Chapter 8 Room at the Table
Jules POV
Wade Karlsson was scared, and I was probably the only person in the room who could see it.
He sat in his usual chair with his shoulders filling the space the way they always did, one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee he’d forgotten to drink.
To Hank and Arvid, he looked the same as any other night.
Even Bette, who’d been part of the pack longer than anyone but Wade, didn’t seem to catch it.
But I’d stood at this man’s side for six years.
I’d watched him pull frostbitten strays out of ditches and talk down wolves twice his size.
I knew the difference between Wade at rest and Wade holding himself together with everything he had.
Tonight, it was everything. And the reason was sitting right beside him.
Nora Keane ate her chowder like a woman who’d decided to do one normal thing in an abnormal day and was going to see it through.
Her dark auburn hair was loose around her shoulders, still tangled from the harbor wind, and she’d shed her torn work glove but not her coveralls.
She smelled like engine oil, lake air, and Wade.
That last part had changed. It had been faint when I’d walked her back from the pier, but now it sat openly in the kitchen air, mixing with the chowder steam and the wood heat. Every wolf at the table could smell it and was pretending not to, badly.
I ladled a second helping for Bette and brought it to the counter. Hank was still arguing with Arvid about dock cleats, but the argument had lost its teeth. Both of them kept glancing toward Wade and Nora with the careful side-eye of men who’d been told not to stare and were doing their level best.
The flash in the shop that morning had been visible from the next bay.
I’d just come back with the marine parts bag when white light flashed where Wade’s bare fingers closed around Nora’s palm, and my wolf had gone still in recognition.
You don’t mistake a mate confirmation. The Goddess doesn’t whisper when she wants to be heard.
Her message was simple: This one. Him and her. Done.
And then Nora had said “No” twice and backed away like Wade was something that could burn her, and Wade had let her go because that was who Wade was.
The rest of us had stood in the bay doorway watching the most important moment of our Alpha’s life happen on a concrete floor next to a broken diesel.
I’d gone to the harbor to find her because her chair was empty, and nobody had asked me to.
Now the chair wasn’t empty. Nora sat in it, eating bread and chowder, her arm near Wade’s, the gap between them humming with something unresolved.
“More bread?” Bette asked her.
“Please,” Nora said.
That was the full conversation. Bette passed the cutting board. Nora tore off a piece. Hank went back to the cleat argument. The kitchen settled into the sounds of forks and bowls and wind pressing against the windows, and for a few minutes it was almost a normal dinner.
Almost.
I caught Arvid watching Nora’s hands when she reached for the salt.
Hank’s argument about cleats had drifted into something about the harbor schedule that just happened to require him to look in her direction every other sentence.
Even Bette, whose expression rarely gave anything away, had positioned herself at the end of the table with a clear view of Nora and Wade.
Nora noticed. I watched her notice, because I’d been watching her since the day she crawled under Toivo’s flatbed and made a crack about electrical tape that nearly made me choke on my own tongue.
Her shoulders had been loose when she sat down. They tightened by degrees, the way a bolt snugs down under a ratchet. She kept eating, kept her face neutral, but I could see the pressure building behind her jaw. I’d seen the same look in every stray who’d ever sat at this table for the first time.
Too many eyes.
She pushed her bowl back.
“I’m going to help Jules,” she said, and stood before anyone could answer.
Half the table was still eating, but Nora came to the stove, where I had bread left to slice and my own bowl to fill.
She ladled the remaining chowder while I cut the bread, then set both on the counter.
Hank finally dropped his gaze, and Arvid went back to his food.
Wade watched her go with an expression that would’ve cracked me open if I’d let it.
Want and restraint and something that looked a lot like grief for a woman standing eight feet away.
I ate standing at the counter, and people were clearing their places by the time I finished.
When the first empty bowls reached us, Nora carried them to the sink and turned on the tap. I brought the empty pot to the counter beside her.
“You don’t have to do those yet,” I said.
“Most people don’t have an audience while they eat.” She ran hot water into the first bowl and scrubbed it harder than chowder residue deserved.
“Fair point.” I picked up a towel and started drying what she handed me. “Bette made the chowder tonight. She’d want you to know that.”
“It was good.”
