Page 39 of Personal Disaster

The view is spectacular, the valley spilling out below us, the mountains glowing pink and orange in the distance on the otherside.

“I’m a full-time park ranger,” he murmurs in my ear. “And very private, for obvious reasons. This is hard to explain. But I told you I’d show you who I am. I was a seed money investor in Starfish Instrumentation. That proved lucrative.”

I turn around, genuinely confused. “Why is that a secret?”

He rolls his neck and gives me a rueful smile. “Well…” He reaches past me and touches his hand to a sensor, unlocking the door. “Come onin.”

“If this is where you tell me you’re a spy, I’ve already figured thatout.”

He laughs out loud at that. “Not a spy.” He sets my bag down inside the front door and gives me a chance to look around.

It does have a cabin feel inside, I guess. A reclaimed wood table dominates the space in the main room, with an open kitchen at one end and an oversized, well-worn sofa overlooking the valley at the other.

But I think there’s a lot more house that crawls off in either direction, and Marcus is looking at me like he’s trying to figure out how to saymore.

Of course there’smore.

“You don’t need to—” I cut myself off and start again, because he wants to share, and I don’t want to stop him. “How many people know you’ve investedwell?”

“Notmany.”

I close the gap between us and wrap my arms around his tense body. “Thank you for trustingme.”

“I didn’t expect you to rocket into my life,” he says gruffly. “I’m not transitioningwell.”

“By the standards of dating people in D.C., you’re doing just fine. Once I went on five dates with a congressional aide before I found out he was married.”

That gets me a serious growl.

“I didn’t sleep withhim.”

“Good.”

I laugh. “Anyway, I’m sorry I freaked out that you own a plane. You live in the middle of a big state, far from your friends, and you have the means, so that makes sense.”

He leads me to the couch, where he flops out and tugs me down on top ofhim.

I nestle my head into the curve of hisneck.

“I like flying,” he says. “I thought about qualifying on bigger planes so I could work as a pilot. I still might. That’s my next back-up plan if the park service gets too political.”

“You wouldn’t go back to investing?”

He clears his throat. “I never really left it. That’s, uh, another thing. On a very part-time basis, I’m also something of a venture capitalist. I have a cousin who shares my love of the environment and together we run a non-profit that invests in big ideas.”

Huh. “Cool.”

We lie there for a few minutes, his hand trailing lazily up and down my back. The whole time, my brain is spinning, and finally I crane my neck up and give him a curiouslook.

“What?”

“What kind of big ideas, exactly?”

“I just gave this guy I know some money to invest in wind-powered shipping.”

My lips repeat those words. Wind-powered shipping. “Like five hundred yearsago?”

“It wasn’t that long ago that we stopped using sails, but yeah. Like that. It’s a renewable resource, and with a combination of carbon-fibre sails and smarter engines, we can cut the energy consumption of massive ships by up to ninety percent.”

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