Perhaps it was time to accept she’d wandered off the trail. She flipped her wrist over and looked at her watch, stunned to see it had only been an hour since the sun had gone down. She could have sworn she’d been out here half the night. She’d been hiking since midmorning, but it already felt like days.
Blowing out a breath, Zarina tucked some long, blond hair that had escaped from her ponytail behind her ear and began backtracking along the route she’d followed to get here. Her navigational skills being what they were, it was entirely possible she’d end up farther off the trail and deeper in trouble, but she wasn’t going to stop searching until she found Tanner. While the idea of wandering around the woods in the middle of the night scared the hell out of her, she was committed to finding him no matter what she had to do. She wasn’t going to give up simply because she was a little nervous about being alone in the woods at night.
Zarina moved her flashlight around as she walked, relaxing a little when she recognized some obvious landmarks after a few steps. She definitely remembered that waist-high outcropping of rocks ahead of her, as well as the big tree leaning over part of it. And that thick root sticking up out of the ground like a clutching hand? Yeah, she’d almost fallen over that thing.
Within minutes, however, the route started to look unfamiliar, and Zarina second-guessed her decision to keep going. Frowning, she stopped walking and turned in a slow circle, wondering if maybe she’d missed a turn or something. Nothing looked familiar now. Not the ground, or the rocks, or the trees.
She was lost.
She probably shouldn’t have been surprised. She was a scientist who specialized in genetic engineering. A normal day for her involved spending hours in a lab looking through microscopes and manipulating DNA strands, not hiking while carrying a backpack’s worth of outdoor gear on her back, looking for one man in the middle of a huge wilderness.
Zarina considered pulling out the satellite phone buried in her backpack but decided against it. She was lucky the new people in charge of the Department of Covert Operations in DC had agreed to let her come on this hopeless mission in the first place. If she called for help after looking for less than a day, they’d probably be on the next flight out to rescue her and her search would be over.
Taking a deep breath, she reached into the pocket of her jacket for the trail map she’d been following. Well, the one she was supposed to be following, anyway. As she focused her flashlight on the bewildering collection of squiggly solid and dotted lines crisscrossing the carefully folded map, she realized she could see her breath in the crisp October air.
Crap. She hoped it didn’t get too much colder tonight. She might have lived most of her adult life in Moscow, but that didn’t mean she enjoyed turning blue. It probably didn’t help that her jacket wasn’t meant for these kinds of temperatures. But in her defense, it had been much warmer in town. Plus, she hadn’t planned on being out here this long.
When she’d showed the man at the sporting goods store a photo of Tanner, he’d told her he had heard rumors of a huge guy with a crazy mane of dark-blond hair camping near Grouse Mountain, just north of the trail she’d been following. The man had sworn it would be easy to find Tanner if she stayed on the path. All she needed to do was look for a big pile of rocks near the spot where the trail and 25 Mile Creek nearly crossed each other. From there, a small, unnamed side path would take her to the general location where Tanner was camping. It had sounded so simple.
But Zarina had been following the main trail since ten o’clock that morning, and she’d never seen anything even close to the landmarks the store clerk had described. Then again, this was the same man who’d sworn the flashlight he’d sold her for fifty dollars would light the forest up like it was broad daylight. That had turned out to be a lie, so maybe he’d been lying about knowing where Tanner was, too.
She pushed that thought aside and stared harder at the map, trying to figure out where she’d veered off the path. While the store clerk might have lied about the quality of the flashlight he’d sold her, she knew in her heart the man he’d described was Tanner. Not only was the former Army Ranger one of the largest men she’d ever seen, he was also graced with the most amazing head of hair any man had ever possessed. It was the kind of hair that made women want to run their hands through it just to feel its softness against their skin. Well, at least that’s what she wanted to do every time she saw him. But maybe that was just her.
Of course, Tanner’s size and wild mane of dark-blond hair were a result of the horrible serum that evil scientists wanting to play God had injected him with nearly a year and a half ago in an old, abandoned ski lodge a dozen miles or so from the place she now stood. But still, no one would ever confuse Tanner with any other man. He was singularly unique in every way.
Zarina vividly remembered the first time she’d seen Tanner. He’d been stripped to the waist and strapped down to a hospital gurney in the bowels of the ski lodge while those two psychotic doctors pumped him full of drugs in an attempt to create the world’s first viable man-made shifter.
But while she’d been in the room, she’d been far from
