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 storylines 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

Step 36

Snatched 37

Exhumed 38

Nativity 39

Fraud 40

Orientation 41

Televangelist 42

Therapeutic 43

Foxy 44

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 daily, barring unseen life events.

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

~ Sarah ~

Chapter One

"How long will Ranger be gone?" said Lula. She was visiting for lunch, and as always she was fascinated by my husband's absences. Ever since she had first met him, she was of the impression that he left the country to start rebellions and coups. When she knew he was gone, she avidly watched the news to see what country was experiencing civil unrest. It was, I thought, the only time she watched the news for more than the weather or the celebrity reports.

"I don't know", I said as I breastfed Grace, my three-month old daughter. My name was Stephanie Plum. I was a part-time bounty hunter whose hours I worked around being a Research Director for my husband's company, Rangeman. I was also still off on maternity leave for the birth of my twin girls, Grace and Alix. While I missed working, I was enjoying the time with the two babies and my twenty-one month old daughter, Tia.

While I was breastfeeding Grace, Tracy – our good friend and nanny – was bottle feeding Alix. We switched them out every time so that they wouldn't have to wait to be fed. This time Grace was breastfeeding and Alix was getting a bottle. The next time, the opposite would happen. After I finished feeding the one child, I would pump enough milk for the other child's next feed. Since both babies had large appetites and weren't patient, this system seemed to work well. Ranger also liked it as he was able to feed the babies just like me. Since I breastfed our first, he said that was something he had been a bit envious about.

I was very proud of my girls. I was still learning Alix and Grace's personalities. Alix looked like Ranger. I didn't know what color eyes she had yet, but her skin was a little more tanned than my pasty-white, she had dark hair, small features, and was a Latino beauty. She reminded me of Julie, Ranger's first daughter. I hoped she took after Julie in personality as well. Julie was sixteen and an amazing person. I was a very proud stepmom to her and was always excited when she was coming to visit. Since she lived in Miami, we didn't see her as much as we would like, but she flew up one weekend a month and spent her summers with us. She had flown up for the week after the babies were born and had loved spending time with her siblings. We were thrilled that she wanted to go to UPenn for university. With being located so close to Trenton, she picked there as she said she would then be able to come home for weekends and spend time with her family.

Grace looked a little like me, with my lighter brown hair, although like Ranger, her hair was straight. She loved to smile. While Lixi was a little more serious, Gracie was a lightning rod on other people's emotions. She seemed to sense how people were feeling and tried to make them feel better.

Tia was almost two and smart as a whip. She had an advanced vocabulary, energy to spare, a ready smile and an infectious laugh that she practiced frequently. She was a little charmer who loved people and liked nothing better than making people happy. She was stubborn, determined, and absolutely gorgeous. I don't think that was just me being a mother either. She had dark brown hair like Ranger although she had my curls. She had Ranger's brown eyes, mouth, ears and cleft in her chin. She had my nose, which I was glad about – it was my best feature – the shape of my eyes and the shape of my face. She was petite like Ranger's family and was a little ball of sunshine. Ranger said she took after me and that was why she was beautiful. The first time he said that I physically choked. I think I look average. I've got boring blue eyes that Ranger says are the color of sapphires, and shoulder-length curly medium brown hair with natural caramel highlights that Ranger says shows energy and beauty is equal amounts. I think sometimes that he is Irish instead of Cuban and has been kissing the Blarney Stone a little too much. I'm 5'7" unless I wear heels. I currently have a decreasing body mass and, although I was happy with the speed it was disappearing, I still had another thirty pounds to go. But while I was average, Ranger was not. He was 6'1" of pure Latino hotness, muscled where muscles were meant to be and flat where men are supposed to be flat. He had short dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, and every woman under the age of ninety wanted to jump him – and many above the age of ninety wanted to as well. Add to that is the fact that he was the kindest man that I had ever met, a quiet man who listened well and said little, a supportive man who was protective and devoted to his family, a humble man who was sensitive to other's emotions and cared deeply about people. Don't get me wrong. He was all those things, but he was also a hard-assed commander, a tough and unforgiving leader who didn't accept shit from his staff. He had to be. In his past, he had led teams of U.S. Army Rangers in the field and, when he retired from the Army, he did it for PMC, a company of mercenaries that he helped start up. When he had pissed off enough terrorists and drug lords to make life a little too dangerous, he trained tough soldiers in the fine art of reconnaissance and hostage extraction. Now, he was the owner of Rangeman, a company he had started eight years ago. Out of nothing, he developed the company into a multimillion-dollar success and, with a bequest from a friend of his, he inherited a billion-dollar addition to his company. Ranger was doing well professionally.

