The following story is a work of fiction that features characters developed by Janet Evanovich. No money has been earned through writing this story. Any similarities to real events or persons are entirely coincidental.

Although a stand-alone, this book builds upon the previous books in my series. Because it is a stand-alone, however, there is a lot of review in the first chapter and a lot of explanation of how I have changed the characters and backstories from JE's. I know some people find that a bit tedious. If you are sensitive to that and don't want the review, feel free to skip reading the first chapter.

Out of the previous books in my series, the first one is a bit cupcake-y, but the rest are pure babes and develop the relationships between the characters. For maximum enjoyment, I suggest that you read them in the following order:

22 Caliber

Trigger Happy 23

Morelli's Argument 23.5

Ranger 23.75

Threatening 24

Fixation 25

Security 26

Sneaky 27

Date Night at the Movies 27.1

Meeting Maria 27.2

The Intervention 27.3

Envious 28

Dickie's Demise 28.1

Mob Matters 28.2

Altercation at Giovichinni's 28.3

Numbskull 29

Toxic 30

Obit 31

Tamper 32

Theft 33

Forced 34

Fiesta 35

In recognition of the fact that I'm a binge reader and don't personally like to wait for updates, I will try to post twice a day, barring unseen life events.

Reviews, as always, are greatly appreciated. I have a few people who regularly review for me, and I'd like to thank you for that. Your reviews have given me the confidence to write another story. I appreciate all reviews and try to respond to each and every one. Please note that I cannot respond to reviews that have been posted by guests. Also please note that there are times that the fan fiction site has glitches and doesn't allow me to respond to reviews. I am still reading and appreciating the reviews, however, and I apologize in advance if I don't respond to your comments.

Thank you for reading my story. I hope you enjoy it!

~ Sarah ~

Chapter One

I walked off the plane beside Ranger. I was sad to say goodbye to Miami, but was looking forward to investigating the City of Atlanta. I was newly married to Ricardo Carlos Manoso, otherwise known as Ranger, and we were on our honeymoon. We had been married three days before in Trenton but Julie, Ranger's daughter from his first marriage, and his ex and her husband had been invited to the wedding. Because Ranger and I had decided to make it a working holiday and because Ranger had to do some work in Miami, and because Rachel and Ron and Julie were returning to their hometown of Miami anyway, Ranger had chartered a plane as a special treat to take the five of us back.

The first night we were in Miami we did work. Ranger and I both worked for Ranger's company, Rangeman, a full-service private security firm that did everything from system design and installation to monitoring and maintenance. We provided security guards and bodyguards, and we did private investigations and cybersecurity and research. The last function, research, was my area of expertise. I was the research director, and I found out people's secrets using an in-house designed software program called In-Spect. The software worked like a Google search engine, and searched through the vast amount of information on the web to create a dossier on a person's life. The file it created would have a range of information from medical to academic to professional to criminal to financial. That information would be inputted by In-Spect into a standardized form – the fields were automatically populated and a report was created. The analysts would then review that form to see if a need for further research was identified. If it was, we would investigate the links identified through the initial search. That was the basis of most of our research. We did this for client startups for those companies wanting to make sure there are no security risks in their employees; for clients looking for security risks in new hires; or, for our sales department so that they could use that information in the marketing of our services.

That wasn't all the research we did though. We did more detailed searches that led us down rabbit holes and through data dumps to find out everything possible about a company or an individual. In this work, we did corporate overviews and analysis as to the health of a company for real estate offices and real estate lawyers looking to broker sales deals. We did similar due diligence reviews for a mutual fund company looking to add certain corporations to their portfolio. We did in-depth analysis of felons for two police forces, and were in the process of signing on an additional three other police departments and the DEA to do this type of in-depth search, and we identified known haunts and other places where felons were typically found in capture plans for our police force clients as well as various bonds offices.

I had experience developing capture plans. In addition to being a research director, I worked for a bonds company going out to retrieve felons. When a felon was arrested, they often had the ability to pay a bond to allow them to walk free until their court date. When they showed up for their hearing, the money was returned to them.

However, felons often didn't have the money to pay the bond. That's where a bonds company came in. For the price of fifteen percent of the bond and the lending of some collateral, the bonds company would pay their bail. When they returned for their hearing, the courts would return the bail to the bond company and the bond company would return the collateral to the felon. The bonds company, however, kept the fifteen percent.

If the felon didn't turn up for their hearing, the bonds company wouldn't get their bail bond back. The bonds company didn't like that. Without that money returned, they couldn't lend the money to another felon and earn another fifteen percent. So they got mad, and hired a bounty hunter to return the felon to the system. For that, ten percent of the price of the bond was given to the bounty hunter for their trouble and the remaining five percent of the bond fee was kept by the bonds company for administrative purposes. The faster the felon was returned to the system, the better it was for the bonds company. When the felon was returned to the system, the whole process started again – just with the bond required by the court at a higher dollar value. Some felons went through this process several times before they simply couldn't afford to miss court any longer.

