“Our what?” he asked, turning to face her.

“I can get a GPS reading on our position.”

He gave her a blank look. Grace set her jacket on the ground, then set Baby on it and wrapped him up tightly. “Help me find my computer,” she said, turning to climb back into the plane.

Grey tried to open the back cargo door, but it wouldn’t budge. He walked around the fuselage, tamping snow as he went, and after several tries and a few grunts, he was able to rip open the door on the opposite side. Her carry-on bag fell into the snow.

“Please, be careful with that,” she told him, reaching out and pulling it back inside the plane.

“Be careful?” he said, giving her an incredulous look across the compartment. “The damn thing just fell three thousand feet.”

“There. That one has my computer,” she told him, pointing to the metal suitcase now sitting in the front compartment, on top of the still hissing engine.

Grey worked the suitcase free and handed it to her across the plane. Grace pulled it out into the snow and packed down a level place to set it. Once satisfied that it was not in danger of tipping, she opened it up.

“Have you ever noticed,” he said, walking back around and hunching down beside her, “how we package our possessions better than ourselves? Our luggage fared better than we did.”

Grace didn’t think he wanted an answer to his observation, so she continued her task in silence. She unpacked the satellite link and handed it to him.

“Here. Set that down away from the plane in as open an area as you can find,” she instructed. “There’s fifty feet of cable, so find a spot where the tree canopy is fairly open to the sky.”

“Will the rain bother it?” he asked as he looked for an open space for the device.

“No. That part is waterproof,” she said. “No. It’s upside down. Turn it over.”

He did, then walked back and picked up Baby, who was beginning to fret.

“He’s hungry,” he said, unwrapping her jacket and peeking inside.

Grace looked up at him, her brow furrowed. “How do you know that? I still can’t discern one of his cries from another.”

He shot her a crooked grin. “One baby brother and two sisters,” he answered.

Grace ducked her head and turned to find her bag with Baby’s formula. Grey beat her to it and started to open it.

“No! I’ll get that,” she said, taking it from him. “I…ah…I know where everything is.”

He didn’t question her overreaction. He simply sat down on the snow with Baby. Grace fished around for the formula and pulled out one of the small bottles. She screwed a nipple onto it and handed it to him.

“It’s probably cold,” she said. “Won’t that cramp his stomach?”

“I’m more worried about it bringing down his temperature,” he told her, taking the bottle and holding it up to his cheek. He nodded. “Nope. It’s fine. It hasn’t chilled yet.”

Relieved, Grace returned to her task of booting up her computer and pulling up her GPS program. That took her a good five minutes. The formula might not be chilled yet, but her computer sure wasn’t happy with the weather.

“What’s a satellite link?” he asked, watching her work while Baby contentedly ate. “And what’s a GPS

position?”

Grace was pleased, if a little surprised, that Greylen MacKeage was not afraid to admit his ignorance about something.

“There are at least nine satellites orbiting the Earth whose sole function is to send signals back to the ground. I can use three of them and get a fix on exactly where we are.” She turned to look at him. “The computer will pick the satellites nearest us, lock onto them, and form a triangulation between them and us. My computer will read the data and calculate our position. Using the numbers it gives me, I can pinpoint us on a map.”

She watched Grey look up at the overcast sky, his expression contemplative. “There are machines traveling around the Earth and sending signals back down?” he asked, still looking up.

“Oh, there are dozens of satellites, not just the GPS ones. There are communication satellites, weather and photography satellites, and other things, like the Hubble telescope and the space station.”

He slowly lowered his gaze back to her. “Really?” he murmured. His eyes narrowed slightly. “What is it you do for a living, Grace, that you carry computers and satellite links?”

She broke contact with his gaze and punched several buttons on her computer. “I work for StarShip Spaceline, a civilian space travel company.” She looked back at him. “I’m a rocket scientist,” she said defensively, expecting…what? A look of disbelief? Of awe? Or horror, maybe?

What she got from Grey, though, was another smile.

“I’m a lucky man to have crashed with you, then,” he said. “Can your satellite link penetrate these heavy clouds?”

Grace returned her attention to the job at hand, so Grey would not see how startled she was by the warmth of his smile. Did nothing rattle this man? He was sitting in the middle of a plane crash on the side of a mountain, feeding a baby, with a woman who had just admitted that she was probably smarter than he was. And he was smiling.

“Well, can it?” he asked.

“Can it what?”

“Can your computer read the numbers through the clouds?”

“Yes, of course. At least, I hope so,” she said. “But all sorts of things could interfere with the link. The mountains, these trees, or a combination of both. Oh, damn.” She pushed a few more buttons, and a map of northwestern Maine popped up on the screen. But there was no magic little dot saying where they were on that map.

“What?” he asked, leaning closer to look over her shoulder.

“It’s not going to work. Either the mountains are blocking our trajectory, or the forest is too dense here.”

She turned to look at him. “And that means the ELT might not get out, either,” she told him truthfully. “It can work on the same system, or if we’re lucky an overseas plane will pick up the signal. They are constantly monitoring the channel the ELT emits from.”

He leaned closer, squinting at the screen. “What’s an ELT?”

“It’s the emergency locator transmitter every aircraft has. If you crash, it automatically starts sending out a signal for a search party to follow.”

Grace climbed back into the plane and searched through the debris for the ELT, keeping her thoughts to herself that Mark might not have been a very conscientious pilot. The guy had been a cowboy, overconfident and reckless by nature. Most bush pilots kept their equipment in pristine condition, knowing their lives often depended on it.

Mark had not. She found the ELT ten minutes later, but she also found that it wasn’t working. She opened it and saw that the battery had leaked and corroded the transmitter beyond use.

Grace had a thought, just a fleeting thought, that she wanted to kill Mark herself. The only hope they had was dead in her hands, a useless piece of smart technology that neglect had ruined.

She backed out of the plane and threw the ELT into the forest as far as she could. She swiped at the tears welling up in her eyes and looked at Grey.

“It’s useless,” she said. “It’s broken.”

Grey sat back against the fuselage and busied himself with Baby. Grace used her sleeve to wipe off her computer. She shut it down and closed the cover.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Nothing works. We’re even too remote to get a cell phone signal.”

“It’s not your fault,” he told her, looking up. He smiled suddenly. “So I guess it’s a good thing you crashed with me. I can do what your technology can’t, Grace. I can get us out of here.”

“Excuse me? I’m not walking off this mountain. They say you’re supposed to stay with the plane.”

“They?” he asked, his dark forest eyes lighting with humor. “Would these be the same they who said Baby should be in his car seat? He would have been bludgeoned to death.”

“They are the experts,” Grace retorted, lifting her chin, refusing to let that smile disarm her. “The people who study these things.”