However, he didn't care at all about that. For him, money was only important if you didn't have enough to pay your bills. He donated a significant part of his annual income and saved the rest for the future. Ranger and I lived a quieter life and no one would suspect that we were as wealthy as we were. That's the way we liked it. My parents didn't know; my sister didn't know; Ranger's family didn't know; even Julie didn't know. There were only a handful of select people that knew, and they were the people that we could trust to keep the information to themselves.

Rangeman was a company on the east coast of the U.S. that did all things security-wise, from bodyguarding to providing security guards; from system design to installation and monitoring; from research to cybersecurity. We were getting known as being the best of the best. We had seven locations and employed roughly fifteen-hundred staff, and had a client list that included the Secret Service, the various alphabet agencies, a number of police forces, and a variety of international corporations and Mom and Pop businesses. Due to the inheritance of Secure, we had expanded our operations with the addition of fifteen more locations from the midwest and western regions of the U.S. and twenty-three hundred more staff. They also had a well-known and respected company, and combining the two was an exciting opportunity. The one problem was that Ranger had to travel to L.A. periodically. This was his first trip there now and, even though I knew that he would soon be back, I was frustrated by his absence. I missed him just as much as I knew that he missed his family.

I had met Ranger seven years ago. I was broke and in danger of losing my apartment and, desperate, I asked my weaselly cousin Vinnie for a job. He owned a bail bonds company. I was envisioning a job as a file clerk. However, the only position he had available was as a bounty hunter. His normal bounty hunter was in the hospital with having just had his appendix out and Vinnie was desperate to clear up his list of outstanding skips. I had no clue as to what I was doing, and his office manager, Connie, suggested that I phone Ranger and ask him for some ideas. I did, and that was the start of a beautiful friendship. He tried to teach me what to do, and the amount I learned from him didn't say anything good about my intelligence. However, he taught me enough that I caught those skips. I don't know who was more surprised – Vinnie or me. When Vinnie paid me, I found that paying my rent and being able to afford food was addictive, and I asked Vinnie for more files. Seven years later, I was still chasing skips for him. The only difference was that now I was doing it on behalf of Rangeman rather than as an independent contractor. When I wasn't pregnant or on maternity leave, I did that one day a week and was the Research Director for the other four.

There were thirty-three researchers on staff, two managers, and myself. We were a talented team that I was proud to work with. With the help of our in-house designed program, In-Spect, our job was to find out everything about individuals and corporations, everything from the mundane to the secrets that no one wanted other people to know. We were the best in the business and, while our company provided security services, our research department was marketed quite heavily and was used to provide clients with sales and background information for both security, marketing and other business needs. We were the fastest growing department in the company. Three years ago, the department was just me – but I impressed enough people that demand for our services grew. Now we could barely keep up with the work.

Rangeman headquarters were in Trenton, New Jersey. We were located on an unassuming quiet side-street located ten minutes from everything important. Three years ago, the complex was one seven-story building that was bursting at the seams. It was a combination of residence and work spaces and although it was a good building, it simply wasn't enough. Ranger started to buy up properties on the street and the next street over, and now owned half the two streets. Since the area was a little run down, the prices on the properties were good and residents were thrilled to be paid as much as Rangeman was paying for the land.

What this allowed was the construction of two additional buildings. One was a designated residence. There was an elaborate gym on the first floor, four floors of apartments for the Emergency Response Teams, one floor with two apartments – one for our Head of Catering and her husband, the Head of Maintenance, and one for our Executive Vice-President and his wife and baby – and Ranger's and my apartment on the top floor. We had just moved in a year ago, and we absolutely loved the space. We were still furnishing the rooms. Ranger and I loved the tones of old wood that were found in antiques, and we were trying to make sure that each room was created into something special and unique. We were very happy with how our apartment was turning out. It was warm and welcoming, and it invited you to relax and unwind.

