Cover

Endorsements

Praise for Sunburst

“International intrigue and adventure paired with a simmering romance and a marriage of convenience equals one fast-moving story you won’t be able to put down! Grab Susan May Warren’s Sunburst today!”

Lisa Harris, bestselling author of the Nikki Boyd Files series

Praise for Sunrise

“Warren launches her thrilling new Sky King Ranch series with a topical tale of romantic suspense set in the breathtaking Alaskan bush. . . .Warren proves yet again why she is a master in the genre.”

Booklist, Starred Review

“In the romance novel Sunrise, a once-couple reconciles in the rugged landscape of Alaska’s beautiful frontier.”

Foreword Reviews

“I started reading this book and could NOT put it down. Definitely is now one of my all-time favorites!”

Interviews & Reviews

“Sunrise is the first explosive volume in a new nail-biting series from USA Today bestselling author Susan May Warren.”

Fresh Fiction

“Warren takes readers on a journey of a lifetime for those who have always wanted to venture to the great Alaskan outdoors.”

Relz Reviews

“Good stories flow with a mix of intellect, wit, and charm. . . . Sunrise combines all of those elements to tell a story that blends action, danger, and romance set against the backdrop of the rugged Alaskan wilderness.”

Killer Nashville

Half Title Page

BOOKS BY SUSAN MAY WARREN

MONTANA RESCUE

Wild Montana Skies

Rescue Me

A Matter of Trust

Troubled Waters

Storm Front

Wait for Me

GLOBAL SEARCH AND RESCUE

The Way of the Brave

The Heart of a Hero

The Price of Valor

SKY KING RANCH

Sunrise

Sunburst

Sundown

Title Page

Copyright Page

© 2022 by Susan May Warren

Published by Revell

a division of Baker Publishing Group

PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

Ebook edition created 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-3883-9

Scripture used in this book, whether quoted or paraphrased by the characters, is taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

ONE

Colt Kingston was in worse shape than he thought.

One good look at himself in the mirror said that he probably shouldn’t be climbing at seven thousand feet, where the air became a whisper in his lungs, where his heart had to work double time, and where every movement turned his muscles into a fist.

But the view. Oh, the view from atop Avalanche Spire, just south of Denali National Park, could just about stop his heart anyway.

Colt scanned the area with his binoculars.

From the north, the massive Denali range rose, rugged and magnificent, its hulking mass thundering across the horizon. A blue-gray shadow fell upon the mountains below, sweeping down to the rich greens of a pine and fir forest, the deep blues of valley lakes set in pockets inside the rising peaks of the foothills.

Snow and ice still capped a number of low-lying peaks, glaciers running off the edge like frosting. The air smelled of the summer wildflowers, and the sunlight hung long upon the day.

“I see the plane,” he said, his gaze dropping to a small white-and-red-striped crumple of metal caught in one of those glaciers, about a half mile down from the cliff where they stood. “Right where you left it, Tae.”

He lowered his binoculars and shot a glance at Taylor—Tae—Price. She wore her blond hair in a singular braid, had on a pair of Gore-Tex hiking pants, a warm jacket, and a wool hat against the still-crisp Denali wind.

Her mouth tightened at the edges. “It wasn’t there when I left it.”

Colt’s brother Dodge had walked over and now gestured for the binoculars. Colt handed them over.

“Looks like the plane slid,” he said. “I can see the trail where the melt carried it.”

“They must have landed in the valley above it, and the glacier carried it down the slope,” Echo, Dodge’s fiancée, said. She had put down her backpack and was taking a drink of water. Two golden-brown braids stuck out of her knit hat. She glanced at Tae. “I still can’t believe you survived.”

They stood on a ridge just above where they’d landed the Piper Super Cub that Dodge had flown, searching for the downed plane. Even the chopper wouldn’t have been able to put down closer to the wreck, so taking the plane gave them more reach to confirm, well, that Tae hadn’t been lying.

Not that Colt thought she was outright lying, per se, but with the position of the plane, it seemed a little far-fetched that the story went down the way she’d told it. The one that included a kidnapping, her attempts to crash the plane, surviving not only the crash that killed the pilot and her kidnapper but also a late-season blizzard.

“I can’t believe I survived either,” Tae said, maybe realizing that no, none of it really added up. Still, here she stood, daring him not to believe her words even as he stared at the crumpled evidence. Dodge and Echo had found her in a gully nearly ten miles away, so maybe . . .

“We need to get to the plane,” Tae said. “My backpack is inside. It has my research and . . .” She looked at Colt, her pale blue eyes on him, a small glare headed his direction.

Fine. Whatever. He’d sort of thought there might be a little something between them over the past few weeks. She had, after all, sat by his bedside during those early days after his extraction from an op-gone-south in Africa. Heard his nightmares. And he’d witnessed one of her own, so . . .

