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Chapter 8

As much as I hated to admit it, spending the whole day lying low seemed to have done me some good. My stitches were hardly bothering me anymore, as long as I kept up on my pain pills and didn't make any weird or sudden movements. Still, by the time the sun started to set, I was going out of my mind.

As it turned out, he honest-to-goodness did not have a television in this house. I pillaged Ranger's bookshelves, but wasn't that drawn to the couple of novels I found. Spy thrillers weren't really to my taste - I got enough of that sort of stress in my real life, I didn't need to read about it in my downtime. I did read up on a couple of the military training manuals, just for kicks.

When Ranger emerged from the office after dusk, I showed him the front cover of my reading material. "I know how to rappel out of a helicopter now."

"Good to know. I'll have Tank add Air Assault to your list of skills on the company roster."

That piqued my interest. "What are my other skills listed?"

"Intelligence. Research. Tracking. Distraction."

"What about my charm offensive?"

He smiled as he sat down on the couch beside me. "That would fall under 'Distraction'. Or sometimes 'Intelligence'."

I picked at a nonexistent piece of lint on my black Pilates pants. He watched me patiently while I considered something I'd started thinking about in the hospital. "What if I wanted to add to that list of skills?"

"What did you have in mind?"

I shrugged one shoulder. "You know. Things like… self-defense? Capture technique?"

He was quiet and I snuck a glance over at him. His gaze was assessing.

"You don't think I'm cut out for it?" I asked.

His gave me a look that said I was being ridiculous. "You know that's not true. I'm just surprised. I think it's great if you're ready to take those things a little more seriously, but why now? I've offered you Rangeman training resources before."

"Nothing like getting shot… again… to light a fire under your butt," I said. "I've tried to stop attracting the psychos, stalkers, and killers, but I can't seem to shake them. So I've decided that if I can't stop them from coming after me, then at least I want to get better at defending myself."

"And at captures?"

"One step at a time."

He studied me for another moment. "Are these new skills still going to be useful to you in your new job?"

I carefully pulled one leg up and tucked it underneath me so I could turn and face him more fully. "What new job?"

"The one that goes with your life plan."

I felt my eyes widen and heat rise to my face. Was he talking about the ill-fated F.M.L. plan? "What do you know about my life plan?"

He shifted on the couch, reached his fingers into a pocket of his cargo pants, and pulled out a piece of yellow legal paper. He handed it to me.

Connie's handwriting stared up at me when I unfolded the paper. Sure enough, right at the top it read 'Stephanie's Life Plan', followed by the three steps. Well, this was embarrassing. "Where did you get this?"

"I lifted it from your bag when I was looking for trackers." His eyes were still locked on me, studying me closely, and they were free of remorse.

I released my bottom lip from my teeth and willed away the heat in my cheeks. I folded the paper back up, ripped it in half, and then ripped it in half again. No doubt there were rules against littering in the Batcave, but I flagrantly disregarded them as I threw the shredded pieces over my shoulder. "That plan went up in flames."

"What happened?"

"I still want a job I'm good at," I told him. "But that's why I'm talking to you. I'm wondering if maybe I can learn to be a little better at the one I already have."

He chewed on that for a moment. "How's the rest of the plan going to feel about that decision? Especially if I help you?"

"The rest of the plan is toast."

His brow rose. "Does the rest of the plan know that?"

"Yep. Unequivocally."

I'd dropped Ranger's gaze again, and he reached out to tilt my chin back up. "How serious is it this time?"

"Serious as a heart attack," I told him. "And it's not just 'this time'. It's the time."

He stared at me like he was trying to read the back of my skull. "Why?"

The intensity was too much. I grabbed Ranger's wrist to pull his fingers away from my chin so I could break eye contact. I brought his hand down to rest between us, with my fingers still circling his wrist. "We have different pictures."

"Meaning?"

"Of 'Someday'," I clarified. "Morelli wants a stable life with kids and a housewife who he doesn't have to worry will get shot at, or have those psychos, stalkers, or killers trailing her home."

"And what do you want?"

I looked back up to meet his eyes again. They were riveted, and I felt put on the spot. "I'm not entirely sure."

"You've got options," he told me. Ranger was still wearing his blank face, and I'd almost never been more in need of a decoder ring to understand what he was thinking.

"Does that mean you'll help me with the training?"

"If that's what you want."

I blew out a sigh. "Right now, I pretty much just want to solve this mystery with Gabriella and put it behind us."

"That would be step one," he agreed.