The third building had just been completed, and was the Operations tower. The original building was turned into the Administrative and Support Services tower. The Operations tower housed Ranger's and the Executive Vice-President's and the Vice-President of Operations' offices, the control room and the monitoring stations, Research, Cybersecurity, Personal Security, Onsite Security, and Investigations. It was a great space and, for the first time in a long time, my team had enough space to practice social distancing while at work. It also allowed staff to have private conversations on the phone and to have their own desks rather than sharing them, one to a side, as they had been doing before. The team had been remarkably patient and tolerant when they were stuffed like sardines into our space, elbow to elbow and nowhere to go. However, now that they had space? They were thrilled, and I was thrilled for them.

We shared the floor with Cybersecurity, another fast-growing department in the company. While they were fast-growing, though, they weren't growing at the supersonic speeds that we were. They took up a third of the floor and we took up the rest of the space. Even so, Research had enough space to double the staff quotient and still be comfortable. So did Cybersecurity. And judging by the way our departments were growing, that was highly possible. After all, we had gone from one person to over thirty in three-and-a-half years - and we were still growing.

I met Ranger seven years ago and, for him, it was love at first sight. It wasn't exactly love on my side, but it was definite lust. I gave hints to him that I would like to get to know him better, hints that he didn't pick up on. Because he had so many terrorists and drug lords pissed with him, he was worried about splashback on me and he cared about me too much to take the chance. So, instead, he became best friends with me and I gave up waiting for him and started to go out with Joe Morelli, a detective in the Trenton Police Department. Five years ago, Ranger's daughter from his first marriage was kidnapped by someone who was trying to steal Ranger's identity. The man was trying to take over Ranger's family and, in addition to stealing Julie, he stole me to become Julie's mother. It was at that point that Ranger realized that it didn't matter how much he tried to keep me separate from his life. I was still in danger just for knowing him.

The only problem was that I was still going out with Morelli in an on-again, off-again relationship, and Ranger was too honorable to poach. However, when I decided that what I liked about Morelli was the friendship and that we weren't going anywhere romantically? I broke up with Morelli for good and Ranger pounced. We started going out in July two-and-a-half years ago and since then had gotten married, had three children and had moved into the new building. Life was moving fast.

Add in that a number of things had happened to me, from being kicked by a felon when I was pregnant and almost losing Tia, being shot, being stabbed, being frozen, being kidnapped, and so on, the result of that was a bout of PTSD for Ranger and a bout of depression for me. While we had so many good things happen to us over the last three years, we also both struggled with mental health issues.

But that wasn't all bad. What came out of that was an even better ability to communicate with each other, and an even better ability to know how to support the other person. We had been best friends when we got together. We were now so much more. I couldn't imagine my life without Ranger. He was my strength, my cheerleader, my best friend, and the only person I knew who I felt like I could be myself with, who I could share my secret self with and trust that he would handle that honor carefully. I kind of wished that everyone was challenged the same way that we'd been. I think it would teach people how to better get along and how to better support their partner. Either that or it would cause more people to break up. I know that, if my first husband had known that I had suffered from depression, Dickie would have blamed me, treated me as though I was deficient, and made my depression worse with his lack of support, and we would have ended up breaking up sooner. Of course, we divorced three months after we were married in the first place, so it would have been hard to have broken up sooner. We barely even knew each other's names when we broke up as it was. While his lack of support was one of the reasons that we broke up, it was his affair with the witch Joyce Barnhardt that really put the nail in the coffin for our marriage. I've recognized for a long time that she had done me a favor. Not that I would ever admit that to her. Bitch.

So, life for me was good, and after years of struggling it was a nice change.

I sighed as I thought about Ranger, and his need to be away for another week. While I understood it, I didn't like it. I sighed again and tuned back into the conversation.

"I'm sorry. I missed it. Where did you say that Ranger went?" said Lula. Lula was the current file clerk at Vinnie's office although, to be honest, I don't know if I had ever seen her filing. Whenever the pile waiting to be filed got too tall, she threw half in the garbage and thought that was the same thing. Everybody had a specialty, however, and from what I could tell Lula's was to pick the best out of a variety of daily horoscopes, and nap on the sofa. She also excelled at playing Solitaire on the computer, and she was pretty good at Tetris. I don't know why Vinnie kept her around other than because she was a friendly face for all the hookers that Vinnie hired into his office. Most were personal friends of hers, and I think they gave Vinnie a better price because of it.

