Prologue
Harris Lipton must have lost his damn mind.
For six months he’d been in the Alaskan wilderness hunting fugitives, drug smugglers and human traffickers, and the minute he got a short leave from his duties with the Xtreme Ops, he took off backpacking into Denali National Park. Instead of heading to Cali for some sun and sweeties, he was trekking through thick mud on the edge of Big Stony Creek.
He planned to set up in one of the zones that permitted camping, but he already knew a week wouldn’t be nearly enough time away from it all.
Picking his way through the high grasses, he forced himself to slow down. There was no run to the finish line on vacation. He pulled in a deep breath of mountain air.
From the corner of his eye, he spotted the bleached white of bone and froze mid-step.
Fucking great.
The fact he was totally desensitized to the possibility—and likelihood—that it could be human remains told him this time away from work was essential.
Lipton changed his path to circle closer to the bone. He might face the remains of some grizzly’s dinner. Or a murdered hiker. Out here, he never knew what to expect.
As soon as he saw the long, spikey tines of a caribou antler shed, relief surged through him.
Scrubbing a hand over his face to clear out half a dozen images of death flitting through his mind, he stood staring down at the antlers people enjoyed searching for and collecting. If he had a home of his own, he might tie them to his backpack and haul them back to nail over a mantel.
At present, home consisted of Quonset huts—small buildings with rounded roofs lined up along the base and outfitted the same as a basic dorm room. After some of the places he’d stayed over a lifetime, he didn’t take it for granted.
Serving four years in the Marines had been the root of his training, but he’d quickly climbed ranks and become the Marines’ number one person to call when they needed a bomb deactivated.
As if the pressures of not blowing himself up every week hadn’t been enough, he jumped at the chance to join Xtreme Ops. His buddies called him a stress junkie. Lord knew he spent enough months in therapy to figure out the same thing. Bottom line—a stressed young boy sought other stressful events as a man searching to control them.
Which made him a control freak too.
He squatted next to the antlers and stroked a fingertip along the smooth, bleached bone. Pretty in a primitive way, just like everything here in Alaska.
Lipton continued on his journey, hiking for miles along the drainage area where mountain runoff created a creek of sorts and sometimes flooded out. Someday, he’d return during the flood time just to witness the power of the water changing the land.
In the distance, Denali rose up, awe-inspiring with its massive size as North America’s tallest mountain. She had some clouds on her, softening her jagged peaks. Yes, Lipton damn well needed more of this.
He pulled in deep breaths. Cool, fresh air washed through his head, clearing out the dark, cobwebbed corners. Early in his military career, he learned he had to find a way to let shit go. Right now, right here, he was making peace with all the unpleasant but necessary deeds he’d done.
His only plan was to commune with nature. Maybe say fuck it to shaving for a week. And he definitely would not be pulling out a map anytime during the course of his leave.
In the distance, he spotted a grizzly with two cubs, the babies a darker shade than their mother and striking against the landscape. He stopped to watch them play for a little while before continuing on with no sense of purpose. It felt good to shut down the tactical portion of his mind. Was this how normal people lived? Just blue sky, pines and himself.
Wandering out of the flat land came as second nature to him. He couldn’t go long without a challenge, so he angled up the hill. Soon his muscles burned with the exertion he was so familiar with on a daily basis, but this time his goal was personal—to reach the top and find a view.
His captain wasn’t giving orders in his ear. He didn’t tote a rifle. And he wasn’t out here to hunt a criminal. As he hiked, he repeated these things to himself. Didn’t people say they needed a vacation from their vacation? No wonder—doing nothing was hard work. He had to continually remind himself to unplug, shut down the internal grind of his mind.
When the sun reached high in the sky, he found a clearing in the trees and stopped.
Staring across the lowlands he’d just hiked, a sense of peace gripped him. Like having a hot cup of coffee on a frigid morning at camp before his teammates climbed out of their tents. Or knowing he’d gone the distance to serve and protect.
He reached out and gripped the tall, thin pine tree in front of him to get a closer look. The clouds were blowing away from Denali, revealing the majestic snow-capped peak.
Above his head came a loud crack and Lipton ducked, his body trained to find cover in an instant. His feet went out from under him, and he slammed into the bruising earth just as branches and pine rushed at him. He reached for his weapon out of instinct, but he never laid hands on it.
When he opened his eyes, he didn’t register anything but the gritty scent of dirt and sap. Then a pair of warm green and gold eyes burned down into his.
Someone was trying to kill him. What else could have happened?
He must be losing his fucking mind. He couldn’t even take a vacation without fucking it up and conjuring some danger that wasn’t really there.
“Are you okay? Can you hear me?” The green eyes were attached to a voice, as soft as the whisper of breeze through the pines just before that blast sent him into full alert mode.
Lipton’s memory sparked in his temporal lobe, and he dug the heels of his hands into the forest floor to push upward.
“Don’t move fast. You could be injured.”
He turned his head to see more than the green eyes. A crunchy-granola type of woman sat there wearing all green. Her curly hair had one small braid tied with a gold thread at the bottom that brushed across the top of her breast.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m one of the park rangers here in Denali. It’s my job to help lost hikers…or lift the top of a pine off a big, muscled man.” She pointed to a pile of branches to the side of where he sat.
He shook his head, trying to make sense of what happened. “What the hell?”
“I didn’t see it, but I heard it. Looks as if that treetop snapped, probably weakened from high winds and snow, and it fell on you.”
He raised a hand and scrubbed it over his face. That explained the branches rushing toward him. Had he blacked out? What a damn sissy, he could hear his fellow Xtreme Ops team member, Hepburn, ribbing him now.
“I’m trained to check for concussion. Can you tell me your name?” the woman asked.
“No. I can’t.” He shoved to his feet, but the instant his boot tread touched down, his ankle folded.
He collapsed, hitting the ground hard again. A stick cut into his palm, and he issued a low growl of fury.
“Oh my God! Your ankle is clearly broken.”
“No way.”
“It went out from under you. I’m pretty sure it’s broken,” she insisted.
He shoved to a standing position again, leaning all his weight onto the opposite foot. There—he was up. Nothing broken. No—
As soon as he set his foot down, his ankle buckled again. This time, pain shot through him, and he grabbed his calf.