“What in the hell are you doing?”

Elena tugged her wool hat more firmly over her ears. She also pulled a thick pair of gloves over her hands and stomped her feet into their boots. Between that and the two layers of vests she had on over her long johns and snow pants, she figured her chances of succumbing to the cold were slim.

“I’m going Yowie hunting with Ace and Wilcox and the Georges.”

Max stared at her, his eyes heavy with exhaustion. He’d woken late after a restless night of tossing and turning and thumping that had prevented both her and Tina from sleeping. The result was an irritable seven-year-old, an even more irritable nanny, and a bed-rumpled man she longed to dump a bucket of snow over.

And not in the fun way.

“We never discussed my schedule, but I can hardly be expected to take care of Tina around the clock. I’m taking the morning off.”

“But you can’t.”

“I can and I will.” She grabbed the backpack of supplies she’d been careful to check and double-check. There wasn’t enough in there to keep her alive much longer than twenty-four hours, but that was too bad. If a painful, snowy death was her fate, then so be it. It was better than sitting inside this cabin with a man who could kiss her and crush her in the same amount of time it took most people to microwave a burrito. “I promise to be back before noon. That should give you plenty of time to go on your rounds this afternoon.”

“Elena, there’s at least another foot of snow out there by now.”

Yes, she knew that and was doing her best not to dwell on it. She had the crescent-shaped fingernail marks in her palm as proof.

“They’re coming by to get me in about ten minutes,” she said and, at Max’s look of inquiry, added, “I made plans with Ace. He stopped by early this morning to pick up something called deer cameras. He said you forgot to bring them the other night.”

Max swore. As he wasn’t normally a man to do that in his daughter’s range of hearing, the vocalization of his mood was telling.

“Daddy, you said a bad word,” Tina said. The girl was sprawled out in the kitchen, using a spray bottle of water and food coloring to paint bowls of snow. “Mommy doesn’t like it when you do that.”

“I guess that means I must not like it either, huh, Max?” Elena said in a low undervoice. “Since Quinn and I are exactly the same person?”

Max’s eyes turned dark. “That isn’t what I said.”

He might as well have. Everything about the way he’d kissed her last night spoke of a man who wanted her just as much as she wanted him. He’d been all tongue and righteous fury, a man who would have gladly bent her over any number of tables. And had he pulled the brakes for any other reason—for the sake of his daughter, because he found Elena disgusting, even because he’d definitively decided he couldn’t stomach the age difference—she’d have been able to nurse her wounds with grace.

But this? Because he thought she was the kind of person who would ask him to give up his climbing? Because he believed she would stand in the way of the thing he loved most in the world next to his daughter?

Even thinking about it now caused a cold, careful fury to settle over her. Cold, careful fury and a determination to prove Max wrong no matter what the cost.

“Do you trust Ace to keep Team Delta safe out there?” she asked.

“Of course I do, but—”

“If it were any other person, would you worry about them heading out in pursuit of Bigfoot today?”

“Well, no, but—”

“Then I’m going.”

Turning her back to Max, she gave Tina her full attention. “You have fun with your daddy this morning, okay? I’m going to get some fresh air and see if I can’t lay these Bigfoot fears to rest once and for all. And I’ll be back in plenty of time for lunch. Maybe I’ll even have some Sasquatch steaks we can fry up.”

Tina giggled and waggled her fingers, finding nothing to dislike in this arrangement.

Based on the glowering look Max was sending her right now and the way her stomach had turned to a solid lump, that made exactly one of them.

---

“And then there’s the Xenarthra school of thought, which is where Wilcox is currently doing his research,” female George said as Elena struggled to keep pace with her much more athletic companion. She’d been instructed to step in male George’s footprints, but his stride was freakishly long. She practically had to jump to each one. “I wasn’t sold at first, since I’ve been firmly in the hominid camp for years, but his theories have merit.”

Elena didn’t look up for fear she’d miss one of the footprints—something she was determined to avoid at all costs. Apparently, you had to watch where you walked this far out. Otherwise, you might step on something called a tree well, which was where the snow had piled up so high it covered trees to their very tips. If you found one—with your foot—you could plunge several dozen feet down the tree’s trunk to a crushing snow cavern of death.

She’d been super excited to hear about that one.

“Xenarthra?” she echoed.

“Ground sloths,” George said in a smug, triumphant voice. The woman also held out her hand to help Elena over a tricky spot, so she forgave her. “There’s an increasing belief that because of the way Bigfoot moves and the fact that he doesn’t surface very often to feed, he could be descended from the prehistoric sloth family. They lived around these parts fifteen thousand years ago.”