Lula used to be a hooker herself. My impression was that she was a much better hooker than she was a file clerk. She was a 2X in clothes but she regularly insisted she was a size 2 petite and, if the clothes had a lot of stretch, she could somehow shoehorn her way into them. Her passions were clothes, heels, hair and nails. Her hair and nails matched and when one started to look a bit ratty and needed to be redone, she changed the other as well. Since her nails needed changing about once every two weeks, her hair changed color that often too. I had seen it in almost all the colors of the rainbow, although I had never seen it white, black or brown. Of course, they weren't colors in the rainbow. She had frequently suggested to me to change my color and thought a nice blue would look good on me, but I had always vetoed it. While my grandmother concurred that a blue would be stunning on me, I figured that I had my whole senior years to become a blue-haired lady, and I didn't want to start now.

One of the problems with Lula was that she preferred fluorescent colors, which meant that she stood out. It was a problem because Lula was often my backup when I was skip tracing. She was about as useful an assistant as a bottle of water in a lake. She ran like a broken car, her desire to chase a felon was dependent upon the condition of the heels she had selected for the day, and although she loved her gun, her accuracy was so bad she couldn't hit a barn door at twenty paces. She blamed her frequent inability to hit the target on wonky sights and, every time she shot her gun and missed, she bought another gun with 'better sights'. This meant that she went through a lot of guns. Perhaps worse, with her fluorescent hair, my ability to go incognito when I was with her was pretty well nil. Her hair was like a beacon, and at times I thought it actually glowed in the dark. I often wondered if I could use her instead of a flashlight when I went out at night.

The good part, though, was that she was a hoot. She had a unique way of looking at the world, she was knowledgeable about different criminal matters, and she could talk the ears off a brass monkey. She was good company during a stakeout and, over the years, I had become close friends with her. We'd had a lot of fun together.

I actually had a lot of respect for Lula. She was like the phoenix rising from the ashes. When she was a hooker, she suffered from a brutal assault that had left her unable to ply her trade. She picked herself up from that and got a job with Vinnie, spiced up her life by offering to be my assistant, and had carried on. She was very proud of her ability to support herself, was the most optimistic person I had ever met, never let herself give up, and had the greatest enthusiasm about life that I had ever seen. She was a good person.

Since I wasn't skip tracing and visiting Lula while doing a stakeout, Lula had come to visit me and the babies. I was glad to see her. I hadn't seen her for a few weeks, and I had missed her brash honesty.

I smiled. "I didn't say where he went. It's a secret."

"You know that I could keep a secret", said Lula. "I would zip my lips and throw away the key."

"Uh-hunh." Lula could no more keep that secret than fly to the moon. "Still not going to happen."

"You probably don't know, do you?"

I laughed. "Yes, I do. And you aren't going to wiggle the information out of me by badgering me. It is Ranger's secret to tell, not mine." I looked at Tracy, and she looked amused. She had heard about Lula in the past but had never met her, and I think she was getting her eyes opened up. Meeting Lula was an experience unlike any other.

"Is he meeting with alien women again? I mean, there has to be some reason that he would leave, and if it isn't to start a coup then it has to be something equally as shocking. After all, we are best friends and I know that you wouldn't hide any old secret from me. Ranger is an alien, isn't he? I mean, there aren't many men that look as good as he does. He has to be an alien."

I laughed and thought that I would have a good time telling Ranger Lula's latest theories. He had heard quite a few of them over the years. Lula was nothing if not imaginative. "Did I ever tell you about the alien couple that came down to Earth and wanted to experience sex with a human couple?" Lula sat forward. I could tell that she thought she was getting the scoop. "They found some willing participants and, when the human woman went off with the alien man, the alien man said, 'if, when we are having sex, you want me to be bigger than I am, tug on my ears and I will grow to the perfect size to satisfy you fully and completely'. She had sex with him, tugged on his ears, and he grew to the perfect size. It was the best sex of her life. When she rejoined her husband, she said to him, 'how was it?' 'Not bad', said the husband. 'But she did this weird thing. She kept frantically tugging on my ears.'"

Tracy laughed as Lula looked at me, wide-eyed. "Does that work?" she said. "When you tug on Ranger's ears, does he grow bigger? What is the limit to this? Can he grow infinitely? Or is there a stop feature on the process so that he doesn't explode?"

Tracy snorted out a laugh. I smiled as well. I could just imagine Ranger's reaction if I started tugging on his ears. He would tell me that I was tugging on the wrong part. "No", I said. "He isn't an alien. He's definitely all man."

Lula sat forward on her seat. "How much of all man?" she said. I looked at her, and her eyes were glistening with interest.

