www.millsandboon.co.uk

      NANCY BARTHOLOMEW

      didn’t seem like the Bombshell type at first. Sure, she grew up in Philadelphia, but she was 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! She 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.

      When the criminal life became less of a challenge, Nancy turned to the final frontier—parenthood. This drove her to writing. Nancy lives in North Carolina, 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 hopes you’ll love her third “child,” Stella Valocchi, and thanks you from the bottom of her heart for reading this book!

      For Martha,

       who taught Stella how to be a true Bombshell!

      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 17

      Chapter 18

      Epilogue

      Chapter 1

      It was 3:00 a.m. and freezing. I was lying next to my partner, Jake, belly deep in pig shit and trying to remind myself that repo is an art form. A good repossession requires creativity and ingenuity. Repo, like art, is not always comfortable or warm. It is messy. Artists are, by their very nature, required to suffer. I took a deep whiff of Mama Pig and knew I was truly suffering. But it wasn’t the agony that bothered me really, it was my karma. This job could ruin my karma for all time. You see, we were robbing Santa Claus.

      Jake hates it when I say that, but it’s true. Okay, so it’s not exactly true, but try to tell that to any good Italian-American in Glenn Ford and see where it gets you. We were huddled up inside Santa’s pigpen, waiting for our Golden Moment, the time when the coast was clear and Jake could bring the tow truck up the driveway.

      “Nothin’ good is gonna come of this,” I muttered.

      “Stella, you were a cop. ‘Santa,’ as you so lovingly refer to him, is a crook. He’s a dope dealer. He didn’t pay for the sleigh, despite having the cash, so we’re taking it back. Clear and simple. It’s a job, Stella, nothing more.”

      I stared up at the moon and shuddered. Joey “Smack” Spagnazi, aka “Santa,” did have a bad reputation. He hadn’t served time. He hadn’t even been convicted, but every man, woman and child in tiny Glenn Ford knew he was “connected,” in a mafioso sort of way. Everyone thought he was Chester County, Pennsylvania’s, drug kingpin, but so far, the police hadn’t been able to catch him. He was just too slick. But Joey Smack had his good side, too.

      “Maybe he used the payment money to send more kids to that summer camp of his,” I offered.

      Jake snorted, ever the cynic. “Yeah, right, save kids with cancer so you can later introduce them to a lifetime cocaine habit. Stella, I don’t get you. Usually you’re the one giving me the soft-heart lecture.”

      “All’s I’m saying is, Joey Smack doesn’t mind copping to running numbers, loan-sharking or an assorted list of criminal activities as long as your arm, but he says drugs aren’t his thing. What if he’s telling the truth and we’re robbing Santa Claus?”

      “Jesus.” Jake moaned. “Listen, we took the job, let’s just do it. If Joey Smack wants a sleigh so bad, let him pay for it. We don’t have a dog in this fight, all right? We work for Lifetime Novelty. We are not the judge and jury for Joey Smack!”

      I studied my partner. Good-looking, in a tall, dark and handsome sort of way. Smart, on most occasions, and resourceful when smarts failed. Why was he so stupid about humanity?

      I mentally slapped myself. He was, after all, a man, wasn’t he?

      Jake was staring back at me, the impatience leaving his face as something else replaced it, something smoldering hot and, up until now, unrealized between the two of us, unfinished business that had been on the back burner for years. Yep, Jake was a man all right, the kind of man that makes you tingle all over and slowly come to a steady, about-to-boil-over-if-you-touch-me simmer that I found frankly maddening.

      “Go get the truck,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”

      I rolled away from him, coming up into a low crouch that startled Mama Pig and her babies. In the darkness I heard Jake chuckle as he moved off toward the road. I forced myself to focus on the job at hand. Joey Smack’s farmhouse sat on a slight rise, hundreds of yards from the road, protected by a wrought-iron electrified fence, which we’d disabled.

      In the middle of the huge expanse of pasture he called a lawn sat a huge Christmas panorama. Joey Smack was famous for this. On one side of the field, the Baby Jesus had just been born, surrounded by his entourage, every piece hand-painted and lit up to be visible from the road. On the right, Frosty the Snowman looked on a fake pond filled with magnetic figures that swirled and skated to cheery Christmas music. But it was in the center of the field, most prominently displayed, that Joey Smack had finally outdone himself.

      An electronic Santa sat in an illuminated sleigh, hooked up to nine sizable and well-lit reindeer. As you watched, Santa waved and slowly doffed his hat. Every piece of the display used the appropriately colored lights. It was wired into a panel that insured a visual feast for the hundreds of cars that drove by each evening in a long slow snake that snarled traffic for hours every night from mid-November until January. The entire showcase probably compromised the electrical power banks that fed the eastern seaboard, but this didn’t worry old Joey Smack.

      No, the affable host, dressed as Santa, would wander