Chapter 19 Chosen Heat
Jules POV
Her taste stayed on my mouth through the night.
I woke in my room with the window cracked and lake air cutting through the heat trapped beneath the blankets. October had turned mean overnight, the kind of cold that promised ice on the dock railings by morning, and I pulled the quilt higher and lay there listening to the house.
Nora was awake already. I could hear her boots on the stairs, the soft thud of the front door, the crunch of gravel as she crossed the yard toward the boatyard.
She’d been up before anyone else every day since she arrived, and that hadn’t changed.
What had changed was that yesterday she’d put her hand on my jaw, looked me in the eyes, and kissed me like she’d been considering it for a while and had finally decided.
I pressed my fingers to my lips. The memory held: the firm pressure of her mouth, the instant she shifted from testing to certain and tightened her grip on my shirt.
The house still held her scent, with Wade’s pine and lake water woven through it, announcing their bond to every wolf with a nose. Across the yard, Rafe Sutherland’s scent carried from the bunkhouse, thinned and soured by the rejection bond that still reached for her.
I had neither of those things. The Goddess hadn’t bound Nora to me.
I had scrambled eggs and honest words and the fact that she’d chosen to kiss me while her hands were still greasy, where Rafe could see.
If Nora and I ever made a chosen bond, it could only begin with both of us deliberately stepping toward it.
That made her kiss worth more than anything fate ever handed out.
It also scared the hell out of me.
? ? ?
By the time I got downstairs, Bette had already opened the office and Hank was limping toward the western road for his watch shift, his bitten hip stiff in the cold. I made coffee for the house, ate toast standing at the counter, and carried a thermos out to the yard.
The lift was Nora’s project for the morning.
She had reset the base plate and replaced the sheared mount bolt yesterday, but she’d told Wade she wouldn’t trust the repair until she tested it under load.
She’d been awake since first light cycling the mechanism and checking the plate after each pass.
I found her lying on her back beneath the assembly with a torque wrench in one hand and a flashlight clamped between her teeth, her hair escaping its knot in every direction.
I set the thermos on the concrete beside her boot. “Coffee.”
“Mmph.” She slid partway out, took the flashlight from her mouth, and squinted up at me. “Run the cradle up six inches. Stop if the pressure needle jumps.”
“Good morning to you too.”
Her mouth twitched toward a smile. The look she gave me was more open than yesterday’s careful distance but more cautious than the kiss, as if she were checking it in daylight. I went to the controls.
We worked side by side for the next hour. I raised and lowered the weighted cradle while she checked the new bolt, the plate and the hydraulic pressure at every stage. She didn’t thank me, and the work said enough.
“Another six inches,” she said.
I held the lever until the cradle rose to the mark.
“Good. Hold that.”
I held it. Her hands moved with the same focused care I’d seen since her first day. Grease streaked her forearms to the elbows, and a smear of hydraulic fluid ran from her jaw to her ear where she’d pushed her hair back with a dirty hand.
I wanted her so badly I forgot to watch the gauge.
“Jules.”
“Yeah.”
“You’re staring.”
“I am.”
She worked her way out from beneath the lift and sat up. The morning light caught the freckles across her nose.
“Yesterday wasn’t a stunt,” she said. “I didn’t kiss you to make a point at Rafe.”
“I know.”
“I kissed you because I wanted to. I’ve been wanting to for a while.
” She wiped her hands on a rag and paused, searching for the right words.
“And I want more than that kiss. But I need you to understand that I can’t give you a clean start.
Wade’s bond is real. Rafe’s bond is open.
I come with two other wolves attached, and I can’t promise you where any of it ends up. ”
“I’m not asking for promises.”
“Then what are you asking for?”
I crouched beside her, close enough to feel the heat of her skin and see the pulse in her throat.
“I want your mouth again. I want your hands on me, and I want the way you talk through an engine problem while you work. I want you, Nora. No promises about where it ends.” I let that settle between us.
“Tonight, I want to cook for you. Something better than chili and bread. Sit with me after the house clears. After that, we’ll see where the wanting takes us. ”
Her eyes held mine. Something shifted behind them, the same look she’d had before the kiss. Calculating, but not cold. Deciding.
“Okay,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Her gaze dropped to my mouth, then moved slowly down my body before returning to my eyes. “Cook something good. I intend to stay hungry.”
I grinned. “When have I not?”
