There was no warmth like the warmth of Paul’s arms around her, no sleep like the sleep she enjoyed when she had her head on his shoulder. He made her feel safe, and, until she’d known him, she’d not realized she felt any other way. Love lent her a dangerous and delicious fragility.

They’d been married four months. They’d been together ten days of it.

Sitting in the right seat of the Beaver, watching the landscape scroll by, she wanted to be with him with a fierceness that bordered on panic. Being a park ranger was a job, not a life; loneliness a choice, not a necessity anymore. It was all she could do not to scream at the pilot to turn the plane around. For a gut-wrenching minute, her career seemed a foolish exercise, a pointless labor for little pay, a cruel hoax that had lured her from her marriage. Being with Paul was the only thing that mattered. She tried to clench her fists, to concentrate her mind, but they only balled into soft paws in the thick down mittens.

A breaking sound in her ears let her know relief was coming, in the form of distraction, and she welcomed it. Robin spoke again, the edge of anger in her voice a refreshing antidote to Anna’s weakness.

“Ridley recommended the Homeland Security guy from this list they sent the park, but nobody who knows anything made up the list.”

Nobody who knows anything. Anna’d been around research projects enough to know that meant an NPS person. There was a strange and mutually hostile love affair between scientists and the parks. Years back, the Park Service abdicated the role of science in the parks and opened it up to outside researchers.