Chapter 7 Second Spark
Nora POV
The diesel ran worse in the cold.
I’d suspected as much from the way the engine note had dropped when Wade ran it yesterday afternoon, but morning confirmed it.
The marine diesel sat on its service stand like something stubborn and old, and when I cranked it and brought the RPMs up under load, it coughed, shuddered, and died at the same point every time.
Fuel starvation, most likely. The exhaust and uneven idle told me the injectors weren’t atomizing cleanly.
I removed the injectors and laid them out on the bench in order. The second injector had a hairline crack I could feel with my thumbnail before I could see it. The third was clogged with carbon so thick it looked like someone had been running unfiltered oil through it.
Wade worked three bays down, doing something to a winch drum with Hank. I heard the clang of his wrench on metal, the low murmur of his voice when he told Hank to hold a cable taut. He hadn’t come to check on me once, hadn’t hovered, hadn’t asked if I knew what I was doing.
I liked that more than I wanted to admit.
Arvid passed the open bay door twice, both times glancing in without stopping.
Bette brought a mug of coffee around nine and set it on the parts shelf and left.
Jules appeared briefly to say he was heading into town for supplies and ask if I needed anything.
I told him a replacement injector set if the marine parts store had one for this engine, and he wrote it down on the back of a receipt and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
This was how a working pack functioned. People doing their jobs, trusting each other to handle their own. No one standing over me explaining how I should hold the wrench.
The bond stayed at the edge of my awareness through all of it, carrying Rafe’s irritation and restlessness. I ignored it like a radio station bleeding into a frequency I was trying to tune. He could feel whatever he wanted. I had work to do.
By midmorning I’d cleaned the injectors I could save and tagged the two that needed replacing.
The compression test confirmed the deeper problem I’d suspected yesterday.
Cylinders two and four had low compression, which pointed to the head gasket or worse.
I needed to pull the head to be sure, and that meant getting the upper housing off first.
The housing was cast iron, heavy, and corroded along the mounting bolts from years of lake air and spray.
Two of the four bolts came free with penetrating oil and patience.
The third shifted only a quarter turn despite a breaker bar and language my mother would have disapproved of. The fourth was seized solid.
I sprayed it again, let it sit, then put the breaker bar on it and leaned my weight in. The bolt didn’t move. The housing shifted instead and ground against the stand mount.
“Hold,” I muttered, and repositioned. The housing was cocked now, sitting crooked on the two remaining bolts, and the weight distribution had changed.
I should have asked someone to brace it.
I knew that. But I’d been doing this kind of work alone for years, and the iron was solid, and the stand looked firm.
I got underneath with a socket extension to reach the seized bolt from below. The angle was bad, but I could feel the corrosion starting to give. I braced my left hand on the stand’s crossbar, gripped the ratchet with my right, and pulled.
The housing lurched without warning. The corroded bolt holding the near side sheared clean through, and sixty pounds of cast iron swung down on the remaining bolt like a jaw snapping shut. My left hand was directly beneath it, and I didn’t have time to pull back.
Wade caught the edge of the housing and wrenched it sideways. His other hand closed over mine and shoved it clear.
The housing slammed onto the crossbar where my fingers had been. The impact rang through the shop. My work glove tore across the palm where Wade’s grip had caught it, and I felt the fabric part and his bare skin close around mine. White light flashed between our hands.
The contact sent heat through my body, far beyond the warmth of another person’s hand. My wolf lunged forward, and the edges of my vision went white.
Wade’s scent flooded my lungs, and the troubling pull I’d been fighting since he found me on the road became unmistakable. Mate.
I heard Jules drop something metal in the next bay. Heard Arvid’s boots stop on the concrete. Heard the silence that follows a sound everyone recognizes.
Wade’s fingers tightened on mine for one more second, and through the contact I felt his wolf surge to meet mine with a force that nearly buckled my knees. Then he let go.
The world rushed back. The diesel on its stand.