I laughed. Lula had been trying to get sizes from me ever since the first time I had sex with Ranger. I haven't told her yet and I never would. "Sorry", I said. "That's my secret."

Lula sighed. "I hate secrets, and you have a lot of them. You won't tell me what Ranger does when he goes away, you won't tell me where he is going, you won't tell me his size or shape. It's infuriating to someone who is as curious as me."

"I know."

Tracy looked at her. "What do you mean, shape?"

Lula smiled. "Some men are seedlings, some are saplings, and some are hundred-year old trunks. Some of them have crooks in their stem and some have knots. I have always found that it is better to stay away from the ones with knots. Unless they have a medical certificate saying otherwise, those knots could contain a lot of scary things. That's why I never got sick when I was a 'ho. I stayed away from the knots. Of course, I demanded that each john covered up. No coat, no cock, that's what I always said."

Tracy looked a little flabbergasted by the conversation. I think she was trying to envision what a knot looked like. I know that I certainly was.

"It's not fair", Lula said. "Grandma has seen how big he is and I haven't. I wouldn't even have a heart attack like Grandma might. I mean, he locks the bathroom door when he goes in just so that I can't see."

"I know. You've tried a few times to get into the bathroom when he is using the facilities. You even asked him to teach you how to pick a lock just for that reason."

"I am just curious. That is one thing about me, I am always curious. I want to see and experience new things. That's why I'd be a good researcher."

I wasn't picking up that conversation. Lula had been trying to get me to hire her since my department started to grow. I had been trying equally as hard to wiggle away from that idea. Lula might have been curious, but sitting around and researching would drive her nuts. She wouldn't be able to sleep at her desk and Solitaire wasn't loaded on the office computers. Add in that she wouldn't be able to throw the files in the garbage or do a half-assed job at looking for information, and she would find most of our research to be boring when she had to investigate hours and hours of people who had done nothing wrong in their lives. She would hate doing research – and we would hate having her do it. I could just imagine Ranger's reaction if I told him that I wanted to hire Lula. I think, if I insisted on it, he would fire me just for sheer, plain, piss-poor judgement.

"Grandma saw Ranger?" said Tracy. She put Alix up on her shoulder and burped her, then continued feeding her the bottle.

I groaned. "We were in a hotel looking for a terrorist. Ranger rented a room and had a shower. My grandmother came into the room and opened the bathroom door. Ranger was just getting out of the shower and toweling off, and Grandma saw the full monty. She said it was the single-most exhilarating experience in her whole life, and the one experience she wished she could do again."

Tracy laughed.

"It's not funny! She's been trying to recreate the experience ever since. Ranger has taken to locking the bathroom door when there are people around now. Grandma has, in fact, learned how to pop the lock in the bathroom at my parents' house just to see him. I have suggested that he wear diapers when we visit, but he said that he had learned to hold it in for hours when he was in the Special Forces, and it was just reminding him of the things he had to do when he was on a mission. He said the only difference was that, with going to my parents, he didn't get paid to be put in danger. Just in case, though, he barely drinks for twenty-four hours before we go."

Tracy laughed again.

I sighed. "It's horrible, Trace. Grandma frequently tells people about his size and talks about it as if it is the golden ticket. People come up to us in the street eyeing his groin, trying to see if Grandma was exaggerating or not. She has a group of old women who get together to discuss the size of men's packages, and Grandma regularly tells them about Ranger. It's their favorite story and they ask to hear it often. I've seen the women glaze over and drool as they listen to my grandmother's rendition, and it's very scary since most of those women are over eighty and some are over ninety. You have to be very careful to assess them fully to make sure they don't need to go to the hospital. Grandma even applied for him to be part of a nude fundraising calendar on his behalf. She was quite excited about the opportunity. Ranger was not. I had to tell her, once again, that Ranger's balls are my balls, and I didn't want to share them with every Tom, Dick and Harry who wanted to buy a calendar. Grandma told me that it wouldn't be the Toms, Dicks and Harrys who would be buying the calendars. In fact, she said she would buy a number of the calendars herself and give them to all the family members and friends for Christmas." I sighed. "She's still on a kick about it. She tried to sweeten the pot by offering to appear naked with him. I'm not sure what horrified Ranger more. Then, when he refused, she tried to get me to take a picture of him and submit it myself." I sighed again. "It makes for a tense relationship."

Lula smiled. "If Ranger changes his mind, Connie and I would like to buy a copy of that calendar."

I groaned. "Not going to happen."