5. Rafe
RAFE
It was instinct, the reach, the same reflex that made him grab a line before it went over the rail.
She spun to face him and he felt it the second his fingers closed around her wrist. A jolt that moved up his arm and hit him somewhere between the chest and the throat, and his wolf went silent in a way it had never gone silent before.
Completely. Like a compass needle swinging and locking in on True North.
He knew the scent. He'd been smelling it since the storm, wild rain and silver, but with his hand on her skin it sharpened into something else entirely, something layered and specific and unambiguous, and the word that rose through the noise of his own pulse was the one he refused to say out loud.
Mate.
He let go of her wrist.
She was staring at him. Whatever anger she'd been running on a moment ago had dropped into something more uncertain, her silver-blonde hair lifting slightly in the lake breeze, those blue-gray eyes reading him fast, thorough, like she was looking for what it meant. She waited for him to say something.
He had nothing. For the first time in longer than he could recall, Rafe Lupeus had absolutely nothing.
His wolf was not helpful. It had gone from howling to something worse, that low, focused vibration of an animal that had found what it had been looking for and was waiting, with terrible patience, for him to catch up.
He felt the pull toward her the way he felt current against the hull, something that required active effort to hold against. It didn’t stop him from trying.
She was afraid of her own power. He'd seen it in the way she pressed her palms flat to her thighs on the inn steps, in the tight control of her voice when she told him the storm wasn't aimed at him, in the way her eyes had gone to the sky like she was checking a lit fuse.
A woman who carried that kind of fear and that kind of pride in the same body was not a woman he could walk up to and say, by the way, my wolf has decided you belong to him.
That wasn't a conversation. That was a trap.
Instead, he took a slow breath and looked at her with the same expression he used when a contract negotiation was going sideways and he needed to reset without giving ground, and he watched her confusion sharpen into something edgier.
"Why did you go quiet?" she said.
"Thinking."
"About what."
"About whether this conversation is worth continuing."
Her chin came up. "You grabbed my arm."
"I did. And you were about to walk into me and you know it."
The color that moved into her face was something.
She had fine features, sharp at the cheekbone and softer at the mouth, and she wore her irritation cleanly, no attempt to hide it.
He found that easier to deal with than the moment before it, when she'd just been looking at him and the whole square had felt very small.
"I was walking away," she said. "You were in my path."
"Then we agree it was a navigational issue and nobody needs to make anything of it."
She stared at him. He could see her working through the shift in his register, the way he'd gone from confrontational to flat, and he watched her decide she didn't trust it. Smart. She shouldn't.
"You were considerably angrier five minutes ago," she said.
"I'm capable of adjustment."
"What changed?"
"I'm still stranded," he said. "My cargo is still ruined. Being angry about it doesn't change the repair timeline." He looked past her toward the dock road, where the Ashvane sat waiting for him with her list of damages. "Nothing's changed."
He said it like he believed it. His wolf told him what a liar he was.
She was watching him with the careful attention, he kept his face neutral and his eyes off hers because direct contact with those blue-gray eyes right now was not something he was prepared to risk.
He could feel her proximity the way he felt a change in barometric pressure.
It wasn’t just in the chest, it was in the back of the neck and pressing in on his whole body.
"I owe you for the damage," she said finally. "I know that. I'm not trying to get out of it."
"What I'd really use is an extra hand on repairs." The offer came out before he'd fully thought it through. She blinked.
"I could ask Rowan's crew," he continued, watching her face, "or I could ask the person responsible and save myself the favor and money." He paused. "Although I suppose there's a risk you'd touch the wrong thing and blow out the hull entirely."
There it was. He saw the flash of it in her eyes, the way her shoulders pulled back and her jaw set.
"That's an incredibly generous offer," she said, her voice had gone very level.
"I thought so."
"You're telling me you want my help and in the same breath questioning whether you should let me within ten feet of your ship."
"I'm telling you it's an option," he said. "Whether it's a practical one is another conversation."
"I have exceptional control," she said, and the way she said it told him exactly how much that sentence cost her.
She meant it and she was angry that she had to say it and she was angry that there was enough truth in his jab that she couldn't throw it back at him cleanly. He almost felt bad about that. Almost.
"I'll keep that in mind," he said.
"You do that."
She pulled her bag up on her shoulder and turned and this time he let her go, standing on the inn steps and watching her cross the square with the purposeful stride of a woman who wanted to be out of his line of sight as quickly as possible without running.
Her hair caught the light as she turned toward the western path, bright against the overcast sky, and his wolf tracked every step she took until the birch trees swallowed her up.
The breeze off the lake was clean and cool and still carrying that thread of scent, faint now with distance, and he breathed it in once before he could think better of it and then exhaled hard before he turned back toward the dock.
He had gone to the inn to grab some things out of the rooms Diana had set him and the crew up in, but right now, he needed work. Distraction.
Dex was leaning against the dock post at the bottom of the bank road with a tin cup of something hot. He had watched the entire exchange from a comfortable distance and formed several opinions about it.
"Good morning," Dex said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
Dex looked into his cup. "She the one who put us into the dock?"
"Yes."
"Fae?"
"Storm fae."
Dex was quiet, doing the kind of math that fox shifters were constitutionally unable to avoid. "She's the one who lives out west. The one Rowan was careful about."
"That would be her."
"She's very—" Dex seemed to search for the right word.
"Don't."
"I was going to say tall."
Rafe walked past him down toward the dock and Dex fell in behind him without being asked, because in seven years that was how it worked.
The Ashvane sat in her mooring looking sorry for herself, the bent bow rail and the limp rigging visible even from the bank, and Rowan's crew had already started on the hull seam with caulking tools and the focused silence of people doing skilled work.
Rafe stood at the top of the gangway and looked at his ship and tried to do what he was good at, which was making a plan and working it.
He had materials to source and a forge appointment to make and a damaged partition below to assess, and he had a week to get through in a town that now had considerably more complications than it'd had last night.
His wolf had chosen a storm fae. Of every creature in every port he'd run in the last ten years, every fae and witch and shifter who'd crossed his path, his wolf had looked at a woman who couldn't fully control weather, who had a history of capsizing boats, who had just implied that his concern about her handling his ship was an overreaction and had gone quiet with recognition.
A storm fae. Rare the way disasters were rare. Powerful the way things were powerful when they had no ceiling. Carrying around enough suppressed emotion to take out a dock when her concentration slipped. Just his luck.