Disclaimer: The characters and their world belong to Janet Evanovich. I'm just playing with them for fun and all mistakes are my own.

Previously:

Steph wrote: I could tell last night and this morning that you and Mari have a lot of unfinished business, so we wanted to give you the chance to talk things over. Closure is good, right? There's plenty to eat in the fridge – and it's real food since I stocked it for you. Ranger wanted me to let you know that the room is secure.

Huh. It was more likely we were locked in with no way out, if I knew mi primo.

Ric had tacked on a post script: I'm delaying my honeymoon for this, so you'd better work things out to Steph's satisfaction. Hector is monitoring the room in case there are any problems.

Sure enough, there was a camera just over the doorway to the bedroom, so I let my middle finger tell them exactly how I felt about the situation.

Chapter 2

We are not talking about our feelings

Lester's POV

So, my friends decided to stun and drug my ex-wife and I so that they could shut us up in a hotel room until we 'talked it out and found closure'. Neither Mari nor I had ever taken orders very well, so for the first few minutes Mari stalked around the room muttering to herself while she searched for a way out.

I knew mi primo and my co-workers well enough to know that that was an exercise in futility, so I spent the time searching out the monitoring devices Hec had planted. The hidden mics got flushed, but the mini cams mostly got stashed in a drawer, since good wireless cameras don't come cheap.

I got a little more artistic with the camera hidden in the complimentary bowl of fruit that sat on the wet bar, though. If the nosy assholes wanted something to watch, they could just look at a life-size drawing of my middle finger. I didn't flatter myself by thinking that I'd found all of the bugs in the room without the proper equipment, but I'd gotten most of them.

"How long were we out again? It couldn't have been long…"

I checked the clock over the fireplace mantle. "At least a couple of hours." Which was plenty of time to lock us in tight. Ric, Tank, and I had once busted up an entire cartel with less lead time.

"How did they manage to disable the locks?" She snarled as she finally stomped away from the security panel she'd jimmied open with a butter knife. "The electronic locking mechanisms on these doors are some of the best on the market, and it's supposed to be impossible to lock someone in." Mari aimed the knife for the sink in the kitchenette and made it on the first try. "Tamper-proof my sweet ass," she muttered.

I exercised my right to remain silent, since any comment I could've made at that moment would've just gotten me into trouble. Yes, her ass was as sweet as ever, and there hasn't been a lock or security system invented that Hector couldn't circumvent. Add the devious mind of one Stephanie Plum-Mañoso into the mix and we were lucky that we weren't marooned on a desert island in our underwear.

I finished checking for bugs and plopped down on the sofa. "They took the room phone and all our electronics, too," I told her as I reached for the remote, which wasn't there, either. "Son of a bitch," I muttered when I realized that the cable box was gone, too. I got why they took my iPad and the phones, but did they have to take all forms of entertainment? It wasn't like either of us was fuckin' MacGuyver. I am a man of many talents, but the ability to build a cell phone out of the TV remote, an iPod and my electric razor wasn't one of them.

Since my head was still pounding, I got up and raided the room fridge for a bottle of water and downed a couple of the ibuprofens someone had so thoughtfully left on the bar for us. Finally feeling a little more human, I rejoined Mari in the living room.

"They even took my makeup mirror and the flashlight off of my keychain," Mari muttered as she neatly caught the water bottle I tossed her. She grabbed the painkillers from me and finally flopped down into one of the armchairs. "Your friends are seriously loco."

"That was probably Stephanie." I shrugged. "My Morse code is rusty, anyway."

"You were funnier from 2500 miles away," she remarked with a scowl. "So if we're stuck in here with no TV and no way out, what are we expected to do?"

"Well, I could think of a couple of things," I jerked my head toward the bedroom. "I probably got rid of all of the cameras in there if you want to test out the bed. Though, on second thought, we never did get around to making that sex tape," I mused, just before I got hit in the head with a throw pillow.

"God, you're such a pig. I'm trying to be serious here," she huffed. "They're your friends, so tell me what they expected to accomplish by knocking us out and tossing us in here?"

"Well, since sex is out, I guess we could do what the note said and talk about our feeeelings," I sang out. She snorted and flung another pillow my way, letting me know exactly what she thought about Steph's plan.

Needless to say, we spent the next hour or so in not-so-comfortable silence. Sitting in a room with Mari glaring at me wasn't how I'd envisioned spending my stay in Las Vegas, but it did give me lots of time to think. And remember. And wish that things could've been different.

The morning after our first quickie Vegas wedding was awkward, but surprisingly friendly. We'd both politely averted our eyes when we got of bed, and since I was raised to be a gentleman, I let her have the first shower while I ordered up the Santos family hangover cure – huevos rancheros and virgin Bloody Marys with extra hot sauce. We'd exchanged contact information before we went our separate ways and the annulment went through less than a month later.

The second time Mari and I met was a couple of years later, when Ric, Tank, and I had decided not to re-enlist and RangeMan was still just an idea in the back of my cousin's mind. Since the three of us were at loose ends, we'd decided to spend our first week as civilians in Vegas.

I'd lost my shirt at the roulette table pretty early on, so I'd decided to look Mari up and see how life was treating her. One drink had led to more drinks, which had somehow led us to the wedding chapel, again. In the years since our first marriage, some wise soul had decided that twenty-four hour wedding chapels and drunks didn't mix. So since the courthouse closed at Midnight, I sort of remember my second wedding. I remember the wedding night, and the two days after that, even better. I won't lie. I love women, and most of the time they like me too, but somehow sex with Mariela Sanchez is just…. More.

