LITMIR.BIZ

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into and out of Canada and were, without a doubt, very dangerous.

      Everyone agreed she was lucky indeed she hadn’t been killed.

      Even if the pictures she took of the shack were the reason the shooters came after her, they didn’t tell her anything. She’d printed them out in her tiny log cabin while she and her military trio had waited for the police to get there. They’d been and gone, taking the memory disk with them. She still had the prints. A shack in the woods with a crooked metal chimney. It looked innocent enough to her.

      Ty cleaned and treated the cut on her forehead. She kept avoiding his eye, aware of her reaction to him, aware that, somehow, everything had changed between them. She’d known him forever. He’d always been a thorn in her side. He’d pushed her out of trees. He’d cut the rope on her tire swing. Now, he was making her tingle. It had to be adrenaline—a post-traumatic reaction of some sort, she decided.

      Hank and Manny built a fire in her woodstove. Hank, she learned, was a newly announced, dark horse candidate to become the junior U.S. senator from Massachusetts. He was a former air force rescue helicopter pilot, a retired major who’d received national attention on his last mission a year ago to recover fishermen whose boat had capsized.

      As unflappable as he’d been in the woods, Hank Callahan was rendered virtually speechless when Antonia Winter walked into her sister’s cabin. It made Carine smile. Her sister was a trauma physician in Boston, but she’d been drawn to Cold Ridge for the thirtieth anniversary of the deaths of their parents. She was a couple of inches shorter than Carine, her auburn hair a tone lighter, but Gus said both his nieces had their mother’s blue eyes.

      Antonia inspected Ty’s medical handiwork, pronouncing it satisfactory. Ty just rolled his eyes. She was focused, hardworking and brilliant, but if she noticed Hank’s reaction to her, she gave no indication of it.

      Gus arrived a few minutes later and shooed out all the air force guys, glowering when North winked at Carine and promised he’d see her later. Gus let Antonia stay.

      Their uncle was fifty, his dark hair mostly gray now, but he was as rangy and fit as ever. In addition to outfitting and leading hiking trips into the White Mountains, he conducted workshops in mountaineering, winter camping and mountain rescue. His goal, Carine knew, was to reduce the chances that anyone would ever again die the way his brother and sister-in-law had. But they did. People died in the mountains almost every year.

      He brought in more wood for the woodstove and insisted Carine sit in front of the fire and tell him and her sister everything.

      She did, except for the part about Ty saying she had pretty eyes.

      Gus wanted her to head back to town with him, but Antonia offered to stay with Carine in her small cabin. Their brother, a U.S. marshal in New York, called and agreed with the general assessment that the shooters hadn’t “missed” her. If they’d wanted her dead, she’d be dead. “Lay low for a few days, will you?”

      Out of Antonia’s earshot, Carine asked Nate what he’d think if she dated Tyler North.

      “Has he asked you out?”

      “No.”

      “Thank God for small favors.”

      The next day, Ty and his friends ended up rescuing a Massachusetts couple who got trapped on Cold Ridge. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had recently bought a house off the notch road and set out on their first hike on the ridge, for what they’d intended to be a simple afternoon excursion. Instead, they encountered higher winds, colder temperatures and rougher terrain than they’d anticipated. Ty, Hank and Manny, prepared for the conditions, helped transport them below the treeline, where they were met by a local volunteer rescue team.

      Jodie Rancourt had sprained her ankle, and both she and her husband were in the early stages of hypothermia, in danger of spending the night on the ridge. Given their lack of experience and the harsh conditions, they could easily have died if the three air force guys hadn’t come along when they had.

      An eventful weekend in the White Mountains.

      After Manny went back to his air force base and Hank to his senate campaign, Ty and Carine were alone on their quiet road in the shadows of Cold Ridge.

      Gus sensed what was happening and stopped by to tell Carine she’d be out of her damn mind to get involved with Tyler North.

      She didn’t listen.

      Her uncle’s warning was too late. Way too late. She was in love.

      She and Ty set their wedding date for Valentine’s Day.

      A week before she was to walk down the aisle, he showed up at her cabin and called it off.

      He couldn’t go through with it.

      Enter Tyler North into her life.

      Exit Tyler North.

      As quick as that.

      One

      For the first time in weeks, Carine didn’t spend her lunch hour thinking about photographing wild turkeys in the meadow outside her log cabin in Cold Ridge. She wandered through Boston Public Garden, eating the tuna sandwich she’d made and packed that morning. Every dime was critical to her ability to afford both her cabin in New Hampshire and her apartment in the city. Not that it was much of an apartment. Not that she could ever live in her cabin again.

      The last of the leaves, even in Boston, had changed color, and many had fallen to the ground, a temptation on a sunny, mild November afternoon. Carine remembered raking huge piles of leaves as a kid with her brother and sister—and Tyler North—and diving into them, hiding, wrestling.

      Ty almost suffocated her once. Unfortunately, she hadn’t thought of it as a premonition. It was just Ty being Ty, pushing the limits.

      But the nine months since their canceled wedding had taught her not to dwell on thoughts of her one-time fiancé and what might have been. She dashed across busy Arlington Street to a French café, splurging on a latte that she took back outside with her. Of course, it was true that she could be photographing wild turkeys in Cold Ridge—or red-tailed hawks, mountain sunsets, waterfalls, rock formations, alpine grasses. She was still a nature photographer, never mind that she’d been in Boston for six months and had just accepted a long-term assignment photographing house renovations.

      Not just any house renovations, she thought. Sterling and Jodie Rancourt had hired her to photograph the painstaking restoration and renovation of their historic Victorian mansion on Commonwealth Avenue.

      Carine sighed, sipping her latte as she peered in the display windows of the upscale shops and salons on trendy Newbury Street. But Ty kept creeping into her thoughts. Even when she’d chased him with a rake at six, spitting bits of leaves out of her mouth, she’d known not to get involved with him, ever. The six-year-old inside her, who knew better than to trust anything he said, must have been screaming bloody murder when she’d fallen in love with him last winter.

      The man could jump out of a helicopter to rescue a downed aircrew—it didn’t matter where. Behind enemy lines, on a mountaintop, in a desert or a jungle or an ocean, in snow or heat or rain. In combat or peacetime. He had a job to do. Getting cold feet wasn’t an option.

      Not so when it’d come to marrying her.

      Carine hadn’t spoken to him since he’d knocked on her cabin door and said he couldn’t go through with their wedding. He’d disappeared into the mountains for a few days of solo winter camping, lived through it, then returned to his base. She’d heard he’d been deployed overseas and participated in dangerous combat search and rescues. CSARs. He’d also performed humanitarian missions, one to treat injured women and children in an isolated area. Carine appreciated the work he did, and gradually, her anger at him had worn off, along with her shock. They were easy emotions to deal with in comparison to the hurt and embarrassment that had followed him walking out on her, the palpable grief of losing a man she’d come to regard in those few short months, maybe over her lifetime, as her soul mate.

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