The Things We Guard (The Cairn Trilogy #1)
Declan Marsh
Each book in this series features a different couple and a complete happily ever after.
Colt Briggs has been trail boss at the Cairn for twenty-two years. He knows every trail on forty square miles of backcountry, every bear on the land, and exactly how much any outsider is allowed to see. His job is to make sure the guest ranch runs, the community stays hidden, and no one who comes through the gate leaves knowing more than they arrived with. He is very good at this job. He has had to be.
Rowan Adler is a conservation biologist from the University of Montana. He has spent three years negotiating access to private grizzly habitat, and the Cairn — the densest documented grizzly corridor in the lower forty-eight — is the last piece. He arrives in June with permits, a satellite phone, and the patient, precise attention of a scientist trained to see what is actually there. Colt is assigned to accompany him everywhere.
The problem is not that Rowan is perceptive. The problem is that his presence is the first time in twenty years that Colt has been asked to see the Cairn from the outside — to watch someone encounter it fresh and notice what they notice. Within two weeks, Rowan has documented a behavioral anomaly: the bears on this land avoid the high ridge with geographic precision. He asks about the Yates brothers. He does not know they are the question everyone agreed never to ask.
Colt is the first person in the Cairn's history who wants, physically wants, to answer.
What begins as protector and charge becomes something the Cairn's thirty-year silence was never built to survive. Colt has been keeping the secret so long the weight of it has become indistinguishable from his own bones. Rowan has been leaving every field site his whole life because leaving is the part he can control.
Both of them are about to run out of reasons to keep doing what they have always done.
What does protection cost the one who does the protecting — and what happens when the person he is protecting from the truth is the only one who makes the truth survivable?
