Chapter 11 Morning Tide
Wade POV
Her hair smelled like cedar and rain and me.
I lay still with Nora pressed against my chest, her breathing deep and even, the narrow loft bed holding us together so that separating would have taken effort neither of us wanted to make.
Dawn came gray through the single window, Lake Superior fog turning the glass opaque.
My wolf had been awake before I had, content in a way I’d forgotten he could be.
Every slow inhale pulled her scent deeper, and every exhale gave back mine, quieting a restlessness I’d carried for years.
Her right shoulder was bare above the blanket.
The skin there was smooth and unmarked, pale with freckles scattered across the blade.
My wolf fixed on that skin with restless certainty.
The bite belonged there. Every instinct I had said so.
The mating mark would bind us past rejection, distance, and whatever the Goddess or Rafe Sutherland or the open bond could throw at us. Once placed, it couldn’t be undone.
I didn’t move my mouth toward her shoulder. I shut the impulse down.
Nora had come to me last night because she wanted to, and I’d accepted what she offered. But wanting a man and wanting his mark on you for good were different choices, and I wasn’t going to blur them because my wolf couldn’t tell the difference.
I eased my arm from beneath her head, careful not to wake her, and reached for the water glass on the shelf above the bed. That’s when the buzzing started.
Her phone sat face up on the small table beside the woodstove, rattling against the wood with a notification. The screen lit up and I read the words before I could stop myself, because the name at the top of the message stripped away my patience.
Rafe Sutherland.
The preview showed the whole message. Nora. I know this needs to be resolved. Please come back to Copper Point so we can talk about the bond. Call when you’re ready.
My hand closed around the phone. I didn’t remember picking it up.
Beneath the message sat three missed calls from the same number.
My thumb found the reply field before my brain caught up, and by then I was already composing something I’d regret.
Something territorial and sharp that would tell Rafe Sutherland exactly whose bed Nora had chosen and whose scent she wore and whose name she’d said in the dark.
“Wade.”
Nora’s voice came from behind me, rough with sleep and alert at the same time. I turned. She was propped on one elbow with the blanket pooled at her waist, her hair a tangled mess across the pillow, and her gaze fixed on the phone in my hand.
“Give me the phone,” she said.
I looked at the screen, then at her. She reached across and took it out of my hand.
She set it face down on the table between us without checking the message. Then she waited for me to answer for myself.
“I shouldn’t have picked it up,” I said.
“No.”
“And I damn near answered it.”
“I saw your thumb.” She sat up fully, pulling the blanket around her shoulders. The fog outside made the loft feel smaller, closer. “That message is mine to deal with. Or not deal with. Whatever I decide, it’s mine.”
“I know that.” The anger in my voice wasn’t aimed at her and she knew it, but it came out hot anyway. “I know that, Nora. I’m pissed at myself for grabbing it and I’m pissed at him for sending it, and those are two separate things.”
I owed her more than anger, so I gave her the uglier truth.
“Part of me liked it,” I said. “Last night. Knowing the bond was open. Knowing he could feel what was happening between us.” I rubbed my face with both hands, scraping my palms across my beard.
“I told myself it didn’t matter, but it did.
I liked that he knew. And that shames me, because I don’t want to be the kind of man who needs another man to suffer so he can enjoy what’s in front of him. ”
Nora was quiet for a long moment. The fog pressed against the window and somewhere below us a gull screamed over the harbor.
“I came upstairs last night because I wanted you,” she said.
“Rafe had nothing to do with it. Neither did the bond. I looked at the light in this window and wanted the man behind it.” She pulled her knees up beneath the blanket and rested her chin on them.
“If Rafe felt something through whatever’s left between us, that’s his to carry. Same as everything else he chose.”
“And if I liked him carrying it?”
“Then you’re honest about something most men would lie about. I’d rather have that than a man who pretends he’s above it.”
I wanted to touch her. I wanted to pull her against me and put my mouth on that bare shoulder and end the question my wolf kept asking. Instead I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands braced on my knees and said the thing that mattered.
“I want to mark you.”
She didn’t flinch or look away.
“The bite stays right here.” I pressed two fingers against the junction of my own neck and shoulder, showing her the spot. “Once it’s placed, the bond locks. Can’t be rejected. Can’t be undone. My wolf wants it so bad I can taste metal.”
Nora’s expression didn’t change. She listened without interrupting, taking in every word.
“The bite waits until you ask for it,” I said. “I won’t do it because I lose control or because the bond pushes us there. It happens when you look at me and say you want it and mean it.” I stood up and found my jeans on the floor. “That’s the only way it happens.”
She watched me dress. I pulled on my flannel and my boots and waited while she found her clothes from last night, still damp from the rain she’d walked through.
When she was dressed, she picked up the phone, glanced at the screen long enough to confirm whatever she’d already guessed, and set it back on the table face down.
“Leaving it?” I asked.
“For now.”
We went down the stairs and into the cold morning.
? ? ?
The yard woke up. Toivo’s truck rattled in before seven.
Hank came down from the house with his collar turned up against the fog.
Bette’s sedan pulled into its usual spot beside the office, and I heard her unlock the front door and start the coffee machine while I crossed the gravel to check the lake level against the marks on the launch ramp.
Nora went straight for the service bay without stopping at the house for breakfast. By the time I came back from the ramp, she had the damaged winch assembly half disassembled on the concrete floor, parts spread in a pattern only she understood, her hair already knotted up and her coveralls zipped to the throat.
