Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight (Stephanie Plum #28)(75)

“Enough not to want to repeat any of it. Diesel was forced to confide in me. How much do you know?”

“Oswald was talkative. He had to vent and brag to someone, and since he never intended to release Lula and me, we were a safe audience.”

“So, you know about the International Space Station?”

“Yes. I finally understand why Diesel was dispatched to get Oswald.” I took another sip of wine. “Morelli isn’t going to be happy that Oswald suddenly disappeared.”

“He’s smart. He’ll put most of it together and let it go. If it ended any other way, it might have turned into a media circus and that wouldn’t be in anyone’s best interest.”

“Agreed.”

It was almost ten o’clock by the time I returned home. Diesel’s things were gone and Ana had left a vase of fresh flowers on my kitchen counter. I’d never gotten to meet her, but I liked her style and I was in awe of her competence. I gave a corn chip to Rex and told him how the Baked Potatoes had saved the space station. And saved me.



* * *




Morelli and Bob showed up at my apartment for the delayed date night at six o’clock on Saturday.

Morelli took me in his arms and kissed me. “Date night is better late than never,” he said.

“It’s going to be lots better,” I told him.

“It’s been brought to my attention that Oswald has left the country.”

“Really? Who brought it to your attention?”

“It was a brief notice from intel, mixed in with many other brief notices.”

“Case closed?”

“You tell me,” Morelli said.

“The case is closed,” I said. “Of course, that’s just my opinion.”

“Yeah, mine, too.”

I brought him into the kitchen. “I have a surprise for dinner.”

“Chinese? Italian? Burger night?”

“None of the above,” I said. “I actually made dinner all by myself. Okay, so I made it at my mom’s house, but I still made it all by myself.”

“I’m ready,” Morelli said.

I took the lid off the cake plate and held the cake out for Morelli to see.

“Chocolate cake,” I said. “Just like my mom’s, only I made it.”

Morelli swiped some frosting off with his finger and tasted it. “I’m in love,” he said.

This is nothing, I thought. Wait until he sees the giant television in my living room.





More from this Series





   One For The Money

Book 1

   Two For The Dough

Book 2





   Three To Get Deadly

Book 3

   Fortune and Glory

Book 27





More from the Author





   The Recovery Agent

   The Bounty





Keep reading for a preview of

The Recovery Agent



by

Janet Evanovich





Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led to a rope and board footbridge, which was swaying in the wind. The narrow bridge spanned a gorge that was a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. Rapids rushed over enormous boulders at the bottom of the gorge, but Gabriela couldn’t see the water, because it was raining buckets and she could barely make out the far side.

She was celebrating her thirtieth birthday deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The birthday wasn’t important to her. She was all about the job. Her long dark brown hair was hidden under her Australian safari hat, its brim shading her exotic almond-shaped brown eyes. She was 5'6" and slim. She kept in shape for the job but also because she liked pretty clothes. And pretty clothes didn’t always come in size fourteen.

She was with two local guides, Jorge and Cuckoo. She guessed they were somewhere between forty and sixty years old, and she was pretty sure that they thought she was an idiot.

“Is this bridge safe?” Gabriela asked.

“Yes, sometimes safe,” Jorge said.

“And it’s the only way?”

Jorge shrugged.

She looked at Cuckoo.

Cuckoo shrugged.

“You first,” she said to Jorge.

Jorge did another shrug and murmured something in Spanish that Gabriela was pretty sure translated to “chickenshit woman.” Let it slide, Gabriela thought. Sometimes it gave you an advantage to be underestimated. If things turned ugly, she was almost certain she could kick his ass. And if that didn’t work out, she could shoot him. Nothing fatal. Maybe take off a toe.

It had been raining when she landed in Quito two days ago. It was still raining when she took the twenty-five-minute flight to Caco and boarded a Napo River ferry to Nuevo Rocfuerte. And it was raining when she met her guides at daybreak and settled into their motorized canoe for the six-hour trip down a narrow, winding river with no name. Just before noon, they’d pulled up at a crude campground hacked out of the jungle. Four hours on foot after that, following a trail that barely existed. All in the pouring rain.

She’d been hired to find Henry Dodge and retrieve a ring he was carrying. Not a lot of information on the ring or Dodge. Just that he couldn’t leave his job site, and he’d requested that someone come to get the ring. Seemed reasonable, since Dodge was an archeologist doing research on a lost civilization in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon rainforest. The payoff for Gabriela was a big bag of money, but that wasn’t what convinced her to take the job. She was a treasure hunter. For profit and for pleasure. She was an amateur anthropologist, a descendant of Blackbeard, a history buff, and a collector of pirate plunder. The opportunity to visit a lost-cities site was irresistible.