LITMIR.BIZ

      For Amy and Larry

       Prologue

      Miles away, in another world, a young male in his prime leaned back, and thought about a woman.

      He didn’t know her name. Or what she looked like. Or the sound of her voice or her favorite foods. He didn’t know anything about her, not even that she, specifically, existed. But he woke one morning to the sound of rain on the water, and couldn’t stop thinking about her.

      The obsession was hard on him, shadowing his every move, every hour of the day, filling his thoughts, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

      He rolled over on his side and stared out over the ever-moving surface of the sea. No, that wasn’t the truth. He knew exactly what to do about it. He just didn’t want to.

      Life was good, right now. The outcropping of rock was warm underneath him, his sleek, powerful muscles slack and relaxed after a day of hard swimming, and the ocean spray tingled on his bare skin, milky-pale despite the hours spent exposed to the elements. He could stay here all day, sleep out under the cool wind and bright stars. Or he could swim back home to the little village where his family lived, the comfortable cottage where there would be fresh-caught fish on the table, and a squabble of nieces and nephews to wrestle with, and the pleasure of a new season of warmth and life to celebrate on this first full week of spring.

      Life was good. On any other day, any other time of his life, he would be content with the gifts he had been given, to be alive and healthy and surrounded by everything he could possibly want.

      But now something tingled in his blood, making him restless and moody. Not just this day: all week, ever since the equinox. Life might be good, but he wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t satisfied with the way anything tasted, wasn’t taking pleasure in anything that he normally enjoyed. Even his temper, normally even and calm, was frayed and ragged.

      His blood-kin abandoned him first, shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at his growls and twitches, telling him without words that they wouldn’t put up with his behavior. His seal-kin lasted longer, their patient eyes and soft plush fur giving comfort until his increasing discomfort drove them away as well, searching out other places to bask in the spring sunshine and leaving him alone on the rock.

      He knew what was wrong. Or rather, what was right. Even if he hadn’t observed it in others, instinct would drive him. The temper, the frustration, the desire to pick a fight with his nearest and dearest … He needed to mate.

      No, that wasn’t accurate. He’d been through lust before, and this was … more. He needed to find the female who would stay with him, not for a night or even a season, but forever.

      Somewhere out there, this woman existed. The simple fact of her being was firing his blood, making him dream of her skin, her hair, the feel of her wrapped around him, of him fitting inside her so perfectly, body and soul …

      All he had to do was find her, woo her, win her.

      It was a simple enough thing, in theory. Not every seal-kin partnered for life—his own mother had several mates, one of them his father, and was on good terms with them all—but it happened often enough. Always the same way: an impossible pull, tugging the male to bend to its will until the female was found and won, wooed and well mated. But the others males always seemed able to find what—who—they needed among the blood-kin, the eight Families that made up this colony. If a mate was not there, they sometimes traveled north or south, to meet up with other colonies. Places that were known, were filled with familiar names and shared histories.

      He didn’t feel a pull that way. He felt pulled westward. West, across the sea, toward the setting sun.

      He covered his face with his arm, trying to block out the need. There were no colonies to the west that anyone knew of. Nobody had gone west in generations. He would not find what he needed.

      That knowledge did not stop the pull, inexorable as the tides.

      It felt wrong, to go against what was traditional. And he resented this pull his body had on him, when it wasn’t what he had been planning. He hadn’t even thought to take a breeding-mate for another few seasons, much less life-mating.

      But his people trusted their instincts. Instinct was what kept them alive and free, even when other colonies were wiped out by Hunters, by pollution, by the slow eroding of their territories. Instinct, and not being too stubborn, too stupid to acknowledge simple truths.

      So when the itch became too much, the need overwhelming, and the warmth of the rock no longer soothed, he slipped shoulder-first into the cold waters of the Atlantic, ignoring the storm clouds forming in the distant east, and, without a word of farewell to anyone, swam toward the pull.

       Chapter 1

      Beth Havelock was restless. She moved back and forth in her workroom, touching projects but not actually doing anything with them. The paper cutter was cleared off, the trash emptied, the work counter scrubbed, pens capped and sorted, to-file box filed down to the last proof sheet and invoice. Chemicals were sorted, the older ones pulled to the front of the darkroom’s cabinet, the newer ones pushed to the back. She even changed the batteries in all the smoke detectors in the house a week early, and then, still needing something to do, went back into her workroom on the first floor and rinsed out all of the extra developing trays, setting them to dry upside down on the counter. Still, she felt the need to be moving, doing.

      Her bare feet scrunched against the cold tile floor, her toes flexing and releasing as though picking up the motion her hands were forbidden, the tension thrumming through her entire body, nose to toes.

      “Good

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