What Stella Wants

The serious tone in Jake’s voice scared me. I took a deep breath and waited, assuming he was going to blame himself for Bitsy’s death.

“After you and I broke up, Bitsy and I had a…short relationship.” He looked at me. “A few years later, a couple of feds paid me a visit, doing a background check on Bitsy. They didn’t tell me why, of course, but I figured it out. Bitsy was joining the spy club. She may have been on a job when she called you. She probably knew we were working together and didn’t want to risk calling me directly.”

Oh, great. So, Bitsy hadn’t wanted to hire me, she wanted Jake. Didn’t they all?

“You all right with this?” Jake asked.

I gave him my best smile. “Glad you told me. We’d better get to it.”

I turned away and stared out my window as Jake drove. The real reason I was upset was not because Jake had information I didn’t have. I was upset because Jake had lots of secrets, and they just seemed to keep popping up. How could I trust a man who had so many secrets?

Dear Reader,

Have you ever wished you could roll back the hands of time, even for a brief moment, and revise your own history? You know, “If I’d only known then what I know now!”

Well, Stella is my opportunity to revisit history. She’s come home to the small town where I grew up (although I’ve made a few changes to protect the innocent as well as the guilty!), and she gets to do a lot of the things I could never quite accomplish. For one thing, she gets the guy! Jake is so much yummier than the boy I pined after in high school and Stella’s got him right where she wants him. In real life, those guys grow up, they lose their hair, gain a spare tire and get sooo boring, but not Stella’s Jake! He’s grown up and he’s gotten better with age and experience.

Stella takes on a case that involves an elderly woman in a nursing home. For the past two years, in my “real life,” I’ve been consulting two days a week in some local nursing homes, doing psychotherapy with the residents. It has been an eye-opening, heartbreaking time for me. Very often I find myself trying to provide the hugs and love that my abandoned parents and grandparents crave. They are so alone, so forgotten, so…well, downright neglected. Stella finds herself caring as much for Baby as I do for my residents. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to once again point out that our elderly or our “mentally ill” are not disposable items—they are wise, giving and loving human beings, and we are lucky to have them among us.

But more than anything, this book is about love and its place in life’s journey.

Have fun, dear reader!

Nancy

What Stella Wants

Nancy Bartholomew

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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NANCY BARTHOLOMEW

didn’t seem like the Bombshell type at first. She grew up in Philadelphia as a gentle minister’s daughter. Sometimes, though, true wildness simmers just below the surface. Nancy started singing country music in biker bars before she graduated from high school. And yes, Dad was there, sitting in the front row, watching over his little girl!

Nancy graduated from college with a degree in psychology and promptly moved into the inner city, where she found work dragging addicted, inner-city teenagers into drug and alcohol rehabilitation. She then moved south to Atlanta and worked as the director of a substance abuse treatment program for court-ordered offenders. Her patients were bikers and strippers and they taught her well…lock picking, exotic dancing, gun play for beginners and hot-wiring cars.

When the criminal life became less of a challenge, Nancy turned to the final frontier: parenthood. This drove her to writing. While her boys were toddlers, Nancy spent their naptimes creating alternate realities. She lives in North Carolina where she rides with the police on a regular basis, raises two hooligan teenage boys and tries to keep up with her writing, her psychotherapy practice and her garden. She thanks you from the bottom of her heart for reading this book!

For my dad—my mentor and role model in life’s journey. I could only wish to one day be so loving and wise! I love you, Dad!

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 1

It was about time my luck changed.

In the past month I’d been beaten up, shot at, lied to and seduced. In my opinion, other than the seduction, I’d been on the short end of the karma scale. At least this stake-out and surveillance, while in the middle of winter, was indoors. Okay, so there wasn’t any heat in the garage, but I wasn’t standing outside in a blizzard, either. And our “target” was slow-moving and not very dangerous. She was an old lady. The bad news was she was my Aunt Lucy.

My partner, Jake Carpenter, also known as the man voted most likely to get under my skin and into my bed, was crouched down next to me, peering out the grimy garage window and into Aunt Lucy’s kitchen.