But best sex of my life or not, we were still strangers with very different lives. So, at the end of the weekend I'd got on a plane to Newark and she'd gone back to studying for finals. And some judge must've been really drunk because they saw fit to grant us a second annulment.

The third time we met, we actually didn't get married. Ric's lawyers were still trying, unsuccessfully, to straighten out a small legal matter between Ric and the Las Vegas PD, when one of our contacts tracked one Vincent DeMuzio to the high roller's suite at Caesar's Palace. Old Vinnie was worth a cool million to RangeMan, so I'd grabbed my go-bag and hopped a plane to Sin City.

Imagine my surprise when my ex-wife turned out to be the in-house security liaison for the takedown. I'd known that Mari was beautiful, and funny, but the sight of her taking down my skip was the sexiest thing I'd ever seen. Hell, it's still in the top five, and I was married to her for almost a year the third time around.

So, after I'd arranged for Vinnie's overnight accommodations at the County lockup, we'd ordered a little room-service and got… reacquainted. And though I'd left the next morning to escort DeMuzio back to Jersey, I couldn't get Mari out of my mind. In fact, I'd mooned around like a pansy-assed teenager so much that Tank and Bobby threatened to ship me naked to a 'Stan if I didn't snap out of it.

So I'd picked up the phone and called her. Late night calls led to weekend visits, and before I knew it I had a whole shit load of frequent flyer miles and Mariela Sanchez was so deeply embedded under my skin she was a part of me. She still was, if I had to be completely honest.

We were stone cold sober for our third wedding, which coincidentally had taken place overlooking the same fountain mi primo and Steph had just said 'I do' at. The only differences were that the bride had worn red and Ric had been the best man. I'd honestly thought the third time was the charm for me and Mari. Sure, I hadn't been able to spend as much time in Vegas as I would've liked, but things had been great between us…. until they weren't.

"Are we just going to sit here ignoring each other?" Mari finally asked.

"Wouldn't be my first choice." I shrugged. "What do you want to talk about?"

"I certainly don't want to talk about my feeelings." We both laughed at that.

"Well, what do you think about the Yankee's chances in the World Series, then?"

That was the icebreaker we needed, since Mari hated the Yankees more than she'd ever hated me. And after we'd good naturedly insulted each other's teams enough, we caught up on the last couple of years of each other's lives.

"So how's your mom?" I asked as I put together a couple of my special ham and cheese sandwiches from the supplies Steph had somehow crammed into the wet bar's fridge. My secret is adding corn chips for crunch.

"Eh – same old same old." Mari wrinkled her nose. "She's on rehab stint number twelve and husband number five."

"Maybe both will stick this time," I said, though we both knew the odds of a tsunami roaring through the middle of the Nevada desert were probably greater. With Mari's mom treating marriage like a revolving door and my own parents rarely living in the same house when I was growing up, it was no wonder our relationship was as screwed up as it was. We didn't exactly have good role models. And frankly, relationships had always seemed like an alien concept to me; I still didn't have a clue as to what went wrong with us the last time. I said as much while we eating and ended up wearing her beer.

"Pendejo!" She spat out. "You lie and whore around and ask me what went wrong?"

What the fuck? Anger started simmering deep in my chest. "I never lied to you," I ground out as I pushed away from the table and sent the beer bottle skittering across the floor.

"You did nothing but lie to me!" She stood up, and advanced on me until we stood chest to chest. "And you were always leaving me alone so you could visit your putas!"

"For Christ's sake," I muttered. "You knew my life and business were in Trenton. If we didn't spend enough time together, it was because you couldn't be bothered to fucking move in with me."

"It's a good thing I didn't give up my life for you," she spat out. "I deserved better than a man who couldn't keep it in his pants."

"I. Never. Cheated. On. You," I snarled. Yes, I'd had a rep as a player, but I hadn't even looked at another woman after we met up for the third time. And it'd taken me and little Les an embarrassingly long time to get back in the saddle, dating wise, after the divorce. "But maybe if I'd known I was gonna be punished anyway, I would've actually done the crime."

I felt the slap practically down to my toes and I would've bet that the sound carried all the way to Ric and Steph's suite. We stood there glaring at each other for several long seconds, and just before I was about to stomp toward the shower, she burst into tears.

"Jesus, don't do that," I sighed as I awkwardly drew her into my arms. "How do you do that – make me so mad I can't see straight and then break me down?" I never could handle it when she cried. I dropped a kiss onto her forehead and wondered if maybe Beautiful hadn't had the right idea, after all. "Maybe we do need to talk about what just happened here." She reared back and I was struck by just how beautiful she looked, with tears shining in her beautiful honey-colored eyes. "Uh… we can talk when you're ready. How about some of that ice cream Steph…."

I didn't get a chance to finish my sentence before she grabbed my face in her hands and hauled me down to her. Her lips were salty with her tears, but her mouth tasted like five kinds of sin.

"Les?" Her lips hovered barely an inch from mine when the kiss finally ended.

"Hmm?" All of my higher order brain functions were occupied with figuring out if I could steal another kiss, so I wasn't up for talking, much.

"Screw talking and take me to bed."

As I fitted my mouth to hers, I could only think that that was the best idea I'd heard all day.

AN: Thanks for the reviews and comments. I think one, maybe two chapters will wrap this up.