The sheared bolt on the floor. The torn glove hanging from my wrist. And Wade Karlsson standing two feet away with his hand still open, his eyes on me, and a look on his face that told me he’d known this was coming and had been trying to prevent it since yesterday.
“No,” I said.
It was the only word I had. My wolf was howling inside my chest, reaching for him with everything she had, and the sound she made was nothing like the desperate whine she’d given Rafe at the ceremony. This was joy. This was recognition. This was yes, him, finally, mine.
I backed up until my hip hit the workbench.
“No,” I said again, louder. “This is not happening.”
Wade didn’t follow me. He stood where he was with his hands at his sides and let me have the distance. Behind him, Jules had come to the bay entrance, and Hank and Arvid stood frozen near the winch. All of them had seen the flash. All of them knew what it meant.
“I felt it too,” Wade said. His voice was level, but underneath it I heard the strain of a man holding his wolf back. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.”
“You knew.” The accusation came out sharp. “Before today. You knew.”
“I suspected,” he said. “Your scent underneath the open bond. I wasn’t sure until contact.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“Tell you what? That I might be the second mate the Goddess chose for you while you were sleeping in my spare room with nowhere else to go?” Something moved behind his eyes, and I recognized it because I’d seen it in the mirror.
Anger at a situation neither of us had built. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”
I wanted him so badly my hands were shaking. The open bond to Rafe throbbed like a fresh wound alongside the new pull, and the combination made me want to tear something apart with my bare teeth.
“The Goddess,” I said, and my voice cracked in a way I hated, “has a sick sense of humor.”
Wade’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue.
He looked past me to Jules, then to the others, and whatever he communicated in that glance made them move.
Jules pulled Hank and Arvid toward the outer yard.
The bay emptied. Wade and I stood alone with the broken diesel and the ruined glove and the bond thrumming between us.
“Take whatever time you need,” he said. “The job doesn’t change. The room doesn’t change. Nothing I offered you had conditions, and nothing about today adds any.”
“How am I supposed to believe that?” The words came out rougher than I meant. “The last man the Goddess matched me with used the bond to rearrange my entire life, and when I wouldn’t let him finish, my father and his father helped him try.”
Wade absorbed that without reacting. Then he said, “I’m not Rafe Sutherland.”
“I know you’re not.”
“Then you know I’m not going to stand here and tell you what this means or what you owe me. You don’t owe me anything.” He took one step back, deliberately, and the additional distance between us hurt in a way that made my wolf snarl. “I’ll work in the far bay. Take whatever space you need.”
He walked out of the bay, and I watched him go because my body wouldn’t let me do otherwise. His shoulders were set, his stride unhurried, and his scent trailed behind him like something I could follow in the dark with my eyes closed.
I pressed my hand against the workbench and breathed until my heartbeat slowed.
A second chance fated mate. The Goddess had looked at my life, at the damage left by the first bond she’d confirmed, and decided the answer was another one.
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to crawl under the diesel and stay there until the world made sense again.
Instead, I stripped off both gloves, cleaned my tools, and covered the engine with the shop tarp because I wasn’t going to leave a half-finished job exposed, no matter what my wolf was doing.
I spent the rest of the shift on the far side of the yard, inventorying the parts shelves and trying not to track Wade’s every movement by scent.
When the bays closed for the day, I walked toward the harbor instead of following the others uphill.
? ? ?
The harbor sat at the bottom of Pine Harbor’s steep main street, where the docks met the cold black water of Superior. I found a concrete bollard at the end of the commercial pier and sat on it with my jacket zipped to my throat.
The wind came off the lake in sharp gusts that smelled like deep water and the coming season. Gulls worked the shallows near the breakwall. A fishing boat idled toward open water, its diesel knocking in a rhythm I could have diagnosed from here.
I sat with my hands on my knees and stared at the horizon and tried to think clearly about anything at all.
The bond to Rafe remained a dull, persistent ache in my chest. Beside it, the new bond to Wade pulsed with a vitality that sharpened that ache.
My wolf wanted to go back to the boatyard, find Wade, and press herself against his side.
