Page 14 of Wolf's Rejected Mate

Disappointment struck me, but I also wasn’t entirely surprised. The persistent pulsating in my chest had diminished a few minutes earlier, the energy I’d felt seconds before laying eyes on Abigail, dispersed.

“Does she come here often? Does she live around here?”

The waitress finally met my eyes. “We don’t ask questions about Abigail,” she said firmly. “I have to get back to work, if there’s nothing else.”

I let her go, realizing that I wasn’t apt to get much more from her, but my curiosity was beyond piqued. Still, Abigail had made it clear that she didn’t want me around, and I had no business chasing after her, regardless of how strongly I felt.

But if I happened to chance upon her on my travels… well, no one could blame me for that.

Grabbing my leather coat, I made my way back to the parking lot, noting the covert stares of the patrons again. Suddenly, they seemed more pointed, more curious than they had before.

Do they know me?

Now I was just getting paranoid.

I needed to get into the city, not sit on the fringes where all the misfits of society appeared to congregate. Answers weren’t going to find me out there, but I knew I’d purposely avoided heading into the middle of town after my brief encounter in Montshire.

The new technologies and architecture were daunting and unfamiliar, but I would have to learn to adjust, and that wasn’t going to happen by drinking beer in a rundown café in the desert.

Plus, if that redhead lived anywhere, she sure as hell didn’t live out in the boonies.

Sliding into the driver’s seat of the stolen sedan, I curled my hands tightly around the steering wheel and started the vehicle, determined to seek the answers I’d come for. And hopefully find the redhead along the way as well.

* * *

I quickly foundthat Pario City was nothing like Montshire. Although the city did boast several high-rise buildings, none rose to the height of those in the place that had seemed like science fiction to me. People went about their business in much the same fashion, dressed in business attire, talking on those strange, hand-held devices to their ears, which I quickly understood were portable telephones.

It still defiedreality to me that I had managed to overlook all of these major changes in the world as I hid away in Seven Rock. A sense of guilty unease overtook me when I pulled the car onto one of the main roads, finding a parking spot near a courtyard park.

Two young motherssat with two children, both vastly varying in ages. It appeared as though the fertility issue existed here as it did everywhere else. There was an old-time feel to Pario City, despite the modern advances, the buildings clinging to an antiquated décor, the movements less hurried than the residents of Montshire but not quite as slow as us in Seven Rock.

I ambledtoward the parking lot but stopped, looking toward the storefronts across the street instead. My pulse quickened as I recognized the sight from the postcard. A flash triggered a fleeting memory, and I raced to grab at it, but it was gone before I could capture it.

I’ve been here before!I know this place!

The thought was astonishing.Pario City was hundreds of miles away from Seven Rock, thousands from where I’d unearthed myself from a certain death. When had I been here, and why?

Slowly,I turned around in a full circle, my eyes taking in every detail of the downtown core around me, willing myself to remember, to understand why I was there. But the more I stood there, the more my frustration mounted.

Without memories or guidance, I really didn’t have anything to go off but a sense of curiosity.

That and a very sexy redhead whose gravitational pull was worth keeping me in her orbit for another day or two until I got a handle on why I’d been mysteriously summoned to the ends of the world.

I didn’t want to believe I’d come all that way for nothing, much as it was beginning to look exactly that way.

But maybe Abigail was a good enough reason—assuming I ever saw her again.

Chapter8

Abby

The shock of seeing Elijah affected the rest of my afternoon. I paced through the little house I’d lived in for over a hundred years, unable to clear my mind of the way my soulmate had looked at me.

The attraction was just as deep and pulsating for me as it had ever been, the pull on the golden arch over my heart painful, yearning and screaming at me to go back to him. I hated that it still existed, the shock of the soulmate symbol still in existence despite the fact that I had been rejected, and he was supposed to be dead!

Who had I been fooling by thinking I’d ever really been over him?

Sweat broke out over my forehead, panic seizing my lungs.

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