Maui Winds

Marine biologist Ri Sullivan had a rough start in life. A biracial baby abandoned in a Moscow train station, she spent eight months in a Russian orphanage before being adopted by a devoted couple from the coast of Maine. Her family weathered years of painful attachment difficulties, and now the spirited, resilient twenty-five-year-old has no conscious memory of ever feeling insecure. But in subtle ways, Ri's emotional past still affects her. And sometimes, the question mark over her ethnic heritage still stings. Arriving on the island of Maui for an internship at the Foundation for Ocean Mammals, Ri is overwhelmed by her own good fortune. She revels in the ocean and the creatures that are her passion, she stumbles into an incredible revelation about her ancestry, and she even meets a guy. But all too soon, a series of random disasters threatens to turn that tide. The closer she gets to the elusive volcanologist who shares her living quarters, the more she sees herself behind his haunted eyes. For Ri, love never comes easy, but Alaskan loner Wolf Markov has his own ideas about "attachment" -- ideas that come from a very different sort of childhood. And getting inside his wounded heart may take all of Ri's learned resilience... and then some. LONG TIME COMING MEANT TO BE