“One’s a little girl,” he whispered to Erin. Well, he hoped he’d pitched his voice to a whisper, anyway. “Look at how dainty her head is compared to her brother’s.”

Erin studied the babies. Turning her face toward him, she said, “I don’t see their mother. Maybe they’re orphaned.”

Wyatt considered the possibility. Awful things happened in the wild. Four Toes had been only a tiny cub when his mother had been killed in a rockslide. “Maybe so.”

She smiled. “Or maybe they were both orphaned separately. Then they found each other and have become best friends. Someday, after they grow up, she’ll love him, and he’ll love her, and they’ll get married in a deer-style wedding.”

Wyatt didn’t fantasize much about wildlife, but he guessed the part about the fawns being orphaned and finding each other was possible. He doubted a full-grown buck would confine his arduous pursuits to only one doe, though, and a marriage between two deer was a plot for children’s storybooks.

Still, it was fun to imagine that happening, impossibly romantic though it was. But just then, an osprey circled over the lake and made a spectacular dive into the water. Erin grew so excited she grabbed Wyatt’s arm, her gaze fixed on the bird. He found himself watching her instead of the raptor.

“She got a fish!” Erin told him. “Watch! She’s going to take it back to the nest.” She pointed high into a pine tree at the opposite side of the lake. “I can hear the babies cheeping.”

Wyatt wished he could hear them. He had no idea what cheeping sounded like and couldn’t even imagine it. But Erin turned toward him and said, “Cheep, cheep, cheep,” and the quick movement of her lips gave him an inkling. He located the nest high in the trees, saw that it was quite large, and wondered how old it was. Ospreys returned each year to their nesting location, and sometimes generations of them remodeled the same residence year after year. Wyatt had read that ospreys could end up with nests ten to thirteen feet deep and up to six feet wide, large enough for a man to easily sit in. In what he hoped was a low voice, he shared that information with Erin.

“Wow. Really?”

She seemed genuinely interested, so Wyatt shared more with her, ending with, “The osprey parents work together to build the nest and locate it within twelve miles of water where the fish swim close to the surface. Ospreys can dive only three feet down.”

“Imagine carrying a fish in your beak for twelve miles,” Erin said. “How incredible is that?”

Wyatt gazed at her upturned face and wanted to kiss her so badly that he ached. From the start, he had suspected Erin had been sent with him because Vickie and Slade hoped the two of them might fall for each other. What they didn’t know was that Wyatt had already lost his heart to Erin, but he wouldn’t ever act on it.