12. Isla
ISLA
She watched him build the fire and tried to figure out why she'd told him anything at all.
It wasn't trust. She didn't trust him. She didn't trust anyone with the specifics of what had happened at Ardenmere, and she'd held that line for years across four towns and a dozen conversations designed to pry it out of her.
Twyla had gotten close. Moira had gotten the records.
Neither of them had gotten the version she'd just handed to a wolf shifter she'd known for less than a week, sitting at her kitchen table in a storm with a candle between them like some kind of confession booth.
So why him? Why now?
She pulled her knees up in the chair and wrapped her arms around them as she watched the firelight start to push the shadows back from the stove corner.
He was crouched with his back to her, feeding birch into the base.
The orange light caught the wave tattoos on his forearms and the line of his jaw.
The particular set of his shoulders was something she was starting to recognize as his version of restraint.
That was part of it, she realized. The restraint.
After their first confrontation outside the inn, he'd come back and been calm.
Not friendly, not warm, but steady. He hadn't pushed.
He hadn't demanded the full story or made her earn his patience by performing contrition.
He'd been sharp with her at Corin's, yes, and she hadn't forgiven him for it, but even that had been honest. He said what he meant. He didn't circle.
And there was something else. Something underneath the practical reasons, a pull she had no word for.
Physical, low, sitting just below her sternum like a second heartbeat she hadn't asked for.
It had been there since he'd grabbed her wrist outside the inn and it had gotten worse every time she'd been near him, and she did not know what it was but she knew it was the reason she'd opened her mouth tonight, and that infuriated her.
He was an infuriating man. Calm when she expected anger. Quiet when she expected demands. Present when she expected him to leave.
The fire caught properly and the stove began to tick with heat. He closed the door and turned around. She realized she'd been staring and didn't look away fast enough.
"Better?" he asked.
"Getting there."
He came back to the table but didn't sit.
He stayed by the counter across from her, arms crossed, the firelight and the candle splitting his face between warm and shadow.
The rain was still heavy on the roof but the wind had dropped to something less violent, the worst of the front moving east over the ridge.
"You don't have to tell me the rest," he said. "About your father."
"I know I don't."
"I'm saying it so you know this isn't me waiting for the rest of the story."
"Then what are you waiting for?"
"Nothing. The storm to pass."
She put her feet on the floor. The stone was cold even with the stove going.
"Stormcallers are rare," she said. "Not the good kind of rare.
The kind where most of us don't make it past forty because the power eats us alive or we lose control and take people with us.
My father was one of the last. I'm the only one I know of now. "
He was quiet. Listening. Not arranging his face into something sympathetic, just listening and she couldn’t stop herself from filling the silence with things she would prefer not talking about.
"My emotions amplify weather. That's the simplest way to say it.
Fear, anger, grief, anything strong enough to get past my hold, and the sky answers it whether I want it to or not.
" She glanced at the candle. "The night your ship came in, I woke up with something I couldn't put down.
Old. Ancestral, maybe. And the storm built before I could get ahead of it. "
"That's why you live out here."
"That's why I live out here. That's why I practice at Corin's.
That's why I keep the buffer zone Twyla likes to mention.
" She pushed her wet hair behind her ear.
"And that's why I am genuinely, truly sorry about your ship.
I know I said it before and you had every right to not believe me, but I need you to hear it now.
I'm sorry. I am working on this. Every single day. "
"I believe you."
"You don't have to say that."
"I don't say things I don't mean. Ask anyone on my crew." He shifted against the counter. "You said a past catastrophe. The one in the note."
"Yes."
"And you said the real version is longer than what you told me."
"It is." She held his gaze.
"Alright."
"That's it? Alright?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"Most people push."
"Most people haven't spent a decade learning when to let a line out and when to pull it in."
Her laugh came out as something closer to a breath, half-amused and half-raw, and it surprised her. She couldn't remember the last time someone had made her almost laugh while she was talking about the thing that had shaped her entire life.
He was still leaning against the counter.
Still watching her. The candlelight played across the planes of his face and she tracked it without meaning to, the straight nose, the stubble along his jaw, the mouth that said very little and meant all of it.
Storm-gray eyes that were not looking away from her.
The pull was back. Louder now. Not in her chest anymore but lower, warm and insistent, and she recognized it for what it was this time even if she didn't understand why it was this strong or this specific to him.
"Why are you like this?" she asked.
"Like what?"
"Calm. Since the inn, you've been calm. You were furious with me and then you just...
stopped. You came to Corin's with a delivery.
You fixed my shutter. You're sitting in my kitchen in a blackout letting me talk about my dead father and you haven't once tried to make it about you or your ship or what I owe you. "
"You want me to be angry?"
"I want to understand why you're not."
He was quiet for a beat. The fire crackled in the stove and the rain moved on the windows and she watched something cross his face that he didn't let her read.
"Because angry doesn't help you," he said. "And you don't need another person making you feel like your existence is a problem. That doesn’t help me with needing fair weather and it doesn’t help you at all.”
She stood up. He straightened off the counter.
The kitchen was small and the distance between them was less than she'd realized, close enough that she could smell him now, salt and wood and the particular warmth that came off his skin when he'd been working.
The pull in her belly tightened into something undeniable and she didn't know why this man, why now, why any of it, but her body had decided something her mind hadn't caught up to and she was tired of pretending otherwise.