I had been a rookie bounty hunter for Vincent Plum Bail Bonds when I met Ranger. I was supremely unqualified for the position and didn't have any of the natural skills necessary to do the job. Ranger mentored me and taught me everything I knew about being a bounty hunter, which didn't say much about his skills as a trainer. However, while I wasn't particularly effective at picking up skips, I was fairly good at creating capture plans. We had five bonds companies as clients, and our staff picked up the felons for three of them. The only reason we didn't pick up the felons for the other two were because those particular bonds companies weren't in Trenton and we didn't have patrol staff there available to pick up the felons.

We had research requests for all our different clients coming out of our ears. A year before, I was the only researcher on staff. I now had six and a half people working for me, and my department was growing again. Ranger, with the help of the Executive Director of his Miami branch, had decided that it made sense to centralize our research department. When I got back to Trenton, I would be hiring another staff member to do the work for the Miami branch of Rangeman.

We were in Atlanta for our honeymoon for three days, but it was to be a working holiday. Ranger was purchasing another security company that had five locations. With this, Rangeman would have seven locations in total and, because the new company didn't have the research capabilities of our staff – or the ownership of In-Spect, the most comprehensive search engine that had ever been developed – Ranger had decided to centralize their research departments as well. This would mean that we'd increase my staff complement by an additional five people to cover the research needs of the new company. However, if the research abilities of our company were marketed in our new cities and if the service was as popular as it was in our hometown of Trenton, we'd be growing much more and adding more staff on quite quickly. Ranger's estimation was that our staff would grow from the one person six months ago to around twenty in the next five years. I thought, judging by the work that was coming that I knew of, that we might achieve that staff complement within two.

My ability to do research had been especially helpful recently. When Julie had come to Trenton, it had come to our attention that she was being stalked. Leo, from Cybersecurity, identified the man and found out that, despite Julie's belief that he was a fifteen-year old boy, he was actually a twenty-nine year old Honduran man in the States with diplomatic immunity and was a known stalker and pedophile. When I researched him, I found that his father was the diplomat and was using his diplomatic channels to import dog food laced with cocaine. The son, in addition to stalking children, had been arranging for the pet food to be separated from the cocaine and was selling the cocaine down the eastern seaboard. Through my research, I was able to identify the problem – but I wasn't able to prove it. I was able to take the case as far as I could without finding specific people who had been sold the drugs by the man or proving the purification of the cocaine.

After I did my job, Ranger did his. He talked to the cities where girls had reported being assaulted. He talked to the City of Miami's police department to report Julie's stalking. He talked to the DEA and had them trace the pet food through to the facility that separated out the cocaine, and he talked to the Honduran President, a friend of his, and arranged for the man and his diplomat father to be deported back to Honduras to stand trial for his drug trafficking and pedophile charges.

Ranger was able to do that because he had a lot of friends in high places. Ranger had a secret but effective past. When he graduated from high school, he joined the army and quickly became a Ranger. He had been involved in a number of high-security missions that I didn't know the details on, and had developed a number of high-level contacts. The mission that was the most important, however, was the mission where he was part of the Ranger team that transported the deceased Osama bin Laden to the US ship for burial at sea.

The al-Qaeda weren't very happy with the US government, both for killing bin Laden as well as for not letting them bury him themselves. In revenge, they targeted every member of the SEAL team that killed him and the Ranger team that transported him, and after a few of the team members were murdered by the al-Qaeda the US government erased all links between the mission itself and the men who had been a part of it. Ranger went a step farther and, when he retired from the army a couple of years later, he asked the government to create an alternate identity for him. He had been given a new Social Security number and a new history. Ranger, graduate from a business program at Douglass College, was born and Ranger, former team lead and decorated soldier in the US Rangers, died a quiet death. If I searched for him using In-Spect, I would find someone who didn't match up with the person I knew.

Since then, Ranger tried to live off the grid. His army pension was paid to Rangeman rather than to Ranger himself, and it was couched as the purchase of security services. We lived in an office building. All our credit cards were company cards. Our car was a company car. Our phones were company phones. Short of facial recognition, there was little that could be used to track Ranger.

This was important as the al-Qaeda were not the only people who had targeted Ranger. After Ranger left the army, he helped start up PMC, or Private Military Contractors – a company made up of mercenaries who were hired to do all the shit jobs that the government wanted done but didn't think were possible. Comprised of the best operatives in the business, they did everything from reconnaissance to extractions to attacks, and had clients ranging from the military to a variety of alphabet agencies both from the US and other countries, to multinational private corporations. Ranger was the best in the world for reconnaissance and leading teams into enemy territory to find evidence and shut down operations. With his Hispanic looks and fluency in Spanish, he had done a lot of work in Central and South America in the War on Drugs. Through his work, he had developed relationships with a number of people higher up in the governments in those countries, and he'd pissed off drug lords throughout the continent.

