Disclaimer: Janet Evanovich is one clever lady. Characters and everything you recognize are hers. I'm just playing.

A/N: Sorry it has been two months between updates! Work got crazy on me. Hopefully I won't do that to you again. I also had a little bit of writer's block going on, but hopefully finally getting this chapter out will help. *cough* so will reviews *cough*. Thanks to everyone who has sent in reviews and continued to follow and favorite in my absence.

CUPCAKE WARNING: This chapter isn't bad. But this story will definitely go there. If you can't handle it, you'll likely just want to give up on this story.

Chapter 4

The first day of our week offline was spent naked in Ranger's apartment. Turns out he had some premade meals in his freezer from Ella because his usual pattern when he got back from being in the wind was to spend a couple days in the apartment alone. The only time we got dressed at all was when Ranger had Bobby come up to check me out one more time. I thought it was excessive, but Ranger "just wanted to be sure". It was sweet, so I let him get away with it. This time.

When we woke up the next morning, and finished off our morning activities, we were sitting at the table eating breakfast when Ranger said, "Babe, this wedding shower, you said it is this weekend, right?"

"Yes, Sunday."

Ranger nodded. "Shrimp scampi is pretty easy. Today's Wednesday, what do you say we go get the ingredients today and make some tonight for dinner? Your hand is injured, so I'll do the bulk of the work and you'll be my sous chef this time." Ranger noticed my puzzled look and added, "It means under-chef. You'll be my assistant. Then Sunday, as long as you're feeling up to it, you'll take lead and I'll assist where you need help. Then after that, we'll go back to the basics whenever we have time for some lessons."

"Ranger, I don't know about future lessons. Can't we just cook together on Sunday?"

"Babe. Let's try today and Sunday. If you have fun, we'll do more, if not, well, I have plenty of other things I can teach you."

My eyes glazed over at the thought for a few seconds. Then I wiped my mouth to check for drool and said, "so, when do you want to go to the grocery store?"

Ranger's eyes had darkened too and he put his hand on my thigh, "well, we can go to the store and I can show you how to pick out good shrimp, garlic, and everything else we need." He slid his hand a little further up my leg and put his mouth right up to my ear continuing with, "or, I can call Ella, ask her for everything we need, and we can find something else to fill that hour of our time with."

A couple hours later, we stumbled back out of the bedroom and Ranger placed the call to Ella. I settled onto the couch, and Ranger went to pick out a movie. He paused when he looked at the movies stacked on the floor next to the TV.

"Babe?"

I blushed and sighed, "well, I know you guys don't really think I care, but I do know I'm out of shape and that it wasn't good for me, especially with regards to my job. I mean, there's only so many times you can get outrun by a senior citizen before it starts to get embarrassing."

I saw Ranger's lips twitch and narrowed my eyes. When he didn't say anything, I continued, "but I really don't like running. So I decided to try a few things out."

"And?"

"I don't think yoga is really for me. I liked the idea and the warm up and cool down bits were soothing, but I couldn't figure out how to do what the instructors were doing. And trying to watch the TV while doing some of those poses really put a crick in my neck. I had the same problem with the pilates. The Zumba and Kickboxing were fun though. I'm not sure if I was doing them right, but I had fun and noticed after a few weeks that I could do longer and longer stretches before I got out of breath, so I figured that I had to be doing SOMETHING right."

Ranger gave me a big grin. "Proud of you, Babe. You don't have to like running or every form of exercise, but it gets easier as you go. And if there are things you do like, we can build on those."

"But not right now, Carlos, right?"

"No Babe, right now, we're resting and relaxing."

With that, he picked out a DVD and put it in and brought the remote back to the couch with him. I scooted forward, he crawled onto the couch behind me and pulled me close so I was spooning him. I fell asleep before I could even see what movie he had picked out.