“She let him in,” he said. “Why hasn’t she brought him back to the kitchen? She brings everybody to the kitchen.”

I looked at Jake. Tall, dark, handsome and sometimes completely clueless. Still, a lot had changed about the man since high school, since he’d left me waiting at the altar in a failed elopement that was now just a distant memory. He’d grown up, but then so had I.

“Oh, I don’t know, Jake. What do you think? Do you think they just went straight down the hall to her bedroom, or what?”

I guess the sarcastic tone gave me away. Jake actually managed to look hurt. “Damn, Stella, I was just asking.”

I arched an eyebrow and tried not to notice the way his eyes were traveling the length of my body, stopping at all the good parts—the parts that had so readily responded to his touch just hours before.

“Jake, it’s my aunt, for God’s sake! She’s been widowed what, six months, and some mysterious guy from her past surfaces and she doesn’t say word one about who it is or what he wants, and you think I shouldn’t be so sensitive? He could be a con man. He could be a killer. He could be…”

I stopped, trying to come up with more possibilities, which gave Jake the window he was looking for. “He could be looking to get laid. Aunt Lucy’s old, but she’s not dead!”

I punched him, and his responding grunt was loud enough to let me know I hadn’t lost my touch. Police training and conditioning is no joke, and I wasn’t about to let it go by the wayside just because I was no longer a cop. Private investigators need muscles and endurance, too, maybe even more. They don’t have an entire police force ready to back them up—they just have a partner or two if they’re lucky. Jake was solid muscle and ex-Special Forces, but he was only one guy. I was the other half of the team. I needed to retain my edge…even if I was only tailing my elderly aunt at the moment.

As we watched, the back door suddenly flew open and my aunt Lucy came rushing down the steps, a white plastic trash bag in hand and a grim look on her face. She headed straight for the garage.

“Hide!” I yelped and dove behind a bunch of boxes.

Jake wasted no time joining me and together we crouched, waiting for my aunt to pull open the old wooden door and head for the trash cans that lined the far wall.

“Nothing good comes of spying on relatives,” I muttered.

“It was your idea,” Jake reminded me.

I wanted to smack him but didn’t dare with Aunt Lucy mere seconds from entering the ancient garage.

“It’s for a good cause,” I reminded him. “I’m only saying that, even if our intent is good, God might not look too kindly on the effort, that’s all.”

“And God doesn’t take intent into account?”

I pinched his earlobe, the only readily available, exposed flesh I could reach.

“Ouch!”

“Shhh!”

The garage door creaked open and Aunt Lucy could be heard walking briskly across the concrete floor to the battered metal trash cans. She pulled a lid off, dumped her bag inside, replaced the lid and started to stomp off. Without warning she stopped, parallel to our hiding place and as we listened, she sniffed, loudly, cautiously, and I was certain she’d discovered us.

“Humph!” She snorted. “Nothing worse than the smell of dead fish!”

Then, without further comment, she left, slamming the garage door securely behind her and continuing on her way across the rectangular back yard. A moment later we heard the back porch door slam and knew we were in the clear.

“I thought she was going to nail us,” Jake said. “The woman’s psychic, I swear she is.”

My cell phone began to vibrate, humming softly in the still garage.

I fished it out of my parka pocket, flipped it open and said, “Valocchi Investigations.”

Jake gave me his usual and customary hard look as I said the name. For some reason the man thought that because we were partners, his name should be on the door. I wasn’t sure I was ready for the partnership to become permanent, so why change things before I had a feel for the potential duration? Look what happened the last time we tried to form a partnership…I’d wound up hurt and alone, trying to explain running away to marry Jake to my disappointed aunt Lucy and uncle Benny. No, I needed to wait this relationship out before I made another foolish commitment.

“Stella, is that you?” The voice, female and anxious, sounded distinctly familiar.

“Yes?”

