A/N: All characters belong to Janet Evanovich.

Carol Cantell-Harmon was sitting on her windowsill with one leg in and one leg out of her 2nd story bedroom window. Her face, fingers, and pink velour sweat suit was covered in yellow Cheez Doodle dust, and her tears were washing lines down her dirty, Doodle dusted face. In one hand, she held an almost-empty bag of Doodles. In the other, she held a frying pan. Carol had failed to appear for her court date earlier in the week. As a result, my sidekick Lula and I had come to Carol's house this morning to check on Carol… and to drag her sorry behind back to jail. This wasn't Carol's first rodeo as a FTA. We did the same drill with Carol several years ago when she robbed a Frito Lay truck.

"I'm not going back to jail!" Carol shrieked. "The women there are terrifying! I don't stand a chance in there! Nobody will bail me out after this! My sister can't afford it. And orange isn't my color!" Carol let out a guttural wail as she teetered precariously on the window ledge.

"It's not so bad," Lula said. "Definitely not worth killing yourself over. And girl, like it or not, orange has been your color for years. When was the last time you showered?"

Carol's eyes bugged out of her head, and a look of rage crossed her face. She shook her frying pan at us. I let out an exasperated sigh, and my eyes rolled back so far in my head I think I saw my brain.

My name is Stephanie Plum. I'm a fugitive apprehension agent for my cousin Vinnie's bail bonds office. I'm 5'7" and 130 pounds of Jersey wit & feminine tenacity, but on bad hair days, my hair adds at least three inches to my height. Today was one of those days. Jersey's summer humidity hadn't been kind to my hair, and it was one step away from wild man of Borneo, with brown curls fluffed in every direction. I was wearing tennis shoes, denim shorts, and a teal girly-cut t-shirt. My blue eyes, a nod to the Hungarian part of my heritage, were accentuated with a double-swipe of black mascara, my lips were glossed, and my nose was a gift from God.

"You're not gonna die if you jump out of a second story window. You're going to break a leg and give yourself a concussion, but you're not gonna die," Lula scoffed.

Since I had last seen Carol, she had married a plumber from the Burg named Hank Harmon. She had settled down in a quaint, two story brick row house one block off Hamilton on Bayard Street. Carol had fallen comfortably into the housewife routine. She spent her days on her couch eating Cheez Doodles and Tastykakes, and she spent her nights burning her daily caloric intake doing the dirty with Hank. Much to Carol's dismay, she learned Hank not only had his hands in every toilet in Trenton, he also had his Mr. Happy inside half the women in the tri-state area. This broke Carol's fragile grip on sanity. In the same day, Carol served Hank with divorce papers and took a tire iron to his Harmon Plumbing panel van. Carol took it too far when the police arrived to arrest her, threatening Officer Robin Russell with the tire iron and breaking the passenger side window on the cop car.

Something in the front yard caught Carol's attention, and she craned her neck for a better look. "What the hell are you doing here?" Carol shrieked in a fit of rage.

Lula and I couldn't see the yard from our location, so we scrambled into the on-suite bathroom and ripped open the tiny window, poking our heads out to see. Hank Harmon stood in the middle of the postage-stamp front yard in his blue plumber's jumpsuit. He had one hand gripping his iPhone, pointed in Carol's direction.

"I came by for the show," Hank said. "Mrs. Menendez next door called me to let me know you were hanging out the window. I thought I'd come by to get your fat, psycho ass on camera. Smile for the camera, baby. You're on Facebook live."

I couldn't see Carol's face, but she released an angry scream before cussing an impressive string of four letter words in Hank's direction.

"She's distracted," I whispered to Lula. "Let's drag her back into the house and get out of here. I'll pull her in, and you cuff her."

"Sure thing," said Lula, digging around in her massive purple purse and hauling out a pair of cuffs.

Lula is the file clerk for Vincent Plum Bail Bonds. I met Lula in my first few weeks on the job as a bounty hunter. She's a short, voluptuous black woman with even more attitude than extra body fat. Lula is an ex-ho, and even though her job title has changed, her wardrobe remains much the same. Today, Lula had painted herself into poison green capri-length leggings and a purple-and-poison green zebra print spandex halter top. There was lots of side-boob oozing out of her top, and it looked as though her leggings were testing the stretch capacity of spandex. Personally, I was praying the spandex held. I'd seen Lula naked on at least one previous occasion apprehending a fugitive on a nude beach, and it wasn't pretty. Lula had accessorized her outfit with a giant purple leather purse, big black hoop earrings, and a pair of black Via Spiga stiletto heels.

I sort of saved Lula's life after a dangerous turn of events with a really bad guy named Ramirez, and ever since, she's been attached to me like gum stuck to a shoe. Sometimes I find this annoying, but I usually find it endearing. She's horrible as a bounty hunter assistant, but she's a good friend. Life was never boring with Lula in the passenger seat.

Lula and I crossed the threshold into the bedroom and saw Carol swearing and making rude hand gestures out the window. I heard Hank shouting from below, but I couldn't hear specifics over Carol. I moved as silently and as quickly as I could across the bedroom floor, Lula behind me. I could see that a small crowd of onlookers had gathered on the front lawn, and at least one police car was parked curbside. I tried to squash down the annoyed feelings that were surfacing. Why me? Why do my takedowns always become such a friggin' spectacle? I resisted the urge to sigh out loud, and I wrapped my arms around Carol's waist, leaning back with all my weight to pull her into the house.