I woke up blissfully comfortable and relaxed in the same position I'd fallen asleep in. I could tell from Ranger's utter stillness and steady, slow breathing that he was still asleep. The DVD menu was still up on the TV and I wondered if Ranger had even pressed play. I could tell that it was getting to be dusk out, so my best guess was that I'd been asleep for a few hours. Huh. Who would have thought Ranger could waste a day like that. Not that I considered it a waste, but I thought Ranger might.

"Shhhh…" Ranger whispered from behind me, using his arms to pull me closer to him.

"I know I didn't say that out loud."

"No, but you were thinking it loud enough!"

I struggled to sit up and finally looked at the clock. "Ranger! It's 7 PM!"

"Babe, what's my name?" Ranger growled behind me, pulling me back down.

"Carlos," I sighed, "But you're still Ranger to me too. It's going to take me a while to get used to calling you something else. And I'll probably just always call you Ranger some of the time."

"As long as you remember that I'm more than just Ranger, I can handle that."

I sat back up, stomach growling.

Ranger chuckled and got up, pulling me to my feet. "Okay, Babe, dinner time, let's talk shrimp and start your lessons."

We went into the kitchen and washed our hands, then Ranger started pulling ingredients out of the fridge and pantry. He explained what each ingredient was to me (with only minimal eyerolling on my part for some of them, but I mean, who didn't know what butter was). Once he had everything out he said, "okay, the first thing we're going to do is start water boiling for pasta."

When my eyes bugged out, he just said, "tonight, we're going to have whole wheat, on Sunday you can make regular pasta if you want."

"Now that we have that starting to heat up, we're going to prep everything else."

We worked together to put all the ingredients in little dishes. Ranger showed me how to mince the garlic, but glanced at my injured hand and didn't look like he was eager to give me a knife anytime soon. Not that I could have held it anyway, but I imagined that even if Bobby gave me the all-clear by Sunday, Ranger wouldn't be letting me mince the garlic then either.

Then he moved to the sink with a rolled up brick of brown paper and a colander. He opened the paper and inside was a bag filled with grossness. I gasped and Ranger chuckled. "Babe, this is shrimp."

"No it's not! It has legs! And it is greyish. Shrimp is pink and doesn't have legs!"

Ranger chucked again. "Well, this is RAW shrimp. It'll turn pink when we cook it. And yeah, it has legs. Shrimp have legs. Don't worry we're going to take them off."

I just gave him a look, and he chucked again. "Well, I had Ella get some that was already deveined because I didn't think you were going to want anything to do with that yet. I'm glad I did. For now, since you have to try to keep your hand clean and dry, I'll handle the peeling. And on Sunday, we'll just use some that is already peeled. It will be raw though. Pre-cooked shrimp just means that you're going to over-cook it when you heat it again."

"And no legs, right!"

"Right. The legs come off when you peel them. We'll even shell out the big bucks for the ones that have the tail off too."

I nodded. I felt a little bit bad if I was making him buy more expensive ingredients, and I had no doubt that even if I tried, I wouldn't be paying. But I mean, really. Legs? Peeling? I shuddered. He made it sound like I'd deal with that sometime later after I discovered a love of cooking, but i had my doubts.

Ranger quickly dealt with the shrimp shells and supervised as I put the pasta in, without burning myself, I might add, while he was doing so. Then he showed me how to cook up the scampi, explaining that his secret ingredients were some red pepper flakes to give it a little bit of extra heat and lemon juice, which he used to replace some of the butter. I was skeptical of that substitution, but whatever it was his show.

Way quicker than I would have thought or been able to do myself, we were sitting down and eating dinner. I had to admit, even with the whole lemons instead of butter thing, it was really good. I told Ranger so. And I guess he still wasn't quite used to listening to me eat, or maybe it was just that he was allowed to do something about it, because in no time at all, I found myself back in the bedroom. Probably we should have dealt with the dishes first, but hey, I was just the assistant, and if this is what the head chef wanted to do next, who was I to judge?