“Stella, it’s Bitsy Blankenship—well it’s Margolies now, but it was Blankenship. Marygrace Llewellen said you’d moved back home and opened a private investigation office. I need to see you. Right now!”

I closed my eyes. Elizabeth “Bitsy” Blankenship. Blond, cheerleader, airhead and high maintenance in high school. Sounded like nothing had changed, at least not in the maintenance department. I remembered hearing she’d married a junior diplomat and was now leading the high life of embassy parties and overseas assignments. Figured she’d land on her designer heels. But the demanding, “everything’s urgent and about me” tone to her voice brought out the rebellious adolescent in me.

“Uh, sorry,” I said. “My first available appointment won’t be for another…” I opened my eyes and stared up at the old garage rafters, aware of Jake’s confused expression because he knew we were next to unemployed in terms of busy. “I guess I could squeeze you in tomorrow, late morning.”

“No! I mean, please, Stella, this is an emergency. I need to see you now!”

I sighed, pushed the sleeve up on my parka and looked at my watch. It was almost noon. “Okay, I suppose I could see you at two, but I might be a few minutes late. We’re in the middle of an important surveillance.”

“Two?” Bitsy’s anguished wail was almost satisfying, especially when I remembered that Jake had briefly dated Bitsy, shortly after he’d failed to show for our elopement to Maryland. “Really, Stella, you can’t see me any sooner?”

Damn, what did the woman want, blood? “I’m sorry. Two is my absolute earliest time and I’ll be pushing it at that.”

I could hear the sound of a car’s engine in the background as Bitsy considered whether to take the appointment or not. She was driving, and I wondered if she were in town yet or on her way in from D.C.

“Oh, all right! I’ll do two. I suppose I can waste a couple of hours visiting my grandmother in the nursing home or something.”

Visiting her grandmother was a waste of her time? Oh, I was so glad I was putting Mrs. High-and-Mighty on the back burner!

“Okay, you know where the office is? It’s across from the old newsstand, off Main.”

“I’ll find it. And, Stella, listen, it’s really important that you don’t tell anybody about this, okay? I don’t want anyone to know I’m in town or that we’re meeting. It could be a matter of life and death.”

I rolled my eyes at Jake. What had he ever seen in this dingbat? Jake frowned and mouthed the words, “What? Who is it?” But I just smiled and shook my head.

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell a soul. See you at two!”

I snapped the phone shut and smiled even bigger at Jake. “Guess what, buddy? Your old girlfriend, Bitsy, is coming to town and she wants to hire me.”

“Us,” Jake corrected, still stuck on the pride of ownership. “She wants to hire us.”

“She didn’t mention you,” I taunted. “If she’d wanted you, I suppose she would’ve called you.”

“What’s wrong with Bitsy?” Jake was all concerned now.

I shrugged and returned my attention to my aunt’s kitchen window. “Don’t know, don’t care. I just hope she has deep pockets. Why don’t you slip back around front and see if you can get the guy’s license plate number when his driver comes back? I’m going to see if I can get a little closer to the house.”

Jake started to protest, caught himself, and shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said. I could tell he thought sneaking around in broad daylight was a bad idea, but what else could I do? Aunt Lucy hadn’t entertained the guy at night. So far, all she’d done was disappear during the daytime, only to return a few hours later with this stupid smile on her face and vague answers when we asked where she’d been and with whom.

Even Lloyd the Dog was left out of the loop. Considering the fact that, until very recently, Aunt Lucy had considered my Australian shepherd to be her deceased husband, Benny, reincarnated, I found her reluctance to confide in him troubling. True, Lloyd the Dog had found love himself in the form of an overwhelmingly large part-wolf named Fang, but that was no reason for Aunt Lucy’s sudden secrecy.

I watched as Jake eased out the back door of the garage and into the alley before I considered my stealth opportunities. Aunt Lucy had been anxious to get us out of the house for the day. She’d found a very necessary and quite convoluted errand for my scattered cousin, Nina, and her girlfriend, Spike, to run in downtown Philadelphia. She’d asked me and Jake to run out to Lancaster to take a set of architectural plans to her Amish carpenter friend, Max. She’d been so insistent we leave that I’d known for certain this was the big day; the day Aunt Lucy had invited the mysterious man to her home.

