Alleria was beautiful and, more important, it was warm. If she couldn’t truly let herself go and relax and enjoy her time here, she could at least savor the warm weather. It was so completely different from anything she’d ever experienced before.

Standing in a cozy patch of shade cast by a huge cluster of coconuts hanging in a nearby palm, Grace took another minute to stretch out her muscles. She rolled her shoulders and raised her arms up in the air, then bent at the waist to touch her toes. She was starting to ache a little from her upper-body workout and it felt good to stretch and bend.

Once Logan had pointed out the need for balance and upper-body strength, Grace had known what she had to do. She’d begun with thirty push-ups when she first got out of bed this morning. She was in decent condition physically, but she needed much more strength in her upper arms if she expected to lift those hefty cocktail trays every night.

She was determined to make Logan Sutherland acknowledge that she took her waitressing job seriously. She couldn’t afford to be sent home. She absolutely had to get her funding; and to do that, she had to find and collect enough Allerian spore specimens to conduct her lifesaving experiments for the next few years.

As she straightened up and moved to another tree, she pondered the sadly obvious fact that Logan Sutherland couldn’t care less about her scientific work. No, he just cared that she performed her job as cocktail waitress as well as anyone else in the company. But if that’s what it took to keep her here, that’s what she would to do.

At each coconut palm tree, she knelt down and examined the juncture where the thick palm roots crisscrossed and divided. Feathery fern leaves sprouted here and there and that was where her spores were known to propagate. But tree after tree, frond after frond offered exactly nothing.