"Uh-uh." I shook my finger at him. "I'm not doing this again. Lula and Connie already tried to wrangle me into that freaking three-step program, and look how well that turned out."

The corner of his mouth turned up. "Figure of speech, Babe."

"So where do we stand on the Gabriella front?" I asked. "What's the news?"

That wiped any trace of humor from Ranger's face, which was regrettable, but I was still feeling antsy about it. If I couldn't be doing more to help find her, I at least wanted to be kept in the loop.

"There is none," he said. "She's either no longer in Trenton, or if she is, she's doing a damn good job of staying underground. Which isn't altogether a bad thing, since we're not the only ones looking."

"What happens if Los Reyes or Par de Balos find her before we do?"

"Tough to say. If Par de Balos find her first, then maybe they turn her over to Valdez in attempt to prove their innocence and as a show of good faith. Los Reyes has been making their lives pretty difficult ever since they escalated the war between them."

"And if someone from Los Reyes finds her first?"

He shrugged. "I imagine they have some questions about their missing shipment. They'll likely try to get her to talk."

"What if she's not the one behind the missing cocaine?"

He gave me a grim look, and I winced. Yeah. Without any information to share, Gabriella didn't have much to offer Los Reyes. No matter what way you looked at it, it wasn't good news for her if either gang found her. It made me question, not for the first time, why she would risk her life to run away from witness protection. What did she stand to gain?

"You have people looking for her, though?" I needed some reassurances right about then. I wasn't liking the squishy feelings I was getting when I thought about Gabriella's fate.

"I have everyone looking for her," Ranger said. "But they're doing it carefully. Part of the trouble is, we don't want to accidentally lead one of the gangs straight to her. I've got men camped out at her apartment, others covertly staking out all the known Reyes and Balos hideouts, and I've got a crew driving around with your GPS tracker, trying a proactive approach to lure Reyes out so we can nail them down for questioning."

I shuddered to think about the type of 'questioning' that skinny guy or gargantuan would be subjected to if Rangeman got ahold of them. "I thought you were going to just destroy that tracker."

"This suits my purposes better. My men have confirmed that Reyes are tailing them. I'm assuming they're counting on you to lead them to Gabriella."

"Fat chance of that, since I'm stuck here," I grumbled.

"It's working, for now, to throw them off the scent, so the other crews have a little more privacy for the real search. And to give you a little more privacy, too. As long as Reyes are trailing your GPS tracker around Trenton, we don't have to worry about them looking for you elsewhere."

I sat up straighter. "That means it's safe for me to go back to Trenton and get some work done. I can stay off their radar, since I'm already on it."

"You're not going to give up on this, are you?" he asked.

"I can't just sit here and do nothing," I argued. "You've got your computer and your work and your coordinating or whatever to keep you busy, but everything I need to do is back in Trenton."

"I'm pretty sure that 'nothing' is exactly what you're supposed to be doing. I don't understand why I keep having to remind you that you got shot less than -"

"That was days ago!"

He glanced at his watch. "Less than 96 hours ago," he finished.

"You get shot all the time." I poked him in the shoulder for emphasis, near the site of his most recent gunshot wound. "I know for a fact that you don't let that stop you from getting your job done."

He was quiet for a minute. Ha! Probably he was trying to think up a rebuttal that wouldn't make him a complete hypocrite.

Since his resolve was maybe wavering, I pushed on. "Look at me." I gestured at myself. "I'm fine. I'm ready to get back out there."

He leaned back against the couch and pulled his hand away from me, scrubbing it across his face. He studied me while he ran his hand along his jaw. "I'm not."

I blinked at him. "You're not ready to get back to work?"

"I'm not ready for you to get back on the streets." He let his words hang in the air for a moment. "I can't get the image out of my head. You hit the pavement so hard and fast after the gun went off. I was already running for you, but I knew I was too late. I thought you were dead."

His voice was low, his tone matter-of-fact. We may as well have been talking about the weather. But the longer I looked at him, the more I saw. The nearly imperceptible tension in the set of his shoulders. The smallest bit of tightness at the corners of his eyes.

He was looking at me in that way he had; the way that made it seem like he was listening to what I had to say, even when I wasn't speaking. I had no idea how to respond to that, so I just said, "But I'm not."

He nodded slowly. "I need you to stay that way."

"Dying isn't on my agenda this week."

The look on his face said that he didn't find that funny.

