Marshall Morris has a penchant for wandering into complicated predicaments. The Justice, Texas high school senior, is on a fun trip to Colorado with classmates when a park ranger tells them that Chrissy Davis, a fifteen-year-old Oklahoma girl, is lost in the mountains. Despite a stern warning not to do so, Marshall leaves caution to the wind and sets out alone to rescue the girl.
Sure enough, he stumbles over her, but they are forced to spend a frigid night huddling together in the deep woods. They face one terrifying threat after another: an encounter with an angry mountain lion, gunshots from poachers, a preying wolf pack, and a near-drowning. Chrissy decides Marshall has become her new boyfriend and can't wait to tell her friends back home. Marshall would beg to differ.
Mac Davis, her headstrong father, loathes this kid from Texas. He is incensed when Chrissy tells him she and Marshall were intimate and did drugs during that long night together. Marshall discovers the greatest danger wasn't the wilderness at all but a devastating betrayal from the person he risked everything to save. Her conniving ways could well destroy his life.