of line, and deserving of the right hook that knocks me on my ass.

Tank standing over you, pissed, is never a good place to be and yet that's exactly where I find myself. "You brought her here into our lives. You left me with the standing order to watch over her and keep her safe. And when you were done, you broke her and left me to pick up the pieces. What did you want me to do, keep turning a blind eye to her rushing into shit and patting her on the head when she didn't die? Fuck that, that's your move. Would it really have been better to let her die going after skips she had no business going after? Helping her had nothing to do with my job and everything to do with being her friend. I gave her a nudge, everything else was all her. She's built a good life for herself."

He backs away and I roll up into a sitting position. "I fucked up."

"Sometimes things work out the way they're supposed to."

I rub my jaw. He might be right, but I'd still like a do-over. I already knew it, but the last couple days have pounded home that my biggest regret in life is walking away from Steph. I handled everything wrong from the beginning.

He offers me a hand up. "I don't know what's in your head, but you better not be planning to implode her life just because you're feeling curious."

I'll admit to a healthy amount of curiosity, but it's more than that. What if is a drum beat in my head, and not only can I not block it out, but it's also getting louder. I want the chance to get to know her again, to love her again.

SPOV

I ignore the wind outside as I prowl around the house. Tybee Island, off the coast of Georgia, has been home ever since I closed my eyes and dropped a finger onto a map. The money from my last capture paid for a fixer upper and the changes that Derek and I made over the years turned it into a home. At this point, I can't imagine living anywhere else. I've made a few trips back to Trenton over the years, mostly for Angie and Mary Alice's graduations and Grandma Mazur's funeral. Instead of trips there for visits, my entire family descends on me for one week in the summer. It's craziness, but it also reminds me of summer trips to Point Pleasant and oddly enough, my mother is much less adversarial on my turf. Go figure.

It's been a couple months since my night with Ranger in Atlanta and the memories visit me at the oddest times. The wind caressing my skin when I run on the beach feels like his hand ghosting across my skin. My leopard print pumps mock me from the shelf in the closet, reminding me of being pushed up against the desk. Worse yet, I find myself thinking about him, no matter how I try and avoid it. Part of me wishes I had taken the time to satisfy my curiosity and ask questions when I had a chance, but I figured not knowing about his life was probably better.

Tank and I still keep in touch, and in one of his last emails, he let me know that Ranger ended up in Trenton for answers. I smile, remembering reading, "He wasn't happy that he didn't get the ones he wanted."

I owe Tank a lot. Without his shove, I probably would've only gotten out of Trenton in a body bag. Not with the risks I had started taking. The contacts he gave me were for the man that ran the searches at Rangeman -Atlanta and the head of security at a tech firm. In both cases, Tank's name and recommendation got me in the door, but I earned the contracts with them, and many more over the years. The work I do is varied from running background checks, running searches for a couple P.I.s in the area, and even researching random stuff for an author that lives across the river in Savannah. Like bounty hunting, I'm my own boss, set my own hours, and don't have to wear pantyhose. Even better, no one shoots at me. It's a job I love and one I'm proud of, and it's the job that saved me after Derek died, giving me a reason to get out of bed every day.

Stopping in front of the bouquet of calla lilies on the table, I dig out the card again. Neither words, nor flowers, can ever compare to your beauty. Ranger

The flowers have been coming every Thursday for almost two months. After the first one, I wondered where he got my address, but an email came to my business account, and he admitted that he finally put two and two together; an audit of the contractor files and a conversation with Bear added up to me doing work for Rangeman for nearly ten years.

At first, I wasn't sure what to make of the flowers or Ranger reaching out. The type of bouquets that he's sent has varied, as has the sentiment. Sometimes it's been an apology, or a memory of times we shared in Trenton. There was even a hamster cartoon. Emails started hitting my inbox about the same time, starting with letting me know that he was the interim general manager of Rangeman Atlanta… and that he'd like to see me again.

I wasn't sure what to do with that and it caused me no shortage of sleep. I nearly disappeared into the grief after Derek's death and I knew that I needed to keep moving forward for my own mental health, but I worried that getting entangled with Ranger again might be a step backward. It was actually Derek's mama, herself a young widow, that gave me some good advice during our monthly dinner. She pointed out that my previous relationship with Ranger was all built on his rules and timeline. I wasn't the same person, so why would I accept the same scraps a second time around? There was nothing that said I couldn't lay out my own rules and boundaries. Either he could accept them, or he couldn't.

With that in mind, we've been emailing back and forth, and I've deliberately kept it light and friendly. I'm afraid that it's just a game because I'm shiny and new again, and he's going to need to convince me otherwise before I'm willing to try anything else. I walked away from our night thinking the door to the Steph/Ranger story was closed, but every card and email makes me question that. After the second email, the one where he told me about his family growing up, I offered up a separate email address created just to converse with him, drawing a line between personal and business. A decade after accepting that he would no longer be a part of my life, contact with him is becoming an important part of my day.

Checking my watch, I grab my purse and head out. He's staying in Savannah this weekend and we're meeting for dinner. Just dinner. I need my head to be on straight to deal with him. He's waiting for me when I arrive at the restaurant, and the kiss to the temple as he places his hand low on my back sends butterflies through my stomach.

We talk about everything and nothing over dinner, just enjoying each other's company. He's open and engaging, laughing as he tells a story about him, Tank, Lester, and Bobby encountering a language barrier while on leave and I wonder how life would have been different if he had shown me this side of himself in Trenton. I shake my head. It's likely that neither of us would have been ready or in the right place for a relationship that would have worked.

Dessert is delivered during a lull in the conversation and I'm shocked when Ranger scoops himself up some flan. I'm focused on the spoon touching his lips, leaving behind some caramel sauce when he laughs. "You haven't heard a word I've said, have you?"

I'm tempted to bluff my way through before giving up with a sheepish shrug. Busted.

"I asked if you'd consider dating me. Exclusively."

I blink a few times. "You live four hours away in Atlanta. I'm not looking to be a once-a-month booty call." That came out blunter than I intended, and his fork pauses halfway to his mouth. A flash of hurt crosses his face before he blanks it. Setting his fork down, he pinches his nose. Good to know I still have that effect on men.

"Stephanie."

Oh boy.

"I know it will take a while for you to accept that I'm serious about you. I've been in love with you for more than a decade and apparently that's not changing any time soon. I'm tired of fighting it. It was on Bear's five-year plan for Atlanta to expand to a satellite office in Savannah. The population and infrastructure will support it. I'll be heading up the office here. I'm asking you to give me a chance. Give us a chance."

Well, shit. That was unexpected on so many levels. It's on the tip of my tongue to ask why, but one look at him and I know. The love is all over his face, for once not hidden from me. After a rough swallow, I agree, adding, "We can take it slow." There's a moment of silence and we both laugh. "Maybe not ten years slow, but slow?"

"Whatever you need, Babe. This time, I'm not going anywhere."

It's scary, the prospect of this new beginning for us, but I've never shied away from taking risks and without the pressures and ghosts of Trenton, I feel like maybe we have a chance. Because I'm not going anywhere, either, and this time we're starting on a more level playing field.

"Ok."

He laughs. "Ok?"

"Ok, especially if you share your flan."

"Babe."