So we called Max and blew him off. We made a big show of driving away from Aunt Lucy’s ancient, brick row house and returned in a borrowed conversion van with tinted windows to park and hide. A mere twenty minutes later our efforts were rewarded by the arrival of a long, black, chauffer-driven sedan.

I was expecting someone as huge as the limousine, someone large, ostentatious, maybe a Donald Trump type. What we got was a short, elderly, white-haired man in a charcoal-gray overcoat carrying a small bouquet of purple violets.

“What the hell?” Jake murmured. As we watched, the little man ascended the steps to the brownstone and rang the doorbell.

Aunt Lucy answered the door moments later, looked down the street in both directions and hastily pulled her visitor inside. This forced us out of the van and around the back of the house to the garage where we hoped to watch my aunt entertaining her visitor in the kitchen. Aunt Lucy always brought company back to her kitchen. Except for this visitor. What was up? I had to get closer to the house. I had to know what was happening inside.

I slipped out the back door of the garage, edged around the far side of the wooden building and began creeping past the thick lilac bushes that lined the edge of my aunt’s yard. I glanced up nervously at the kitchen window and saw no movement inside.

I began working my way up the side of the house, passing the back porch and stopping beneath my aunt’s bedroom window. I am not proud of what I did next, but you need to understand, I thought Aunt Lucy was in danger…maybe. I slipped the miniature sound amplifier out of my pocket, fitted the tiny earpiece into my right ear and reached up stealthily to attach the little bug to the glass windowpane.

My aunt’s voice reverberated inside my head. “Oh, right there!” she cried. “You’ve almost got it! Come on, you can get it! Please!” There was a pause and then a soft, excited cry. “Oh, yes! That’s it! Oh, you got it!”

Oh. My. God! I ripped the earpiece out, snatched the listening device off the window and ran, full tilt, the length of the house and out onto the front sidewalk. Where was Jake? Oh. My. God! They were…they were…having…sex! My aunt, my uncle Benny’s widow, was having S.E.X.! I didn’t know people that old even had sex!

I sprinted for the street, darted through parked cars and banged on the passenger-side door of the van.

Jake greeted me with a knowing smile. “Well, well…just when I was wondering how to pass the time.”

“Shut up!”

“Hey, a little edgy, aren’t we?”

I glared at him. “They are in her bedroom. They are…she’s…he was…”

Comprehension dawned slowly in Jake’s eyes. “No, they weren’t!”

I nodded.

“You sure about that?”

I just looked at him.

“No way. Damn! Well, who knew? I guess getting old won’t be so bad after all.”

“Jake, shut up!”

I peered out into the street, looking for the limousine. With the exception of Aunt Lucy’s neighbor Mrs. Talluchi’s ancient black Plymouth, there were no black sedans in sight.

“He must have told the driver to leave,” Jake said, anticipating my next question. “We wait him out.”

The way he said it, the way he moved up behind me left no doubt as to how Jake Carpenter thought we’d pass the time. His breath, hot on my neck, tingled, sending shivers of anticipation surging to every raw, hungry nerve ending in my body. When his hands slid around my waist and pulled me back against his body, I fought the urge to give in and turned on him.

“Jake, not now! Honestly! Is that all you think about?”

Jake’s grin was infectious, and any other time I might have given in, but I’d just heard Aunt Lucy in the throes of passion and it didn’t exactly do a whole lot for my libido.

“Come on, Stel, lighten up!”

Lighten up. Wasn’t that just like a man. I pushed the sleeve up on my parka and stared at my watch. It was only 11:30. I tugged the plaid curtains apart on the back side window and looked out through the darkly tinted glass at my aunt’s tiny row house. It looked so normal, so peaceful, so…Jake’s thumb stroked the spot he knew all too well behind my ear, breaking my concentration and sending shivers down the side of my neck. A tiny flame caught and held deep inside my body. I was in trouble.

