The Hunted - Anna Leonard

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full day waited in front of him. A full day, and his mate waiting for him, somewhere nearby. The thought that she might be within earshot, even, her silken skin waiting for his touch.

      The rush of blood to his groin wasn’t unexpected. The strange tightness in his chest was more of a surprise. He tried to breathe normally, remembering how easy it had been to breathe into the medical apparatus, but the tightness remained. It wasn’t his lungs that weren’t working, but the muscles in his chest, constricting around his heart with a pang that felt a little like hunger, and a little like sadness.

      When he claimed his mate, all those emotions would go away. The knowledge came to him the same way awareness of her had, appearing like something he’d always known only never consciously realized until now. He had to find her. Everything would be all right once he found her.

      But first, he needed to find a place that would buy his anklet. A jewelry store, or a crafts stall. Or a pawnshop. Something like that, any town of decent size would have to have those, yes? Then, he would go to this bed-and-breakfast. It burned him to take charity, but maybe, if he got enough for the anklet, he wouldn’t have to. Money was the first priority, though. He might be willing to sleep on the beach without fuss, but if he was going to look among humans, he needed to stay among them, too.

      Glancing down at the sheet of paper Dr. Alden had given him, with a rough-drawn map and a name on it, he stepped onto the sidewalk, and started moving toward his goal.

       Chapter 3

      Beth had woken early that morning, listening to the birds doing their welcome-the-dawn thing outside her window, and cautiously probed her emotional status the way a bomb technician might inspect a suspicious package. Yes, still twitchy, even though the storm had blown through, and the skies were now clear and bright. In fact, she thought that it might even be worse now, and she couldn’t blame it on the weather.

      Or the dream she’d had, all sea-green and salty, the pressure on her lungs as though she were holding her breath too long, like being held underwater but without any of the fear or agitation you might think would come from a dream about drowning.

      She knew how to swim, of course. You didn’t grow up on an island and not know how to swim. But her family was odd among the Nantucket old-timers; nobody in her family went to sea for their career. Not back when there was an actual sailing-and-whaling industry based on the island, not to the navy, marines, or Coasties—although there were stories of a distant cousin in the air force, during WWII—and not now. Hell, they didn’t even own a boat, relying on the ferry to get them the short distance between the island and mainland. They stayed put on land, and did landy things—without ever getting too far from the ocean itself. She tried to remember a single close relative who had moved to a landlocked state, and failed. She had gone away for college, but come home as soon as she could, and her father had never even gotten that far away, and every cousin within two generations had been the same.

      So why was she now dreaming of the sea like it was something she had been missing all her life? How could you yearn for something you always had, and never particularly wanted?

      It had been an erotic dream, too, she remembered now, stretching and blushing slightly at the memory. Waves like hands stroking her skin, the water blood-warm, even as her blood warmed more. Her own hand slid down her belly, tangling briefly in the curls between her legs, curls that were still damp from the intensity of that dream.

      Beth let out a deep sigh and scrubbed at her face with both hands, trying to erase all images, erotic or otherwise, from her head. “That storm just messed with you, is all. The storm, and that naked man on the beach.

      “Oh, yeah. Time to get out of the house, away from the darkroom and the computer and all the stress, and put some fresh air on your face,” she told herself, throwing off the covers and making her way, shivering, to the wardrobe. Never mind that it hadn’t worked all that well yesterday; today was a new day. Anything was possible, right?

      Underwear, a pair of sweats and a jog bra, and a windbreaker over that, two pairs of socks, and her sneakers, and she was ready to go. Ten minutes later, she had pulled her bike out of storage and was pedaling down the road, already feeling her mood improve even as the memory of the dream faded. The road was slick with morning dew, and the air was crisp and salty on her skin, just the way it should be. Instead of heading to the beach road as usual, though, she went upland, above town, and away from the water. It was more of a workout that way, she justified to herself, feeling her muscles protest as she headed up a steep incline. If she worked hard this morning, she could eat an éclair from Peggie’s Bakery after dinner without guilt.

      Maybe even two, if she only had a salad for dinner itself.

      An hour later, sweating and grinning, éclairs earned and her mood on a definite upswing, she locked the bike up outside the local diner and went inside.

      “Morning, Miss Elizabeth,” the man behind the counter called out. “Coffee ‘n’ eggroll?”

      “Please, yes, thank you, Ben.” The eggroll had been a joke since she was ten—it was exactly that, a hard roll with scrambled eggs inside. No bacon, no ham, nothing except egg, to which Beth would add a dose of hot sauce just before she ate it. The first time she had gone to a Chinese restaurant, the notion that there might be another kind of egg roll had completely floored her.

      She sat at the counter, since there wasn’t anyone else in the diner except a trucker at one of the tables, staring into his coffee like it held the answer to everything. After dumping her bike helmet on the seat next to her, she propped her elbows up on the Formica counter and waited for the coffee and inevitable.

      “Didja heah about the guy washed up on the beach?”

      Glory not only made the best eggroll in the world, she also knew everything that happened in town, often before the people it was happening to knew. She should have been a reporter for the Times, not a short-order cook.

      Beth looked at the square-shouldered woman, her gray curls pulled into a ponytail that should have looked ridiculous on a woman her age, but somehow worked. She and her husband, Ben, had owned the diner since before Beth was born, and she suspected they’d be here long after she had died. They were just so … solid. Like granite underfoot, only not so heavy, since neither Glory nor Ben were very large individuals. In fact, Ben was shorter than Beth was, and couldn’t weigh much more than she did, soaking wet, for all that he gave off a reassuring impression of solidity. When her parents had died, and there hadn’t been anyone else to take the teenage Elizabeth in, those two had stepped forward, fostering her until she could be on her own, so that she didn’t have to leave her home. She owed them a debt they refused to even acknowledge. The least she could do was indulge Glory’s love of gossip.

      “I was there,” she told Glory. “On the beach last night when they found him.”

      “Yes, but did you heah?”

      Beth sighed. Obviously, there was more to the story, and Glory wasn’t going to be satisfied until she had the telling of it. “I need coffee before anything else,” she told the older woman, pretending that something inside her hadn’t done a weird flip at the mention of the stranger.

      Suddenly, she wasn’t sure that she wanted more coffee after all. That flip feeling wasn’t good. Nothing that made her feel like her world was being turned upside down and roundabout like that could be any good.

      Glory, unaware of Beth’s sudden mood change, was already pouring the black liquid into a thick white mug and pushing it across the counter into the younger woman’s unresisting hands.

      “All right.” Beth sighed, her fingers curling around the mug despite herself. There wasn’t any graceful way to escape. “Spill all.”

      “His name’s Dylan, he’s been checked out of the clinic already and Doc, as usual, refused to take any money for it. That man is going to run himself into the ground, he doesn’t watch it.”

      The rant about Doc Alden was familiar territory, and Glory skipped over it to the new and interesting

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