But after he’d cornered her, forced her story out two weeks ago, something had changed between them. The big chill.

He should have expected that, maybe. No one liked being interrogated.

“We’ll have to traverse the glacier,” Dodge said, “and then ice climb down to the plane. It looks pretty precarious.” He glanced at Colt. “You sure you’re up for this?”

Colt didn’t want to bristle at his brother’s question, but still, it burned through him. “Of course.”

If it hadn’t been for the beating Colt had suffered while being held hostage by a group of terrorists in Nigeria, he would have been out here two weeks ago. Right after local sheriff Deke Starr had turned up with the proof that someone was after Tae—someone meaning some Russian mafia group.

And now he sounded crazy, even to himself.

Clearly, Colt was desperate to put a little hero back into his reflection in the mirror. The one that stared at him with reddened eyes and fading bruises. He didn’t go to sleep every night without replaying that moment when the truck of jihadists pulled up in a Nigerian village and forced him and his fellow security officer to their knees. When, for the first time in years, he prayed that God hadn’t completely abandoned him. Maybe, maybe not, because somehow most of them survived, including Noemi, his brother Ranger’s wife, who had been an humanitarian aid worker in Nigeria.

It didn’t mean that God was actually looking out for Colt. He attributed God’s favor to Noemi and Selah, the other humanitarian aid worker, and maybe even the doctor Colt had been tasked to protect.

Thankfully, the doc had survived, but no thanks to Colt.

Bottom line, he’d failed.

Sometimes, before he dropped off into his sweaty nightmares, he backed all the way up to the moment they’d found the dead bodies of the villagers in the church. In that moment, he listened to his gut instincts that said, Run.

Or he shot first and then threw his body in front of the doctor, taking the bullet.

Instincts he’d honed during his years as a Delta Force operator. Except he wasn’t that guy anymore. Wasn’t even a security pro for Jones, Inc., at least not until he healed up from his broken bones and bruised insides.

Which meant he had plenty of time to focus on Tae and her crazy story about being chased by international terrorists all the way to his backyard in Alaska.

“While you were learning to fly, I was climbing and rappelling,” Colt said now to Dodge. “And don’t forget that one year I actually worked at the Denali Base Camp, coordinating Sky King Ranch flights.”

“I remember,” Dodge said as he pulled out crampons from his pack and hooked them to a carabiner. “Dad was afraid you were going to actually attach to one of the climbing crews and head up the mountain.”

Colt also dug out his crampons and hooked them to the outside of his pack. The snow was soft, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t lethal. “I was seventeen. I wasn’t allowed up.”

“Since when do you follow the rules?” Dodge handed Echo the rope, one end already affixed to his harness. She clipped in.

Colt hiked up his own harness. “When it matters.” He turned to Tae, who was struggling with her rig. “You could wait here . . .”

“I know how to climb. I used to climb the wall back at my gym in Seattle.” She stepped away from him when he reached to help. “Besides, I want to be there when you see that I’m telling the truth.”

“I never said you weren’t telling the truth.” He glanced at Dodge, whose eyebrows rose.

“Really?” She rounded on Colt. “When I told you my story, you stared at me so long, I thought maybe you were suffering from a hit on the head.”

Yeah, well, he was, a little. “It’s just . . . the whole thing sounds like something out of a Brad Thor novel. You being kidnapped off your cruise ship by your boyfriend—”

“A Russian spy!”

“Right.” He held up a hand. “A Russian spy named Sergei. Who then forced you on a plane to hijack you to some secret lab in Russia.”

“I never said that.” Her mouth tightened. “I said that I thought he might be taking me to Russia. And that’s why I freaked out. Why I opened the door to the plane—”

“Because you were trying to crash.”

“Wouldn’t you?” She was tightening her harness. “Isn’t that part of your oath as a soldier? Escape, survive—or something like that?”

“But you’re not military.”

“My father was. And . . . well, I wasn’t going to . . .”

And then she stopped. Again. Right where she always stopped—before she told him the why behind everything.

Secrets. Tae was full of them, and he wasn’t going to let them get him, or his family, killed.

“See, you don’t believe me, again.”

“What?”

“It’s your face.” She moved her open palm in a circle before him. “You think I’m crazy.” She turned to Dodge. “Do you think I’m crazy? That I dreamed all this up?”

Dodge held up his hand in surrender. “I think we’re wasting time.”

Probably. Because although the sun was still high, Colt’s chest was really starting to ache from the lack of oxygen.

He took the rope from Echo, tied a figure eight knot and attached a carabiner to it. Turned to Tae. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Tae. It’s that you’re not telling me everything, and I know it.”