"I don't do this."
"I know."
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know enough."
She grabbed the front of his jacket suddenly and pulled him down and put her mouth on his hard, and the sound he made against her lips was low and rough going through her like current.
His hands came up to her waist and tightened, pulling her into him, and the contact of his body against hers sent heat flaring through every nerve she had.
He kissed her back hard, one hand sliding up her spine to grip the back of her neck, angling her head the way he wanted it, and she let him because the way he wanted it was exactly right.
The counter hit her lower back. He pressed her into it, his hips against hers, and she could feel him hard against her stomach through the wet denim and the rush of want that went through her made her gasp against his mouth.
He pulled back just far enough to look at her, gray eyes dark, chest moving fast.
"Tell me to stop," he said.
"No."
He lifted her onto the counter. Her legs wrapped around his waist on instinct, pulling him closer, and his mouth found her neck, her jaw, the spot just below her ear that made her hands fist in his hair.
She yanked his jacket off his shoulders and he let it drop and she pulled his shirt up and over his head and put her hands on his chest feeling the heat of him, the solid muscle and scarred skin and the rapid beat of his heart under her palm.
He pulled her shirt off in one motion, then her bra, and when his hands closed over her breasts she arched into him with a sound she didn't recognize as her own.
His thumbs dragged over her nipples and she bit her lip hard enough to taste copper.
He watched her face while he did it, those storm-gray eyes tracking every reaction, and the focused intensity of his attention was almost as devastating as his hands.
"Rafe." His name came out broken.
"I know." He kissed her again, deeper this time, his tongue sliding against hers while his hands worked her jeans open.
She lifted her hips and he pulled them down, underwear with them, and then she was bare on her own kitchen counter with his hands on her thighs and the rain on the roof and the fire in the stove and nothing between them but the sound of their breathing.
He dropped to his knees.
She started to say something, his name, a protest, a please, but his mouth found her and whatever she'd been about to say dissolved into a moan that she would have been embarrassed about if she'd had any capacity left for embarrassment.
His tongue moved against her with purpose, slow firm strokes that found exactly where she needed him and stayed there.
She braced her hands on the counter edge and let her head fall back.
She gave herself over to it because fighting it was no longer an option she was willing to consider.
He was good at this. Methodical and relentless and paying attention to every shift of her hips, every hitch in her breathing, adjusting pressure and rhythm the way she imagined he adjusted to current and wind, reading the response and following it.
When he slid two fingers inside her she cried out and felt the wind spike outside, a gust rattling the shutters they'd just secured, and for once she didn't care.
He brought her close and then eased back and she reached down and grabbed his hair.
He gave her what she wanted, his mouth and his fingers working together with a rhythm that tightened everything in her body to a single bright point, and when she came it hit her in a wave that started low and crested hard and she heard herself say his name in a voice she barely recognized.
He stood up while she was still shaking.
She reached for his belt, got it open, shoved his jeans down far enough, and wrapped her hand around him.
He was thick and hot in her grip and the groan that came out of him was raw enough to make her clench.
She stroked him once, twice, and he caught her wrist.
"Not like that," he said. "Not the first time."
He pulled her to the edge of the counter and she guided him and when he pushed into her she stopped breathing.
He filled her completely, the stretch of it almost too much, and he held still when he bottomed out, his forehead pressed against hers, both of them breathing ragged in the small space between their mouths.
"Move," she whispered.
He did. Long strokes that rocked her against the counter, his hands gripping her hips, pulling her into each thrust. She wrapped her legs tighter around him and matched his rhythm.
The friction was exquisite, every movement hitting her in exactly the right place.
The counter was the wrong height and the angle was imperfect and she didn't care because the imperfection of it was part of what made it real, not choreographed, not practiced, just two bodies figuring each other out in a dark kitchen while the world fell apart outside.
He picked up the pace and she met him. Her nails raked down his back and he hissed through his teeth and drove into her harder and the counter creaked beneath them.
She felt the second orgasm building, deeper than the first, slower, pulling from a place that had everything to do with the way he was watching her, gray eyes fixed on her face like she was the only thing in the room that mattered.
"Isla." His voice was wrecked. Low, rough, her name pulled out of him like it cost something.
She put her hand on his jaw and held his gaze. "Don't stop."
He didn't. He shifted his grip, one arm bracing the counter behind her, the other hand sliding between them to press against her clit, and the combined pressure of him inside her and his thumb circling her sent her over the edge so hard her vision whited out.
She clenched around him and felt him follow, his hips slamming into hers with a final, brutal thrust, a groan tearing out of his chest that vibrated through her whole body.
They stayed there. Him buried in her, her legs locked around his waist, both of them breathing hard with their foreheads pressed together.
The rain had thinned to a steady pour. The fire ticked in the stove.
The candle on the table had burned down a quarter inch since she'd lit it and the wax pooled in the dish with a faint smell of honey.
She felt his heartbeat where their chests pressed together, fast and hard, slowing by degrees. He was still inside her and she didn't want him to move.
She'd slept with men before. Not often, not carelessly, but she knew what this was supposed to feel like afterward, the familiar pull toward distance, the instinct to rebuild the walls before the other person noticed they'd come down. She waited for it but it didn't come.