Because Ranger was getting known for his work in shutting down illegal operations and it was therefore getting too personally dangerous to continue to enter enemy territory, he had become a trainer for PMC. He had done that for the past two years and had been doing well at it. However, it required him to be in Colombia at the PMC headquarters and training facility approximately eight weeks out of the year, and with settling down with me and growing his company, Ranger didn't feel comfortable being away from Trenton so frequently. He had, a month before, retired from his trainer position and become just a member of the Board of Directors. He had not given up his part-ownership in the company. As he said, it was a huge moneymaker for Rangeman and covered his salary, and being on the Board of Directors didn't take much time.

Ranger was concerned about his involvement in all these dangerous activities not only for himself, but also for me. He felt that association with him brought danger to me – and our unborn baby. I was twenty-one weeks pregnant with our first child. Tia Rose was due on July fourth.

To help protect the baby, Ranger and I had chosen a bodyguard with an interest in childcare to be her nanny. To help protect me, Ranger had put trackers on everything I owned – my watch, my purse, my car…the only way I could be safer would be for Ranger to microchip me. I mentioned that to him once, and when he looked intrigued by the idea I decided not to mention it again.

On my watch was a panic button. I could press that and a Rangeman team would come running. I'd had the watch for nine months and unfortunately I'd had to use the watch panic button several times. Four months ago I had been almost kidnapped. Three months ago, I had been approached by a man intent on killing me. Two months ago, I had been shot twice. Luckily I had been wearing the bulletproof jacket that Ranger had gotten me for my birthday. One month ago, my bodyguard had been shot when the shooter had been aiming for me. Through it all, I was fine and the baby was fine. Ranger? Not so much. He had seen me get shot both times before Christmas and had arrived late to the party with the other threats. He was struggling with me being in danger. He had started to suffer from nightmares. Always a bit overprotective, he became more so. He wanted to know where I was going, who I'd be with and what time I'd be back, and I swore he tracked my location the whole time I was away. Always calm and collected, he was now constantly tense and poised for action. He had started seeing the corporate psychiatrist on a weekly basis to help him with his anxiety.

It didn't help that, not only was I in danger, but the baby was in danger as well. When the man intent on killing me approached me, we got into a tussle and he kicked me in the stomach. This resulted in bleeding and I'd had to lie down with my feet up for ten days to give the baby a fighting chance. When I was shot, the baby was fine but I was advised again to lie down with my feet up. Things had been going well with the baby until a week ago. A routine checkup showed that my blood pressure was high, and the doctor had limited me to fifty hours a week of work. Since I had recently reduced my workweek from one hundred hours to seventy-five hours, I didn't know how I would reduce it further. However, Ranger was upset by the danger to me and baby Tia, and he had banned me from the office for the next month.

Of course, we found out about Julie's stalking after that ban had been enforced and Ranger had let me break that ban to work on the needed research. He said I was Rangeman's best researcher. I didn't know if I was, but I was just glad he let me do the research. I had been upset about Julie being stalked and, as I told Ranger, it would upset me more to think about it and not do anything proactive about it than it would for me to do the research myself.

So we were in Atlanta for our honeymoon and so that Ranger could purchase Pearl Security. It was a multimillion-dollar deal that would vault our company into being one of the top income earners in Trenton. Already profitable, Rangeman would now net almost seventy-five million in revenues annually. If this purchase went well, Ranger intended to expand again into other locations around the US.

Ranger was struggling a bit with the growth. He had recently reorganized the company so that there were more managers who were responsible for more in their job descriptions. However, he was growing from a staff of over four hundred between his two locations to one that was almost fourteen hundred through the seven locations, and that sort of growth was challenging to manage easily. Ranger had to change from being an owner who had a hands-on management style, to one that just managed; had to change from one that got down in the trenches and helped out with the work, to one that relied on his managers to do that work for him. It was a steep learning curve that, as an employee looking on, he made look easy. As his spouse, however, I knew how difficult he was finding it.

Ranger was talking to the psychiatrist about that as well. The psychiatrist called him a workaholic, and I had to agree. He recently cut back his hours and was now working seventy-five hours a week. The doctor had challenged him to work the same fifty hours I worked, and Ranger was feeling overwhelmed. He wanted to work the same hours I was working and agreed that he should be in theory, even just to be there for me, but the practice of it was a little more challenging. I understood that and was trying to support him in any way I could.

The psychiatrist told him that every person had four legs – family, friends, work and spiritual. The only area of his life that wasn't changing was spiritual. His family was growing with the addition of me and Tia, his friends were growing with the addition of my friends, and work was changing with the addition of Pearl Security and his retirement from PMC. So much was changing, and Ranger was reeling a bit with it all. Ranger was receiving support for that from the psychiatrist as well.

Ranger had been finding the sessions with the psychiatrist helpful. As he said, before he started, he had a whole lot of feeling balled up in a layer of anxiety, and he was so overwhelmed that he couldn't tease out the specific feelings to do something about them. The psychiatrist was helping him separate out and identify the specific feelings so that he could act upon them. I had found that, since he had started seeing the psychiatrist, he was still abnormally overprotective but he seemed more settled and more grateful for the little things. As someone who had been traditionally calm and peaceful, he was getting in touch with his Zen again – and I couldn't be happier.