Unfortunately, thanks to the Cheez Doodles Tastykakes, there was a lot of Carol. She wasn't as big as Lula, but the woman had put on some serious weight in the absence of her nightly cardio routine. She had at least forty pounds on me. Leaning backward with all my weight, I couldn't make her budge. When Carol realized what was happening, she shrieked and tried to pull away from me, in the process, knocking us both ass-over-teakettles out the window.

We landed on our backs with a thud on top of an azalea bush, and we expelled a huge breath as the wind was knocked out of us. I stared up at Lula with her head hanging out the upstairs window, unable to breathe.

"Steph, you okay?" Lula shouted. When I didn't respond, she left the window, presumably to come down to check on us.

I lay there in stunned silence trying to take an assessment of the damages. I wiggled my toes and fingers. I jiggled around on the ground a little. So far, so good. I tried to sit up and realized I had a throbbing headache. I sucked in some air, laying back down on the ground to wince in pain. When I opened my eyes, I looked up at two Rangers. I blinked several times, and my eyes managed to focus, pulling my vision of two men into one.

Ricardo Carlos Manoso, often called by his street name Ranger, is my longtime mentor, sometimes boss, and infrequent-yet-incredible lover. Ranger is nearly six feet of highly-toned muscle in mocha latte-colored skin, a nod to his Cuban ancestry. Today, he was in his usual uniform of black t-shirt and cargo pants with black, Vibram sole boots, accessorized with a gun belt that held his Glock, pepper spray, and his sat phone. Ranger's dark hair is cut short, and his chocolate brown eyes dilate to black when he makes love. My relationship with Ranger is complicated at best, and his admissions for love for me are rare and intertwined with qualifiers.

Ranger owns an elite security company called Rangeman with offices in Trenton, Boston, Miami, and Atlanta. Ranger is ex-army, Special Forces. His skills in the bedroom are magic, but his street skills, bounty hunter skills, and security professional skills rank somewhere in the neighborhood of superhero.

"Babe," Ranger said, lingering on the "a" sound a bit too long.

I blinked up at him. "Mmmph," I moaned.

Ranger did a quick assessment of my status, asking me to wiggle my toes and fingers or bend my arms and legs. Once he determined nothing was broken, he pulled me into a sitting position. I looked down at myself and realized I was covered in Cheez Doodle dust. I sighed. I looked over at Carol, who was still crumpled on the ground. Her soon-to-be ex-husband was standing over her with his iPhone, no doubt still broadcasting live on Facebook. Carol's eyes were open and she was sucking in air, but she wasn't up and moving yet. I realized her arm was twisted in an unnatural position, clearly broken after her two story fall. My stomach lurched, causing me to empty the contents of my stomach onto my legs and denim shorts. Ranger rubbed my back and held back my hair.

"Sorry," I whined, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand.

"Let's get you to Saint Francis. You have a head injury, but nothing life-threatening. An ambulance is on the way for her," Ranger said, nodding towards Cantell.

"No!" I exclaimed with too much enthusiasm, causing my head to pound. "She's FTA. She's mine—I caught her, and…"

Ranger cut me off. "I've got Hal and Lester in the car on the street. We'll give them the paperwork. They'll follow the ambulance to the hospital and wait until she's treated. They'll take her in and bring you the body receipt. You've done enough damage for one day," said Ranger, looking like he was thinking about smiling.

Lula sidled up to us. "You gonna live?" she asked, her eyes wide.

"Yeah, I think I'm okay. Can you take my car back to the bonds office?" I asked "Ranger is going to take me to get checked at Saint Francis."

"Sure thing. This place is starting to swarm with cops, so I'm gonna get the hell out of here," said Lula, turning around and swinging her ass in the direction of my car.

Ranger scooped me up under the armpits, setting me on my feet. I tried my best to balance on the balls of my feet, but everything was spinning around me. When Ranger felt my knees give, he held me up and hauled me to the curb where his Porsche 911 Turbo was parked. He slid me into the front seat and buckled me in before jogging around the car to climb into the driver's seat.

"Ranger, I'm getting barf in your car," I whined apologetically.

"Babe."

Twenty minutes later, we were in Saint Francis Hospital's emergency room behind a series of privacy curtains. I had an ice pack on my head while I waited for my turn in the MRI machine downstairs. I was grateful that Ranger was sitting with me, but he was in the zone. The silence was deafening

"Why did you show up at Cantell's?" I asked Ranger.

"The men in the control room had tracked your Corolla. We heard the call go out on the police band for a possible suicidal woman at the address, so I thought I better come check it out. I wanted to make sure the suicidal woman wasn't you," Ranger joked.

"You're in an awfully good mood," I said, giving him my best Burg glare.

"It's not every day I get to see you fall from a second story window and get covered in crushed Cheez Doodles."

I rolled my eyes, and tried my best to brush the crushed Doodles off the back of my shirt.

Two hours later, I was diagnosed with a mild concussion and told to take it easy for a few days. Ranger drove into the lot of my apartment and helped me to the door. He waited patiently outside the bathroom door while I brushed the barf out of my teeth and showered to remove any food, dirt, or vomit that still clung to my body. I emerged in a towel Doodle-dust free and dressed in soft flannel pajama pants with an oversized t-shirt. Ranger got me settled in front of the couch with an ice pack on my head, snacks on my coffee table, cell phone on the arm of the couch, and a blanket over my lap.

"You're acting awfully domesticated," I told him with a smirk.

"Don't push it, babe. I'm many things, but domesticated isn't one," he replied dryly before pressing his lips to mine in a mind-numbing kiss that ran straight to my duda. It took me a few seconds to remember to breathe when he ended the kiss. By the time all my senses were again working, he was gone.