From Frozen Betrayal To Fierce Love

The first sign I was going to die wasn't the blizzard. It wasn't the bone-deep cold. It was the look in my fiancé's eyes when he told me he had given my life's work-our only guarantee of survival-to another woman.

"Kelsi was freezing," he said, as if I were being unreasonable. "You're the expert, you can handle it."

He then took my satellite phone, shoved me into a hastily dug snow pit, and left me to die.

His new girlfriend, Kelsi, appeared, wrapped snugly in my shimmering smart blanket. She smiled as she used my own ice axe to slash my suit, my last layer of protection against the storm.

"Stop being so dramatic," he told me, his voice full of contempt as I lay there freezing to death.

They thought they had taken everything. They thought they had won.

But they didn't know about the secret emergency beacon I had stitched into my sleeve. And with my last ounce of strength, I activated it.

Chapter 1

The first sign that I was going to die wasn't the blizzard that had descended on us with the fury of a vengeful god. It wasn't even the searing, bone-deep cold that had begun to leech the life from my limbs. It was the look in my fiancé's eyes when he told me he had given my proprietary prototype-my life's work, our only guarantee of survival-to another woman.

The wind on Denali' s upper slope was a physical entity, a solid wall of ice and noise that slammed into our small expedition tent, threatening to rip it from its anchors. Inside, the air was only marginally warmer than the negative forty degrees Fahrenheit outside. My teeth chattered so violently I thought they might crack.

"Bryan," I managed, my voice a thin, reedy thing against the storm's roar. "I need the blanket. My core temperature is dropping."

I was the lead software engineer for OmniClimb, the brains behind the tech we were field-testing. I knew the numbers. I knew the precise point at which shivering stops and the body begins to shut down. I was dangerously close.

I fumbled with the zipper of my gear pack, my fingers clumsy and disobedient, like frozen sticks of wood. The space where my prototype "smart blanket" should have been was empty. Panic, cold and sharp, lanced through the fog of hypothermia.

The blanket was my masterpiece. Woven with micro-filaments that generated and regulated heat based on biometric feedback, it could sustain a human in arctic conditions for seventy-two hours. It was one-of-a-kind. It was my safety net.

And it was gone.

"Where is it?" I looked up at Bryan, my fiancé, the project manager for this very trip. His handsome face, usually so open and easy to read, was a shuttered mask.

He wouldn't meet my eyes. He was fussing with the straps on a different pack, his movements jerky. "What are you talking about?"

"The blanket, Bryan. The prototype. It's not in my pack."

A flicker