I was starting to lose patience with this merry-go-round of a conversation. "I'm sorry that you were worried. But maybe now you have some small sense of what the rest of us feel when you head off on your mysterious missions every other month. And yet I doubt that you have to go ten rounds with someone who's trying to keep you from doing what you need to do. You can't keep me locked away in a safe house 24/7, or wrap me up in bubble wrap. And frankly, it's a little demeaning that you think you need to try."

By the end of my speech, I'd worked my way up in volume a bit and my eyes were narrowed. Ranger was still sitting back, taking it in.

"You worry about me?" he finally said.

My eyes rolled so hard that it was an entire body movement. "Of course I worry about you. Idiot."

After another few moments while he continued to study me, his shoulders lost some of their tension, and he looked a little more relaxed. Or maybe the look was resigned. "You're right."

"Of course I'm right." I scoffed, but in reality, I was a little surprised that he was conceding.

"I'm not going to apologize for wanting to keep you safe," he began. As my eyes narrowed once more, he held up a hand. "But I will admit that this probably isn't the only way to go about it. You're still stuck with a bodyguard until we wrap up the Gabriella situation. And I still think it's a bad idea for you to be staying in your apartment. Los Reyes obviously know where you live."

I waved that off. "That's fine. I can concede on that point. I don't want to wake up with skinny guy and gargantuan standing over my bed any more than you want me to."

He was quiet for another moment, and then spoke carefully. "I don't want you staying at Rangeman, either. I'm being cautious in the way that I'm composing the teams who are working on this, and how we socialize it inside the company. I still don't know how Los Reyes connected me to Gabriella's kidnapping. There are very few people who know about the work that I do with that team. A couple of them are inside the company. Given the situation, I'd be stupid to not consider a potential leak."

I felt my eyes widen. "You think you have a traitor on your team?"

He shook his head. "I really don't think so. But until I can say 'no' with absolute certainty, I'm being careful with how I disseminate information."

"What does that mean?"

"For example, Tank is the only one who knows where we're staying. That won't change anytime soon." It went without saying that Tank was trusted implicitly.

"You want us to keep staying here," I guessed.

He nodded, watching for my reaction.

"That's fine, as long as we can go back to Trenton during the day. I can keep a low profile, and I can even deal with a bodyguard, but I need to keep working."

"Okay."

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn't expected him to acquiesce quite so easily. Less than 24 hours ago, after hearing the message for 'Bravo One', he'd been pacing my living room, about as tense as I'd ever seen him. He couldn't wait to bundle me up in Kevlar and ship me off to safety. I was lucky that he'd only sent me as far as Newark and not, say, Switzerland. I wasn't sure whether it was my speech that got through to him, or if he'd just had enough time to cool down, or if being stuck in this house with me all day was enough to reassure him that I was still alive and kickin'. Whatever his reasoning, I wasn't going to question it.

"While you're being so agreeable, I have another request," I told him.

"How much am I going to hate it?"

"I guess that depends on what sort of diet you're following at the moment." I smiled. "I was going to request some pizza."

###

Ranger treated me to another surprise by actually taking me out for dinner. He insisted that we drive, both for safety and in deference to my injury, even though the pizza place was only about six blocks from the house. It was a hole-in-the-wall with a tiny eat-in area, but Ranger was able to nab us a booth in a corner where he could sit with his back to the wall and keep an eye on the front and back doors. The pizza rivaled even Shorty's from back home, and Ranger seemed to know the guys working the counter and the oven, based on his head nod of acknowledgment for one and the complicated handshake exchanged with the other.

When we were back at the house, there was a brief awkward moment when I hemmed and hawed a little over sleeping arrangements. When I emerged from the master bathroom after brushing my teeth, he was already sprawled out in bed. I froze, deer in headlights. He tucked an arm underneath his head and regarded me with some amusement.

"You coming?"

"Erm," I managed.

"To bed?" he clarified with a grin.

I shifted my weight from foot to foot. "Maybe I should sleep in the guest room?"

"Babe." His tone made it clear that in this instance, 'Babe' meant 'Quit being ridiculous and get your ass in bed'. "We're just sleeping. You're injured."

"Actually, the doctor's instructions said that sex was fine, as long as I don't do anything crazy." I felt heat rise to my face, not sure why I'd felt the need to disclose that. So sue me, I was feeling a little flustered.

A corner of his mouth tipped up. "Good to know. But I'm still not going to jump you. Not tonight. You've had a long couple of days, and you need your sleep."