The rational part of my brain wanted to get in my truck and drive until I hit a coastline where nobody’s scent could reach me.
I could leave. Wade had said so himself. The truck was parked by the service bay, and my tools were in the bed, and the highway ran in both directions. I could be across the state line before dark.
And then what? Another gas station, another stranger, another town where I’d start from zero with two unresolved bonds instead of one?
The thought exhausted me more than the sleepless nights had.
I heard Jules before I smelled him. His boots on the pier planks, unhurried, giving me time to decide whether I wanted company.
“Dinner’s on,” he said, stopping a comfortable distance away. He leaned against a piling and looked out at the lake instead of at me. “Bette made chowder.”
“How long have you been standing there?” I asked.
“A minute or two.”
I tucked my windblown hair behind my ear. Jules waited. He didn’t ask about Wade, the flash in the shop, the torn glove, or why I’d said no twice.
“Do you like the work?” he asked instead.
I looked at him. The wind tossed his curls, and his face had gone ruddy from the cold. His hands stayed in his jacket pockets, and he hunched against the gusts. He’d walked down to the cold pier because I hadn’t come back for dinner, and that mattered to him.
“Yeah,” I said. “I like the work.”
“Town’s not bad either. The hardware store closes early, but the woman who runs it will open the back door if you knock and tell her it’s for the boatyard. The diner does a fish fry on Fridays. The coffee is terrible everywhere, but you get used to it.”
Something in my chest eased. Coffee, a fish fry, a hardware store’s back door. Nothing about bonds or mates or the treaty that had decided my life for me.
“How long have you lived here?” I asked.
“Six years. Long enough to know who keeps the hardware store open late and which dock freezes first.” He nodded toward the boatyard. “There’s enough work to keep us busy, especially before winter. You could do well here.”
The lake threw spray against the pilings. I felt the cold on my face and let it ground me.
I looked at the dark water and thought about the spare room with its clean sheets, the kitchen where six plates were set for dinner, the pegboard in the shop where every tool had an outline.
I remembered Wade’s hand catching mine, the certainty in his eyes, and the way he’d stepped back and left the choice to me.
“The chowder’s going to get cold,” Jules said.
I got up from the bollard and walked back with him.
? ? ?
The pack house kitchen was loud with the kind of noise that happens when people who’ve worked all day sit down to eat together.
Jules ladled chowder at the stove, bread waited on the cutting board, and Hank argued with Arvid about the best way to patch a dock cleat. Bette carried bowls to the table.
Nobody stared when I walked in. Nobody whispered. Hank looked up, nodded, and went back to his argument. Arvid passed the bread. Bette set a bowl in front of the empty chair beside Wade and raised an eyebrow at me that said sit down and eat as clearly as if she’d spoken.
Wade was already seated. He looked at me when I came in, and I saw the question in his expression and the restraint it took not to ask it out loud.
I pulled out the chair and sat beside him.
“I’m not leaving after a week,” I said. Low enough that the table conversation covered it, but he heard every word. “You’ve got weeks of repair work before freeze-up, and half your equipment needs a mechanic who knows what she’s doing. I’ll stay through the season.”
Wade’s hand rested on the table near his bowl. He didn’t reach for mine. “All right.”
“That’s it? All right?”
“What do you want me to say?”
I picked up my spoon. “All right works.”
Conversation faltered for a beat, and I felt the table’s attention turn toward Wade and me, curious but silent. Wade’s arm rested on the table beside mine, not touching, and our scents mingled openly in the warm kitchen air.
His wolf’s presence pressed against mine through the bond without demanding or claiming. He knew me. He would wait.
I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust any of it.
Three nights ago I’d stood in front of my fated mate while he told me he loved my sister, and the Goddess had watched from behind her full moon and said nothing.
Now the same Goddess was handing me another bond and expecting me to believe this one would hold.
But the pack house was full of wolves who hadn’t asked anything of me except that I do my job and show up for dinner. The gap between Wade’s skin and mine felt like a decision I hadn’t made yet.
For the moment, I stayed beside him.