She didn’t look at me when I passed, but her wolf brushed against mine through the bond like a hand trailing across a shoulder, a quiet acknowledgment.
I spent the morning in the office doorway working the autumn haul schedule.
The freeze would come early this year. I could feel it in the water temperature and the way the wind had shifted out of the north a week ahead of the usual turn.
We had fourteen boats to pull before ice made the ramp dangerous, and three of those owners hadn’t confirmed their haul dates.
I called two of them, left a message for the third, and updated the calendar on the wall while keeping one ear on the sounds from the bay.
Metal on metal. The ratchet of a socket wrench. A brief silence while Nora assessed something, then the sharp crack of a seized bolt giving way. Her work was patient and exact. She asked for no help she didn’t need.
The repair between us happened the same way. Side by side and mostly in silence, one bolt at a time.
I brought her coffee around nine. She took it, drank half standing over the disassembled drum housing, and handed the mug back with grease on the rim. Our fingers touched during the exchange. The bond hummed. Neither of us mentioned it.
Around ten, Arvid wandered through the bay carrying a coil of dock line and paused to watch Nora muscle a bent guide plate back into alignment with a dead-blow hammer and a block of hardwood.
“That’s been off since June,” he said.
“I can tell,” Nora answered. “Whoever tried to fix it just tightened the bolts harder instead of straightening the plate.”
“That was Eino.”
“Of course it was.”
Arvid made a sound that might have been a laugh if he’d committed to it, and kept walking.
? ? ?
The midday meal was in the pack house kitchen.
Jules had made soup from whatever was left in the refrigerator, thick with potatoes and the last of the roast, and there was bread still warm, butter melting through it.
Bette passed Nora the coffee. Hank moved his chair to make room.
Toivo ate standing at the counter, as he always did.
“How’s the winch?” Jules asked Nora, setting a bowl in front of her.
“Drum housing’s warped,” she said. “Needs a new bearing race and the cable guide’s been bent since God knows when. I can have it back together by tomorrow if the bearing race I ordered gets here.”
“I’ll check the mail run,” Bette said.
That was it. Nobody asked about the loft or looked at me and Nora with the kind of careful attention that meant they were holding questions back.
The pack had been through enough arrivals and enough hard nights and enough mornings after to know that what happened between two wolves behind a closed door stayed there until someone chose to share it.
Jules was warm with both of us. He refilled Nora’s coffee, asked me about the haul schedule, told a story about a boat owner from Marquette who’d tried to convince him that a twenty-foot runabout qualified for the commercial rate.
Nora laughed at the punchline, a real laugh, short and surprised, and I watched Jules watch her when she did it.
His eyes stayed on her mouth. Just for a second. Then he looked away and picked up his own bowl and carried it to the sink, and the moment passed so cleanly that no one else at the table caught it. I did.
I kept quiet. If her choice was truly hers, then my Beta wanting Nora while she hadn’t decided what any of us were to her was mine to put up with. Jules and I would have to speak about it, but later, away from her.
After the meal, Nora went back to the bay and I went back to the office. The afternoon passed in phone calls and parts lists and the steady sound of her working forty feet from my desk. I could smell her through the wall when the wind shifted.
? ? ?
The fog had burned off by early evening, leaving the harbor sharp and bright under a cold sky.
Lake Superior lay flat and dark beyond the breakwater, and the birches on the hill above town had started turning, yellow creeping into the green canopy in patches that would spread fast once the first hard frost hit.
I found Nora cleaning her tools at the bench inside the bay, each piece wiped down and returned to its place on the pegboard.
The winch sat partially reassembled on the floor, waiting for the bearing race.
Her coveralls were filthy, her hands black with old grease, and her hair had come loose from its knot to hang in strands around her face.
She looked like she belonged here.
I leaned against the bay door and looked at her.
The bond pulsed between us, and through it I sensed her tired satisfaction, the good ache of a body that had done real work and known it was needed.
Beneath the grease and her own scent, I could still smell the faint, bitter trace of Rafe’s open rejection bond.
I hated that I could sense it. I hated even more that she had to carry it.
“Spare room or the loft?” I asked.
She looked up from the bench and studied me before answering.
“Spare room,” she said.
The answer hurt even though I’d expected it. Nora had chosen me last night with clear eyes and a clear voice, but living in my bed while Rafe’s bond still pulled at her would turn something freely given into something that looked like refuge.
“All right,” I said.
We closed the bay together. She locked the tool cabinet while I shut down the compressor and checked the fire extinguisher log.
We walked across the yard and up the hill to the pack house in the last of the daylight, our boots crunching on gravel, our shoulders almost touching.
I could feel her warmth through my jacket sleeve.
At the top of the stairs I walked her to the spare room door.
The hallway was empty. Jules’s room was at the far end, door closed, music playing faintly behind it.
The house smelled like whatever Bette had put in the oven for dinner and the old pine floors and the lake wind that came through every crack no matter how many times I caulked them.
Nora opened her door and turned back to me.
“Thank you,” she said. “For this morning. For saying what you said about the mark.”
“I meant it.”
“You did.” She held my gaze. “It mattered.”
She went inside and closed the door. I stood in the hallway with my hands at my sides and let the bond stretch between us through the wall, her presence on one side and mine on the other. Tonight, that was close enough.
My wolf had lost the deep contentment of dawn, but he settled because his mate was safe and near and the rest could wait.
The mark could wait. The decision could wait. The phone with Rafe Sutherland’s message and missed calls could sit face down on a table in an empty loft until the woman they were meant for decided they deserved her attention.
I went downstairs to help with dinner.