Her mouth tightened, and he had interrogated enough people to know he’d hit on truth. “Do you know how to—”

“Yes.” She took the carabiner from him and attached it. Met his eyes. “You’ll see. We’ll get down to that plane and you’ll see two dead bodies. And then I’ll get my backpack and prove that it’s all true. I’m not crazy.”

“For the last time, I never called you crazy.”

She hiked an eyebrow at him.

Okay, when he’d first heard her story, he might have paused for a long moment, let it sink into his head, let the what-ifs surface.

What if her story was true—that she had been kidnapped by the Russian mob? Why? And sure, he’d tried to pry that bit of truth from her, but she’d clammed up.

Almost as if she didn’t trust him.

So maybe their little trek out to the bush to confirm her story had as much to do with her trusting him as it did with him trusting her.

He clipped the tail end of the rope to his harness.

“Here’s how this will work,” Dodge, always the boss, said. He also wore a Gore-Tex outfit and a wool hat. The fact that Dodge had agreed to come along on this crazy search . . . well, maybe things were going to be okay between him and Colt, after all. “The climb down isn’t terrible, but once we reach the glacier, walk only in my steps. I’ll test the snow, but this time of year, the ice can give and then—”

“You could fall a thousand feet to your death,” Colt said.

Dodge gave him a look.

Well, maybe someone, and he wasn’t saying who—ahem, Tae—should think about what she was getting into.

“If that happens,” Echo said, rolling her eyes at Colt’s words, “hit the ground with your ice axe, and hold on. You’re the only one stopping said person from”—she gestured at Colt—“what he said.”

He shot Tae a final look.

“Please. I hiked through the wilderness, alone, for five days. Survived a blizzard.”

“Barely,” Dodge said, probably remembering that day when he and Echo had found her, nearly frozen, in the snow near a ranger cabin.

Tae gave Dodge the same look she’d given Colt. Gone was the quiet, sweet girl who’d made them all soup.

Colt’s fault, really, and for a moment he was back at the cabin two weeks ago, after he’d seen her picture taken from an assassin’s phone, targeting her. He’d practically ran her down, shoved his hand over her shoulder, holding the cabin door closed so she couldn’t escape, and said, his tone tight and serious, “Spill.”

She’d morphed right in front of his eyes from quiet, hidden Florence Nightingale—his nickname for her—to Marie Curie, fierce, determined, and brave.

Even, maybe, a little bossy.

“You sure you want to know?” she’d asked.

Maybe he should have said no. Because now, as they prepared to climb down the mountain, he sort of missed Florence.

“Let’s go,” Colt said.

Dodge was right. The boulders created a natural stairway down the mountainside, into the valley where the glacier spilled over the side of the cliff.

Colt watched as Echo trekked in front of him. She had also grown up in Alaska and had the sure steps of a mountain goat.

But Tae handled herself just fine, holding on, checking her steps, careful.

Deliberate.

The sun still hovered high, although by Colt’s guesstimation, it might be nearly six in the evening. Maybe they should have camped on the ridge after their hike from the valley floor where Dodge landed. But Colt was as eager to prove Tae right, or wrong, as she was.

He was rooting for wrong. Because the idea of some terrorist after her—and as a by-product, his family—had Colt’s gut in all manner of knots.

Then again, if she’d made it up . . .

So maybe right wasn’t such a bad option.

Dodge reached the edge of the glacier field. Maybe a thousand feet across, the glacier was a quietly moving river, with thousands of tributaries running through cracks in its gnarled, veiny blue surface. The frozen river fell from the top of the valley down to the edge of a cliff that dropped another thousand feet to a glacial lake below.

Working its way over the cliff, maybe ten feet from the edge, sat the mangled six-seater Beechcraft Bonanza, its wings shorn off, the fuselage twisted. When it landed, it had dragged the tail, which broke off, spinning the aircraft so that it then cartwheeled, taking off the wings.

It had ended up on its back, a fallen albatross, wheels up.

A stiff wind caught Colt’s jacket, slipped down his back. He sat on a boulder and attached his crampons, then unhooked his ice axe from the pack.

“Maybe just Colt and I should go,” Dodge said.

Colt nodded, brutally aware of the way his heart had started to hammer. Sheesh. He wasn’t scared, but the sweat down his back and his hard breathing had him thinking that if someone went down . . . he might not be able to pull them back up.

So, if Dodge fell, they would both die.

“No,” Echo said, saving him. “We go together.”

Dodge’s mouth made a grim line, but he nodded.

“My steps, your steps,” Dodge said and started out.

Echo followed, then Tae, and finally Colt, his chest tight.

Quiet. Footsteps crunching in the snow. Dodge pressed the handle of his ice axe into the snow, testing for strength, step by step.

