One Strange Week: Book 4 of "Tracie Dumas, Bounty Hunter"

It's not the best of times
for me. Work's been slow and Johnny left me tending the bar so he could take
care of his sick mother.  I'm a bounty
hunter, not a bar manager. My instincts are wrong, and with Johnny gone, I'm
also lonely. It doesn't help that a hot woman is angling to buy me out and I
suspect Johnny might like that idea. To make things worse, I'm offered a bounty
to catch some guy knocking off check cashing places and there is no way I can
break loose to bring him in. The hunk who delivers booze is the only real
bright spot in my life and between my legs.

~~~~~
PG Excerpt ~~~~~

Johnny stretched languidly,
his naked body moving against mine as we lay in his bed. The morning sun had
just begun lighting the room, coming in behind him, silhouetting his wonderful,
muscular body. It was warm, we were both naked, and I ran my eyes over his body
and had good thoughts.

"How's your work
doing?" he asked. "Is the bounty-hunting season in high pitch? It
doesn't seem like you've been traveling much lately."

Johnny is not usually subtle,
and I wondered where this was going. He didn't really pay much attention to
what I did for a living. "Why? You sound like you have something in
mind?"

"I do. But it will take
several days."

Okay, Johnny has real
stamina, but even he didn't think of playing mattress polo over that long a
period. He liked his games as much as I did, but they didn't normally involve
advanced planning. As it happened, I wasn't getting any work at all. I was
intending to go to the office that morning and see what I could scrounge up.
"Several days?"

"Of your time. See, I
was hoping I could convince you to take a break from your work and watch the
bar for a week. I mean, you are a half owner, so you have a vested
interest."

Seeing that the several days
clearly wouldn't be spent with him, my interest took a dive. "While you do
what?"

"Go see my mother. You
know she's been sick, and now they want to operate and remove a tumor. She
called me last night in a panic. The idea of them cutting into her scares the
shit out of her. They want to do a biopsy, which isn't bad, but if they find
it's malignant they'll want to get it all out right away. She needs me to go
hold her hand and be there to help her make decisions."

"What about Alice?"

He grunted. "Still in
Paris. And it's your fault." He grinned teasingly. Actually, I had made it
possible for Alice to be in Paris. I'd bought out her interest in the family
bar downstairs, knowing she wanted the money to move there. "She and her
girlfriend just bought a place and they're in the middle of all the paperwork
and then they have to move in right away because the lease on the place they've
been living is up. Perfect timing and all that."

I touched his hard chest, ran
a finger over his chest and sighed. Family problems are a bitch. It's hard
being an outsider because even if you know a person you can't really see how
they view their responsibilities. In my case it was easy. My responsibility to
my parents was to stay the hell away from them. They were staunch conservatives
and very religious. That I had squandered my life by becoming a bounty hunter
had been an unforgivable sin against my abilities and their sensibilities. That
I was a slut was expected.

Long
ago I'd come to understand that we didn't see life as even the same kind of
experience. I wanted to live it and they wanted… I'm not sure what they wanted
other than to make their Bible-pounding friends approve of them. That meant
that they did what was written rather than what they wanted.