“Tell her that. She’ll pretend she doesn’t care and then make it again next week.”
Some of the stiffness eased from Nora’s shoulders, and she passed me the next bowl without looking at me, which somehow felt more natural than eye contact would have.
“The diesel in bay three,” she said. “You get the injector set?”
The shift in subject was deliberate, and I matched it. “The marine parts store had one of the two replacements. The other one is coming from Marquette and should be here by Thursday.”
“Thursday works. I can clean and reseat the two good injectors and start on the head gasket while we wait.” She scrubbed the next bowl. “How long has that engine been sitting with low compression?”
“Since June, at least. Eino was supposed to run diagnostics before he quit, but Eino’s idea of diagnostics was kicking the housing and listening for a rattle.”
That drew a low, brief laugh from her. “That explains the electrical tape on Toivo’s fuel line.”
“Eino’s finest work,” I said. “His other masterpiece was wiring the hydraulic lift’s warning light straight to the battery so it would stop blinking. Didn’t fix the leak. Just made the light stop telling him about it.”
“Jesus Christ.” Nora shook her head and handed me a serving spoon. “How did you keep this place running?”
“Wade and I did most of the real work. Arvid’s decent with anything that doesn’t involve an engine.
Hank’s learning.” I leaned against the counter, letting the conversation settle into its own pace.
“Bette handles the books and the ordering and the customers who need someone with a look that scares them into paying on time. The harbormaster sends us overflow when the commercial boats need service, and a couple of fishing captains won’t let anyone else touch their engines. ”
“What about winter?”
“Storage, mostly. We haul boats, shrink-wrap them, do indoor repairs. The lift stays busy. Some years we pick up snowplow contracts for the county, if Wade wants the headache.” I paused. “Why?”
“Trying to figure out if there’s enough work to justify a full-time mechanic past freeze-up.”
She wanted to know whether the job was real. Whether this place could hold her weight through a full season.
“There’s enough,” I said. “More than enough, if half the things I’ve seen you fix this week are any sign.”
Nora turned off the tap and dried her hands on a rag. Behind us, chairs scraped as the others started clearing. The kitchen took on the feeling that came at dinner’s end, when everyone drifted toward their evening routines, boots by the door and somebody setting up the coffeepot for morning.
“Jules,” she said, and the way she said my name was different from how she said Wade’s or Hank’s or anyone else’s. Careful, and not unfriendly. “Thanks for coming to get me. At the harbor.”
“You missed dinner. That’s practically a crime around here.”
“I mean it.”
I held her gaze. Her gray-green eyes were bloodshot from wind, exhaustion, and a grief she’d never cop to.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “Anytime.”
She nodded once and carried the last stack of bowls to the shelf. Then she went upstairs, and I heard her door close, and the house settled into its nighttime sounds of plumbing and floorboards and wind.
? ? ?
I found Wade on the porch.
He stood with his hands on the railing and his face toward the lake, which was running high and dark under a sky that promised weather by morning.
His coffee had gone cold in the mug he’d brought outside.
His shoulders were rigid beneath his shirt, and I knew from experience he’d stand here until the temperature drove him in, turning everything over behind those brown eyes without saying a word about any of it.
“She’s upstairs,” I said. “Her door is closed, and she’s settled in.”
“I heard.”
Of course he had. His wolf would be aware of her through every wall and floor of this house.
I leaned against the porch post across from him and crossed my arms. The lake wind cut through my thermal and raised goose bumps along my forearms, but the cold felt good after the kitchen heat.
“I need to tell you something,” I said.
Wade didn’t turn. “All right.”
“I want her too.”
The silence that followed had real weight. I watched his jaw tighten, watched the cords stand out in his forearms where they rested on the railing. His wolf pushed forward behind his eyes, and for one long moment I felt the Alpha authority in him like a hand pressing against my chest.
Then it eased. Wade let out a breath and looked at the lake.
“Since when?” he asked, his tone flat and knowing.
“Since the day she arrived, Wade.” I kept my voice even. “I watched her strip that outboard in four hours and clean every tool before she put it back.”
He said nothing. I let the silence sit. Wade had never been a man who rushed his own thinking, and this was the kind of thing that needed whatever space it took.