They edged out—ten feet, twenty, thirty.

“Stop,” Dodge said, and Colt froze.

“There’s a bridge here. We’ll need to go around.”

An ice bridge. The kind that spanned a crevasse. The kind that could disintegrate with weight and bring them all down.

Dodge backtracked while they stayed put, and rerouted. He found where the crevasse ended, and they crossed over.

The pain in Colt’s chest had started to ease. See, they’d be just fine.

“It looks like the door is missing,” Dodge said as they drew closer to the plane. “Is that how you got out, Tae?”

“I don’t know. I woke up outside, strapped to my seat.”

Dodge stepped up to the empty metal carcass, looking through the open tail.

“Any dead bodies?” Colt asked, catching up. Dodge had left about twenty feet of rope between them. Echo caught up to him, then Tae.

“I think so,” Dodge said.

Tae started inside.

“Wait.” Dodge held his arm up. “This plane is sitting on ice. One wrong move and this whole thing could break free, go over the cliff.”

“I need my pack,” Tae said.

“I’ll get it.” Colt shot a look at Dodge. “Anchor in?”

Dodge nodded and pressed his ice axe into the glacier. Echo wedged hers in too, and then they both unclipped their carabiners and affixed them to the axes. The rope from their anchors stretched out to first Tae, then Colt.

“I’m going with you,” Tae said.

“Stay here.” Colt looked at her. “I promise to get your pack.”

She opened her mouth, closed it. “Please don’t die.”

Huh. Well, well. He gave her a smile.

She drew in a breath. “You’ll see I’m not lying.”

Right. He turned to the wreckage.

The back seats had been ripped from the body of the plane, one of them gone—probably Tae’s, given her story. The two middle seats had fallen and lay mangled on the ceiling-now-floor. Colt eased up, through the wreckage, to the front. An odor of gas hinted the air.

Wind whistled through the cockpit window, but as he drew closer, he spotted a corpse hanging from a seat in front. The pilot.

“I have a body!” he shouted. He came closer, pulling up his scarf. The man had frozen, clearly, but with the thaw, had started to decompose.

“What about Sergei?” Tae shouted to him.

He grabbed a dangling seat belt, listing in the wind. “Where was he sitting?”

“He wasn’t— He was . . .”

The hiccup in her voice made him look at her. She had turned a little wan. “He was trying to strangle me.”

The quietness, the horror of her words simply ripped through him.

“I had opened the door, was trying to wreck the plane.” She offered a tiny smile, a hint of Florence. But he was starting to like Marie. She was brave.

“Maybe he was thrown out, like you,” Echo said.

Tae nodded. “Do you see my pack? It’s purple and has my name on it.”

He searched the front compartment. “Not here.”

“I shoved it under one of the seats,” Tae said and stepped inside the plane.

And that’s when it started to give.

“Tae, stop moving,” Colt said, climbing back toward her.

“That pack has all my research in it.” She hit the floor, searching under the mangled seats.

The plane moved again, this time a bit more, as if trying to break free.

“I see it!” She lay prone, reaching out under a fallen seat. “It’s wedged in here!”

He reached her, grabbed her harness. “Tae, we gotta get out of here!”

“Colt!” Dodge shouted.

And with a crack, the entire plane rocked.

“Tae!” Colt tugged at her.

“I can almost reach it!”

The plane began to slide. Slowly, but, “Tae, c’mon!”

“I’m stuck!”

The plane started to pick up speed. The rope that tethered them to Dodge’s ice axe was coiling out, twenty feet of it that would stop Tae first, then Colt.

And if she didn’t get unstuck . . .

He yanked on her jacket, hard. She shrieked but landed against him. They fell against the wall, and the entire plane shuddered.

He wrapped his arms around her. “Hold on!”

And then, the plane sailed over the edge into the bright blue of the Alaskan sky.

Tae should have gone right on pretending she couldn’t speak, couldn’t remember who she was, and quietly slipped away in the night.

Kept running.

Because then no one else would die.

She screamed as the plane dropped out around her.

“Hang on!” Colt held on to her rope, tucking her against him as they fell with the momentum of the plane.

Her rope caught them, jerking them to a stop just below the lip of the cliff. Below them, the plane dropped, the crunch of metal echoing as it bounced. It hit the lake, some thousand plus feet below, and Tae just barely stopped herself from screaming again.

Above them, a shout lifted. Probably Dodge, trying to keep the axe from jerking free.

Then, silence. Just Colt’s heavy breathing as she lay in his embrace. His arm tightened around her as he gripped the rope, his feet scrabbling for purchase against the icy wall.

“I got you,” he said. “You’re okay.”

They hung maybe five feet below the lip of the glacier, the rope pressed into the ice, their feet dangling in air.

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