It wasn't that I begrudged him his place in the bed. It was his bed, after all. And we'd slept together before, of course. In every sense of the phrase. But every time we'd slept together in the traditional sense of the phrase, Ranger had joined me after I was already asleep. Racking my brain, I couldn't think of a single instance in which I'd crawled into bed next to him while we were both still awake, and without imminent plans for activities other than sleeping.

Granted, it was possible that not all of my brain power was dedicated to the memory search, since at least part of me was distracted by the display before me. Ranger's posture was relaxed, but with his hand tucked behind his head, the muscles in his arm were flexed. Although Ranger didn't need to flex for his muscles to pop. My eyes traveled from his face, down to his shoulders, skimmed over his chest, and roamed across his abs. They got a little hung up there, focused on the thin trail of dark hair leading down from his navel and dipping below the sheet at his waist.

"Don't push it," Ranger said, his voice low and gravelly. I looked back up to his face to find him still watching me, and his eyes had gone all molten chocolate. I knew that look, but he was simultaneously shaking his head. "Just get in."

I folded like a cheap suit. I rounded the foot of the bed to climb in on the other side, the one furthest away from the door. Ranger flipped the switch on the bedside lamp next to him and threw us into darkness. He extended an arm out to me and I got comfy on my side, facing him, with my front pressed against his side and using part of the bicep I'd been ogling as my pillow. As much as I hated to admit it, Ranger must have been right on at least one count, because I was asleep in what felt like a matter of seconds.

###

The next morning, I convinced Ranger that I would be a danger to myself and others if we didn't get a donut in me ASAP. His safe house had zero sugar anywhere - even his peanut butter was the stupid 'all natural' kind - and I was experiencing some serious withdrawal. He could hardly expect me to be on top of my game and remain aware of my surroundings in that state.

Before we hit the highway back to Trenton for the day, Ranger parked the car on the street a few blocks down from a coffee shop that he pointed out to me.

"You're sure they have donuts?" I asked dubiously.

"Pretty sure. If not, they'll have some sort of pastry that should tide you over."

He walked alongside me down the sidewalk, letting me set the pace. My stitches were hardly bothering me anymore, but I was doing my best to remember to take it easy. And when I forgot, Ranger was there to remind me.

An easy ten minutes later, we were headed back to the car. I was clutching a pastry bag with an old fashioned donut and a bear claw in one hand, and a fancy mocha latte with whipped cream in the other. As expected, Ranger had ordered green tea. He'd already had his day's allotment of coffee before we left the house. Probably he was also doing penance for the pizza he'd eaten the night before.

I had my head in the pastry bag when it happened. I heard an "Oh, shit" from Ranger, and in a flash, he grabbed me around the waist and spun me around.

My heart rate kicked up a notch and I barely managed to keep my grip on my snacks. "What? What is it?"

"Keep your head down. Keep walking," he murmured. He slung his arm across my shoulders and hurried us along the sidewalk, which I took as a good sign - at least we weren't diving for cover. Maybe we hadn't been spotted.

"What's happening?" I asked.

"Carlos!" A voice from behind us, followed by quickened footsteps.

Ranger froze and I sucked in some air while we both listened to the footsteps approaching us from behind. He still had one arm around me and the other hand around his coffee cup - he hadn't dropped either to go for his gun, which I was thinking was also a good sign.

"What are you doing here?" The voice behind us didn't sound threatening. The lilt on the question was one of pleasant surprise.

"Brace yourself," Ranger whispered. Then he squared his shoulders and used his grip on me to turn us both around again.

I found myself face to face with a very pretty Latina woman. She was my height, and maybe a couple years younger. Her long dark hair was pulled back into a bun. She was wearing yoga pants and a tank top that both fit her like a second skin. And she was smiling up at Ranger like he hung the stars.

Ranger gave her a somewhat reluctant smile in return. "Anita."

Her eyes lingered on me, and I'm sure that I made quite a sight. Still not sure what was happening, my mouth was slightly agape, and I was clutching both my pastry bag and my coffee to my chest.

She cocked her head and turned back to Ranger. She didn't say a word, but she did the annoying single-eyebrow-lift that Ranger could do, and that always spoke volumes.

He expelled a breath and I felt some of the tension go out of him. He removed his arm from around my shoulders and brought his hand to the small of my back. "Anita, this is Stephanie."

The woman's eyes lit up, and she grinned at me. That's when it clicked into place for me, because the resemblance was suddenly undeniable. I'd know that 200-watt smile anywhere. The rest of the introduction was superfluous, but Ranger gave it anyway.

"Stephanie, this is Anita. My sister."