Gunnar Wolfe lifted the landing gear the moment he cleared the small Colorado runway, directed one last scowl at the mountains he’d wasted three days searching, and turned the small private jet east. Already having called once to say he’d be a day late to his new job in Spellbound Falls, Maine, he was damned close to blowing a second 7:00 a.m. roll call. The last thing he wanted was to waste the favors he’d had to cash in to snag the last firefighter position on one of the top fire and rescue squads in the country.
Engaging the autopilot once he reached cruising altitude, Gunnar signed off with the tower, switched the radio to cabin speakers, and pulled off his headphones. He leaned back in his seat with a heavy sigh and wondered, for the hundredth time since setting out on this crazy odyssey nearly a week ago, what in hell he was doing chasing halfway around the world after a woman he’d never even met.
A woman, he’d finally concluded, who didn’t want to be found.
What had begun as a potential distraction provided by a good friend’s matchmaking wife had, as of three days ago, turned into a personal mission to track down Katy MacBain, who’d mysteriously gone missing after finishing a four-week wilderness rescue course in Colorado. About the only thing Gunnar could say with any level of confidence was that Miss MacBain was still alive. Or she had been four days ago, when she’d driven off alone in the rental pickup delivered to the motel she’d spent two days holed up in—also alone, the desk clerk had assured him.
There, the paper trail Gunnar had been following just flat-out vanished. Hell, his computer hacker couldn’t even get a ping on her cell phone signal. And here he was—a man who made his living hunting down and severing the heads of criminal organizations, independent terrorist cells, and petty regimes, stymied by a twenty-eight-year-old part-time real estate broker and volunteer paramedic who still lived at home with Mommy and Daddy. Or she had, until somehow managing to wrangle herself a position on one of the more premier fire and rescue squads in the country.
Christ, he hoped Katy had pointed that rental truck east and was driving to Maine, as he didn’t want to think he might be abandoning a woman in trouble. In his experience, women only went into hiding for one of two reasons: to nurse a broken heart or to escape some no-good bastard trying to break them.
This should teach him to mind his own business the next time he stumbled upon a kidnapped queen. Why hadn’t he just called his royal buddy, Markov Lakeland—king of the young country of Shelkova, just across the Bering Sea from Alaska—and simply told the man where he could find his missing wife and aunt? Getting mixed up in their reunion had led Gunnar straight from the frying pan into the fire.
He sighed, remembering the look on his friend’s face when Markov strode into the village carrying the weight of six desperate days of not knowing if he’d ever see his wife again. Gunnar could swear he’d felt the ground shift when Markov had pulled Jane into his arms. For the first time in his life, Gunnar had found himself wondering what it would feel like to love someone that much.
And so had begun a three-month-long fantasy, fueled by a persistent queen who sent email after email with outrageous stories about her very tall, very beautiful, very best childhood friend who, having missed the royal wedding, had given her promise to be in Shelkova in time for the royal birth.
Only Katy MacBain had once again been a no-show, and Jane had gone into labor two weeks early smack in the middle of a palace overrun by well-groomed, ill-mannered nomads on a collective mission to find wives. And now it was Gunnar’s mission, once again, to locate a missing woman and restore order in at least one small corner of the world.
Chapter One
Two weeks later
Katy MacBain’s heart sank when she saw that one of the late arrivals they’d been holding the plane for was a kid.
Please stop. Please stop walking, she silently pleaded to the young boy striding down the aisle of the crowded commuter jet. Katy sighed in relief when the decidedly winded, harried-looking woman following him grabbed the loop on his backpack and pulled him to a halt five rows away.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like kids, but this one looked more excited