Nancy Bartholomew - 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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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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!

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

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.