The Prince and the Professor

By Iris Forester

Adjunct biology professor and wetlands specialist Tierra is fiercely committed to her work. In her relatively limited romantic experience, she’s never seen dating as worth the trouble. Her heart is in the wetlands, and she wouldn’t have it any other way. As she’s in the field researching a rare species of newt in the Pacific Northwest threatened with extinction, however, her carefully constructed life begins to veer off course — in more ways than one.

First, she meets the mysterious and striking Andre in the field. Tierra is immediately fascinated by Andre, whose slight accent captivates her almost as much as his impressive knowledge of endangered species. But she also senses a danger in Andre, who Tierra suspects isn’t quite who he seems to be.

Then there was the phone call warning her to discontinue her research. Someone is trying to sabotage Tierra’s research — and the ecosystem she's working in — and it seems they’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. Could Andre be involved? Or could there be more to him than even in Tierra’s wildest dreams?

Tender, suspenseful, and heart-warming, The Prince and the Professor is a one-of-a-kind contemporary fairy tale romance

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Jul 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094421667

Iris Forester

Iris Forester is never happier than when she’s tossed everything aside to follow one of the story threads that cross her path. She shares her home place with eagles, ravens and owls — but also makes time every year to spend in New York City. When she’s not writing, Iris works with paint, clay, and various difficult creatures.

Book preview

Chapter One

As Tierra stepped out of her car, she paused to take in the quietness of the forest, and relish the solitude that she loved. Field research was the real reason she had become a biologist, and now that she was finished with the hectic teaching demands of the semester, her reward was the chance to be alone again on the land.

No other cars were in the small dirt parking lot, because the path that began here didn’t lead to any major tourist destination. After winding through the forest for a mile, it merely led to an open marshy area, fretted with a network of small ponds. This wetland, to an untrained eye, would seem boring and merely difficult to walk through.

Tierra tied her rain boots onto her backpack, and tucked her collecting boxes into her backpack along with a couple of granola bars, oranges, and a waterproof notebook. It was so much more comfortable, being out here in her overalls and hiking boots and rain jacket, than at the front of the classroom in Coastal College.

At thirty-one years old, with the dignity afforded her by the position of adjunct professor, Tierra no longer suffered the confusion and doubt that had plagued her earlier years, but she still never quite felt at home with other human beings. She had come to terms with both the gifts and the challenges of being on the autism spectrum, and she recognized that there was an entire universe of emotional communication that was invisible to her. It was possible that she was lonely — she wasn’t one hundred percent certain of what loneliness really meant — but she understood that this was probably a lifelong condition. And that was all right, really. If you compared the empty, might-be-loneliness to actual physical pain, it barely merited a two on a scale of one to ten. She felt lucky: She didn’t have any kind of chronic physical pain or health issues to deal with, and her strong, stocky body was consistently reliable.

When she was out in the natural world, all such questions disappeared, and Tierra felt herself to be merely one organism among all of the others, all breathing and living in commonality.

It was June in the San Juan Islands, and that meant it was gray and misty, with cool wet cloud-veils in the air. The forest, of course, loved it, and every needle hung with moisture. Bracken fern fronds were unfolding, the native Nootka rose blossoms scented the air, and the rich quietness held fertile promise.

It was on these cool, gray summer days that Tierra had the best chance of finding her elusive quarry: the Pacific fire newt. These tiny creatures were so rare that the conventional wisdom was that they no longer existed on Cedar Island, and possibly not even anywhere in the San Juans. So few of them had been found that they were on Washington State’s Endangered List, and had even been approved on the national list. If Tierra could locate a viable colony of them in the county, it would provide a fresh genetic line if the species had to be rescued by a captive breeding program. Also, if some of them did still live here, it would probably be possible to designate a protected zone around their habitat. The land on that part of the island was owned by the county itself, although a handful of cabins from earlier decades could still be found here and there. There were always rumors that the county was going to sell off part of its holdings, but no sales had ever materialized.

Tierra was certain that some of the lovely little creatures were hiding away on the island, and the need to find and protect them was a constant pressure in the back of her mind. She was sure she had seen their aquatic larvae when she had scouted through here a couple months earlier, but she hadn’t succeeded in catching any. At that earlier stage, the young newts were fast-moving, tiny and gray-brown like small fishes, and they would perish if taken out of the water. Now, in June, their gills would have developed into lungs, and if they were present at all, they would be out along the edges of the marsh.