When his tongue followed his thumb, knowingly tracing the fire line along my neck, I couldn’t help myself. A sigh escaped my lips and I turned, letting my body mold into his as we kissed. When would I ever learn? I am putty in Jake’s hands, willing, soft, mushy putty. Oh, well, if you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em.

“I love conversion vans, don’t you, Jake?” I breathed the words in a whisper as he slowly moved me to the thickly padded day bed that hugged the back of the cavernous vehicle.

“Mmm-hmm,” he said, and unzipped my parka.

A moment later, before I could feel the cold, I discovered the pile of quilts and blankets conveniently placed at one end of the well-stocked van.

“Hey, who’d you borrow this from, anyway?”

Jake opened up a thick, multi-colored quilt and smiled. “Buddy of mine.”

“You knew this would happen, didn’t you?” Suspicion dawned in my gullible brain. He was not nearly as interested in tracking down Aunt Lucy’s mysterious visitor as I was.

“Now, Stella, you know that wasn’t it. I just like to be prepared, that’s all.”

I felt my spine stiffen. “Prepared, my ass!” Wasn’t that just like a man? I’d left Florida and a promising career in law enforcement to get away from a no-good, cheating scoundrel only to wind up back in my old home town with the very first con artist to break my heart. What was it with me, anyway? When was I going to learn?

Jake leaned down and kissed me so thoroughly I began to appreciate the beauty of thoughtful preparation. So what if he was prepared? So what if he didn’t care about Aunt Lucy’s boyfriend as much as—Oh, please keep touching me there!

I reached for Jake, grabbing the waistband of his jeans and pulling him closer. My fingers found the top button and I knew there was about to be no turning back.

“What if the limo comes?” I murmured, my lips never leaving his.

“We’ll hear it,” he assured me. “I’ll listen out for it. I have unbelievable ears.”

Jake’s fingers slipped under my bra and began softly stroking and tugging at my nipples.

“You have unbelievable fingers,” I whispered, and sighed as my body gave itself over to his slow seduction.

“You’re no slouch yourself,” he answered.

I smiled and pushed his jeans down over his hips. Another moment and we were naked beneath a pile of warm afghans and quilts. Outside, the street was silent. With the exception of the old people, like Aunt Lucy and her best friend, crazy Sylvia Talluchi, all the other inhabitants on the block were at work.

Jake’s knowing hand moved slowly down across my stomach, teasing me with its leisurely approach. I heard someone moan and knew it was me. Here we were, naked in a van, about to make wild crazy love while also trying not to make enough noise to rouse the curiosity of any inadvertent passersby. It was illicit, steamy and a complete turn-on. Jake, I realized, was a brilliant man. He knew what this unexpected opportunity would do to me, and he was totally prepared to take full advantage of it. You just had to love a man like that.

Or did you?

In the past few months our relationship had kindled into far more than the adolescent fumbling that had been our high school romance. We’d gotten past, kind of, Jake jilting me at the altar in a failed, underage elopement. We’d survived my uncle Benny’s murder investigation in which Jake had been one of the prime suspects. We’d even gone into business as private investigators and resumed our personal relationship with the wisdom that only age and experience can bring. But in the past few months, the chemistry between us had exploded into an all-consuming fire that frankly scared the hell out of me.

I’d tried to play it cool. I’d forced myself to spend time away from him. He’d let me down before, and while we’re on the subject, so had every other man I’d every had a personal relationship with, even my father. He and Mom had had the nerve to take a second honeymoon to Ireland, without me, and had managed to die in a fiery plane crash. I just had to be sure about Jake before I got so hopelessly entangled in the relationship that I couldn’t survive the loss of it.

“Oh, Jake!” His tongue was following his fingers. I felt my body explode into a bonfire of need and without thinking I reached for him, pulling and positioning my body beneath him. What was wrong with me? How could I not trust someone who made me feel like this? This was so incredibly good! This was better than anything I’d ever felt in my entire…