Tempest Rising by Tracy Deebs Page A

warm and normal in my ear. “That was kick-ass!” he said, his lips skimming over my cheek and down my jaw.
    “I know.” I laughed up at him.
    He pulled back with a grin, slung his arm around my shoulder, and propelled me up the beach toward home.
    We were halfway there before I remembered. Stopping dead, I turned and searched the beach for Kona. He was nowhere to be found. “Where’s Kona?” I demanded. I needed to thank him, needed to … I didn’t know what I needed to do with him. But I burned with the need to see him again. To figure out how he’d managed to talk to me over the roar of the ocean.
    “Why?” Mark said, his smile gone so fast it was like it had never been.
    “I don’t know. I just thought I’d—” I stopped, unsure of what to say, especially when confronted by the tension that had invaded Mark’s body.
    “He ducked out a few minutes ago,” Logan said as he walked by on my right, saving me from having to come up with an answer for Mark.
    “Did you see him go?”
    He shot me a funny look. “No, but I don’t think he sprouted wings and flew away, do you?”
    Logan’s words sparked the memory of when I’d first met Kona, when he’d all but vanished in front of me. Wings? Did I think he’d grown wings? Of course not.
    But scales were a whole different story.

PART TWO
    T ake O ff
    “The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea.”
    —I SAK D INESEN

Chapter 7
    I looked down at the piece of pizza with the works and knew I couldn’t eat a bite. Not tonight, not now, when my seventeenth birthday was a few short hours away. Shoving the plate back, I tried to act naturally when Mark gave me a concerned frown.
    “What’s wrong, Tempest? You’ve been acting funny all night.”
    “I’m not hungry.”
    He stared at me incredulously, and I understood his shock. For the last six months I’d been ravenous, eating everything I could get my hands on without ever gaining an ounce. Most girlfriends let their boyfriends have the last piece of pizza in the box, but with Mark and me it had been the other way around for a while now. Yet tonight, I couldn’t even work up the will to eat one piece, let alone my usual four.
    “Are you sick?”
    “No.” I snapped out the word, annoyed beyond measure with people asking me if I was okay or sick or upset or whatever.
    Mark reared back at the ugly tone in my voice, a quick flash of hurt crossing his features before he could hide it. Right away I felt like a bitch, particularly since I’d spent most of the last week thinking of another guy.
    Thinking of Kona.
    “I’m just hyped up, I guess,” I said in a more even tone. “With my birthday tomorrow and everything.”
    Mark grasped the lifeline gratefully. “So, what do you think your dad’s going to get you this year? It’ll be hard to top the Brewer.”
    “I don’t think he can top the Brewer—it’s the best present I’ve ever gotten.”
    “Well, yeah. It’s totally wicked.”
    That was one of the great things about having a boyfriend who was as obsessed with surfing as I was. Another guy might get bent out of shape that I liked my dad’s gift better than his, but Mark understood.
    In the surfing world, not much could top a custom-designed Brewer—not even the brand-new iPod Mark had gotten me last year when I’d lost mine in the ocean days before my birthday. He’d loaded it with all my favorite songs, had even programmed special playlists into it for me. It had been a perfect gift for me and I loved it—just not as much as my board.
    Mark started on his third piece of pizza, and I glanced around the parlor we’d been going to for as long as we’d been dating. Tonight it looked a little different—the red-and-white-checked tablecloths were a little fuzzy, while the pizza- and Coke-shaped neon lamps on the windows were so bright they hurt my eyes. And the familiar smells—garlic and tomatoes and Italian spices mixed with the briny scent of the ocean—had me