After walking through the forest path, noting the state of the moss and the brassy calls of the pileated woodpeckers, Tierra emerged into the broad open marshland. She swapped her tennis shoes for the rain boots, and stepped happily into the tall, squishy grass. Here, the forest bird calls gave way to those of field and fresh water, most notably the red-winged blackbirds. She made her way carefully toward the center of the marsh, placing her feet on the higher ground. Two mallards rose abruptly from a large pond in the center of the meadow, which had been hidden by the tall grass. Several yards from this pond, the excess water drained off through a series of small meandering brooks, and it was by one of these that Tierra squatted now. She searched over the ground for the neon red of the fire newts, combing gently through the grasses at the edge of the small waterways.

Occupied in this way, in the meditative flow state that such exploration brought on, Tierra spent over an hour with no sense of time passing. Eventually, her knees started to feel stiff from the squatting and kneeling, and she stood in order to stretch her tired muscles. As she looked around the broad open grassy area, and the bordering firs and cedars that surrounded it, she had an odd feeling. She felt as if she were being watched. She looked more closely around her, but she could find no source of the feeling. Her reaction was curiosity, rather than fear.

Cedar Island was a safe place by any standard, a destination for tourists with a taste for quaint island life and the abundant natural beauty of the area. It was too hard to get to, for people who were interested only in creating mayhem, and possibly its way of life wasn’t predictable enough. In any case, Tierra wasn’t prone to irrational fear. She did wonder, as she settled back down to examining the water’s edge, whether the sensation she felt could come from an animal, a fox or a river otter maybe, or a deer. It seemed to her that it would not; she was used to being scrutinized by animals, and had never gotten a watched feeling.

Distracted by these thoughts, she stood up again almost immediately, and again began to scan her surroundings. This time, a patch of teal blue was visible against the nearest stand of trees, about forty or fifty feet away. It was someone’s jacket. A man, alone, was standing against the trees and looking in her direction. On impulse, Tierra waved. They were the only two people in that entire piece of the island, apparently, and it might be the polite thing to do. Tierra had to think logically about what was socially appropriate, because she didn’t have an instinctive grasp of social conventions. The man waved back, and started towards her, but then backed up. She couldn’t see his feet, but she guessed that he had discovered that the wetland wasn’t exactly walkable without good high boots. And even then, if you didn’t recognize the slightly different grasses that indicated deeper water, a wrong step could sink you thigh-deep in very cold water.

Tierra yielded to her curiosity about the man, and set her backpack and other things down on a dry-ish tussock. Nimbly making her way along the shallower margins, she approached him.

Hi, she said.

He gave her a crinkly smile that seemed very friendly. I tried to come over to you, but I wasn’t ready to go wading, he said.

Yeah, even if you know where to put your feet, you still need boots, she agreed, and she looked him over as much as was proper. She had long ago learned that staring at people made them uncomfortable, so she took him in with a very quick glance. He was tall, although everyone looked tall to Tierra, who was just five feet two inches. He was fair-skinned, red-haired and freckled, with a rather pointy nose and a mischievous grin. Maybe about my age, early thirties, she thought.

He also had an accent, which she was unable to trace. Some people could tell where an accent was from, but that had always seemed like a superpower to Tierra. She had no idea how it was done.

Where are you from? she asked him.

Oh, over in Europe. I was born in Switzerland, but I’ve spent time in various countries. He looked at her boots and the wet knees of her waterproof pants. What are you doing there in the field? he asked.

I was trying to see if there were any efts, she said, adding, That means partially developed newts. I believe there’s a colony of a certain endangered kind of newt here on Cedar Island, and at this time of year, they would be found in a place like this. But I haven’t seen any so far today.

The Pacific fire newt, the man said, utterly surprising Tierra. How could this man possibly be familiar with such an obscure creature?

Are you a biologist, too? she asked.

He smiled, and Tierra noticed how comfortable she felt with him. Usually it took her a while to feel at ease around people, because she had to work hard to discover each new person’s mannerisms and expressions, and make sense of them. Somehow, this man seemed to be on her wavelength, right from the beginning.

No, nothing that disciplined, he answered. But I’ve studied a bit about that newt, and I was also wondering if its presence here on Cedar Island had been documented yet.

Now Tierra smiled. What a dream! If she were ever to imagine her perfect romantic encounter, it would be this: A stranger coming out of the woods who somehow magically understood the purpose and importance of her work.

A movement farther back in the forest caught her eye, and she realized that there was another person nearby. Or maybe two more. The man followed the direction of her glance, and sighed.

Don’t worry. Those are just my security detail. They won’t bother us, he said. Tierra was mystified.

Security detail? Why? Who are you?

The man seemed embarrassed. Nobody special. It’s just a requirement that my employer imposes. A formality. I work in government administration, in Schachbourg. When I travel, I’m required to have these two guards with me. They’re okay.

You sound important, Tierra said. And then she added, I always used to like learning about Schachbourg when I was in elementary school. It was so cool, that tiny little country there in the mountains.

"It’s