Oregon Mountain Search and Rescue climber Dr. Cullen Grey has spent a rewarding night bringing an injured person to safety. Then he learns that his divorcing wife Sarah was injured in a volcanic blast near Seattle. A volcanologist, she met him during a rock-climbers' festival and they married too soon, then split up when work and study kept them apart. But Sarah still has him listed as next of kin, and comes around to find Cullen at her bedside - whether she wants him or not.

Sarah takes time to recover and the doctors refuse to discharge her to live alone. She want to get on with analysing test data, but she can't walk unaided or dress herself. Cullen offers her a room in his home and grudgingly she accepts. She doesn't believe she can rely on him, and hates losing her independence. Cullen lives in small Hood Hamlet, near Mount Hood, and nobody there knew he was married. Life is about to alter radically for both of them.

WINNING BACK HIS WIFE is not the expectation Cullen has of these weeks, but as the pair use their enforced companionship to get to know each other all over again, suddenly nothing seems more important to him. Sarah's vulnerable, on pain medication and determined to be her own woman. But she can't help regretting their lost love.

I fond the constant coyness of Sarah asking her husband to turn his back so she could slip off her bra rather slow, and while they both regretted the breakup they were unable to discuss it - odd for intelligent, active people. The focus is on Sarah's serious injuries and recovery, and the two don't discuss current affairs, books or hobbies, as most adults would. They do however go to a chocolate sampling evening, good fun for them, and Sarah helps kids with a lava flow school project, fun for everyone. These were far from stereotyped characters, who separated because they were too alike, rather than too different. If they'd married home-makers instead they'd have been well cared for and stayed married... but bored! This story by Melissa McClone asks the excellent question of how intelligent, driven women are supposed to be happy in a marriage and how far an intelligent man should adapt his life to care for an extraordinary woman.