“She’s my mate, Jules.”
“I know.”
“The Goddess confirmed it. In front of everyone.”
“I was there. I saw the flash.” I uncrossed my arms and put my hands in my pockets. “I’m not challenging you. I’m not making a claim. I’m telling you because you’re my Alpha and my friend, and I don’t keep shit from you.”
Wade turned to face me. Jealousy was in his expression, sharp in the air between us, but underneath it I saw what I’d seen every time a damaged wolf came through his door. The willingness to look past his own instinct and ask what was actually needed.
“She came here running from a man who decided her future without asking,” he said. “A man whose father and her own father helped him do it. If she ends up feeling like another Alpha is running her life, she will leave, and she’ll be right to.”
“I know that too.”
“Then you know the only thing I’m going to say about this.
” His voice dropped into the register he used when something was final.
“Nobody crowds her. Not you, not me, not anybody. She decides what she wants, and when, and who. If that’s me, I’ll thank the Goddess every morning for the rest of my life.
If it’s something I can’t predict right now, then that’s what it is. ”
“You’re a better man than most,” I said.
“I’ve watched her hold herself together since she pulled in, with two packs’ worth of bullshit sitting on her shoulders. She doesn’t need another wolf telling her what’s best.” He looked back at the water. “She needs room.”
“Then give her room.” I straightened up. “And I’ll be here doing what I’ve always done. Cooking dinner. Keeping the house in one piece. Making sure nobody goes hungry.”
“Jules.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for telling me.”
I nodded and left him on the porch with the wind and whatever his wolf was saying in the dark.
? ? ?
It was maybe an hour later when I heard Wade’s footsteps in the upstairs hallway. His tread was heavier than anyone else’s in the house, and he paused outside Nora’s door. I was in the kitchen wiping down the counters, which didn’t need wiping, but it gave me a reason to be downstairs.
Wade’s voice carried clearly enough through the old floorboards.
“Spend tomorrow night with me,” he said. “At the loft. Away from everyone here.”
Most of Nora’s answer blurred, but the end reached me. “All right. Yes.”
When Wade came back down, he stopped at the kitchen entrance.
“Tomorrow evening,” he said. “After the bays close. We’re going up to the loft.”
The loft above the boatyard office. Wade’s space, separate from the pack house, where he went when he needed to think without five other wolves breathing through the walls.
“All right,” I said.
He studied me for a beat, and I let him, because I didn’t have anything to hide.
The sting was there. It sat behind my ribs like a splinter I could feel but couldn’t reach.
They were going somewhere private, somewhere that belonged to the two of them, and I was the one who’d told him to give her room.
“Get some rest,” he said, and went upstairs.
I finished wiping the counters, rinsed the coffeepot, and hung the dish towels over the oven handle.
Then I went upstairs.
Nora’s door was closed, but lamplight showed in the thin gap underneath. I stopped in front of it. The smart thing would have been to keep walking, go to my own room, let tomorrow sort itself out.
I knocked twice, lightly.
“Yeah?” Her voice came through the wood, tired but alert.
“Just wanted to say goodnight.”
A pause. Then the door opened a few inches, and she stood in the gap wearing an old flannel that looked like she’d owned it for years, her hair pulled back and her feet bare on the cold floor.
“Goodnight, Jules,” she said.
She met my eyes, still guarded, but she’d opened the door.
“You did good today,” I told her. “With the diesel. With everything.”
“I nearly lost a hand.”
“You came back for dinner. That’s what counts.”
The corner of her mouth lifted faintly. “You and your damn dinner.”
For another second neither of us moved, and I felt the pull between us. Gentler than what she had with Wade, but present, real, unmistakable. My wolf wanted her too.
“Sleep well,” I said, and stepped back from the door.
“You too.”
The door closed. The lamplight narrowed beneath it. I stood in the dark hallway, my wolf pressing against the inside of my chest with a quiet, stubborn hope.
I went to my room, lay down, and stared at the ceiling while the wind off Superior shook the eaves.
Wade was right. She needed room. She needed to choose her own path without another wolf’s wants pressing in.
And if the Goddess had something in mind that included me, I’d learn about it when Nora decided.
But damn, it was hard to walk away from that door.