“Oh.” Elena perked up. She kind of liked that. Sloths were slow. Sloths were gentle. Sloths were—

“Some of them could grow to up to twenty feet, with claws the size of tusks.”

—horrifying, apparently.

She swallowed. So far, they hadn’t seen any kind of wildlife except for the occasional squirrel, but she wasn’t sure how much longer her luck would hold. Ace, Wilcox, and the Georges weren’t fooling around with this Sasquatch stuff. They’d been hiking for an hour already, setting up deer cameras on trees and examining every broken branch to determine if something large had walked by and caused the damage. And female George had been describing their research to her in alarming detail. There was some serious science to their approach.

It’s still better than being stuck with Max, Elena told herself firmly.

Or so she thought until she stepped in a footprint only to smack into the back of male George, who had halted his progress and was holding up a hand to keep them at bay.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” he said. “Don’t take another step.”

Elena couldn’t have obeyed him faster. She didn’t step, she didn’t move, she didn’t breathe. “Oh, God. Did you actually find him?”

“I think so.”

She might as well have not been there for all the interest Team Delta had in her after that. Male George motioned for his wife to join him, and Elena was forced to give up her safe position at the breadth of his back so the pair of them could confer. Which they did in elaborate detail, drawing in Wilcox as they discussed the exciting development of a rocky outcropping several hundred feet above them.

From a purely technical standpoint, Elena shouldn’t have been dizzy. After all, she wasn’t looking down a ravine; she was looking up at one. The place where she stood was the safe spot. It was all those slippery, jagged sheer cliffs above her that promised imminent doom—especially when the team started throwing around terms like belay and equalized anchor systems.

She recognized those terms from her Max safety research. They’re going to climb it. Not to save a life, and not for the adrenaline of it, but because they wanted to see if there was Bigfoot feces or other signs of habitation in that cave.

And people thought she was weird.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered to Ace. He seemed to take all of this in semi-amused stride, letting his team make plans that sounded improbable—if not impossible—for the human body to achieve. “If they have to use all that specialized equipment to get up there, how did a giant sloth make it?”

Ace touched his finger to the side of his nose and winked. “That, hot stuff, is the real question. But it’s not one for either of us to answer, if you catch my meaning.”

She did. He didn’t think Bigfoot existed any more than Max did. Which was all well and fine for the pair of them, so capable and certain of themselves in every situation, but how did that help her? She might not believe in monsters, but she did believe that nothing good could come from an ascent up a sheet of ice in the middle of nowhere while snow cascaded all around them.

But she’d invited herself on this expedition for a reason. To get away from the ranger’s cabin, yes, but also to learn more about this world of Max’s, this world he thought she couldn’t understand. To be fair, she didn’t understand it—not the way the Georges and Wilcox seemed to, practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect ahead of them—but she could see why it would appeal to a man like Max.

He was carved of the same stuff as that rock face—he was immovable, stubborn, hard. Of course he felt most at home here. It was only a soft, sniveling, weak person like her who didn’t belong.

“Are you coming up with us, Elena?” female George asked as they finalized their plans and started extracting their equipment. There were ropes and cables and scary-looking ice axes. Each item looked more ominous than the last. “It’s a lot easier than it looks. We can harness you to Ace so you’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Yeah, um. No.” She couldn’t back up fast enough, but then she remembered the tree wells and stopped. The number of safe spaces out here was diminishing at an alarming rate. “Is it okay if I wait for you down here? I’ll just sit on this nice, flat rock and not move.”

Ace appeared doubtful, giving one of his long dreadlocks a tug. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

She’d never been surer of anything in her life. Not even the prospect of Max waiting for her at the top would have been enough to get her anywhere near one of those ropes. It was all too easy to picture herself swinging like a pendulum, bound in the air with nowhere to go. Static and stuck, her fears holding her firmly in place.

“Absolutely,” she said. “You guys enjoy yourselves. I’m going to watch and learn.”

Ace shrugged. “Suit yourself. But if you really wanted to learn how this works, you should have asked Max. No one is better at this kind of stuff than he is—or, I guess, no one used to be. Poor bastard. He misses it a lot more than he lets on, you know.”

“I know, Ace.” Elena lowered herself to the rock, welcoming the clammy press of stone on her bottom. At least it gave her something to fixate on other than death and giant sloths and Max’s cold, angry face when she’d left that morning. “Believe me, I know.”