She almost laughed. I would have given anything to hear the whole sound, but she swallowed it and went back under the lift. I returned to the controls with my body fully aware of what she had just promised.
? ? ?
I found Wade in the boatyard office after lunch.
He was sitting behind the metal desk with his bandaged forearm laid across a stack of invoices, the fresh gauze already showing the faint pink stain that meant the bite was still seeping.
He’d been staring at the harbor through the window, and when I came in he didn’t look surprised.
He’d felt it through his bond with Nora. He already knew.
“Close the door,” he said.
I closed it.
The office was small. A filing cabinet stood beside the desk, two chairs faced it, and a corkboard held haul schedules and parts orders.
It smelled like diesel fuel, Wade’s scent of pine and lake water, and the cold air leaking through the window frame.
I sat in the chair across from him and waited, because Wade never started important conversations fast.
“She told you yes,” he said.
“She told me yes.”
His jaw worked. Wade had watched me for six years and trusted me with his pack, his back, and every wolf who walked through Pine Harbor’s door.
Now his brown eyes held raw, undisguised jealousy.
He was watching someone he loved choose another man alongside him, and he wasn’t hiding how much it hurt.
“You promised this wouldn’t become a fight between us,” he said.
“It won’t.”
“You’re cooking her dinner. Alone. After the house clears.”
“She’s not a bone, Wade. I’m not stealing her from your yard.”
He let out a long breath through his nose. His good hand closed over the edge of the desk, and I watched his knuckles go white before he deliberately loosened them.
“I asked her for nothing exclusive, and I won’t start now. If tonight goes where I think it goes, she’s still welcome in my bed and at my table and under my roof. I won’t claim to enjoy it. But making her choose would put me too close to what Rafe did.”
“Wade.” I leaned forward. “You trusted me with this pack long before she got here. I won’t turn this into a contest or use her to wound you. None of what we are to each other changes because I want her.”
He looked at the harbor for a long time. The wind rattled the window frame, and somewhere outside Arvid’s crowbar rang against metal.
“Don’t make her regret it,” he said.
“I won’t.”
“And Jules.” His voice dropped; this had nothing to do with rank. “I don’t need details. Whatever happens tonight, I don’t want to hear about it from you.”
“Fair.”
He nodded once. I stood, and as I reached for the door handle, he said my name again.
“Jules.”
I turned.
“She’s worth it,” he said. “Every goddamn complication. She’s worth it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She is.”
I stepped into the hall and nearly walked into Rafe Sutherland.
He’d been passing on his way from the back door to the yard, his injured arm still held tight against his ribs and his borrowed clothes hanging loose on a frame that weeks of sickness had whittled down.
He’d stopped outside the closed office door, within earshot.
His eyes moved past me to where Wade sat visible through the doorway, then back to my face, and his expression turned sour and tight.
He gave me a flat look, turned, and walked toward the bunkhouse with his good shoulder set hard against the wind.
I should have let him go. I knew that. Every part of me that was a Beta, a packmate, a man who understood what it felt like to want something you couldn’t have, told me to shut my mouth and walk away.
Instead I called after him. “Hey, Sutherland. Sleep well on that cot?”
His stride hitched once, but he kept walking.
“Jules.”
Nora’s voice came from the service lane near the lift, where she’d been wiping down the reset base plate with a clean rag. The word carried without a shout, low and firm, in the same voice she used when a bolt was cross-threaded and someone needed to stop turning before they stripped it.
“Knock it off,” she said.
I stood in the cold with the satisfaction draining out of me. Rafe kept walking. The bunkhouse door opened and closed.
Nora looked at me from the service lane. I would have preferred shouting to the disappointment on her face. She’d seen something small in me and wished she hadn’t.
She was right. Rafe was sleeping on a cot because his father had sent wolves after the woman he’d rejected, and he’d taken a bite through the shoulder for her.
Whatever he’d done at the ceremony, kicking him while he walked away was the kind of move I’d spent six years in Pine Harbor trying to outgrow.
“Sorry,” I said.
Nora held my eyes for another beat, then went back to wiping down the lift plate. The dismissal was gentle, which somehow made it sting worse.
I went inside and started planning dinner.
? ? ?
The kitchen had been mine since my first winter in Pine Harbor. I’d claimed the stove, the cutting boards, the cast-iron pan and a shelf of spices built up from Marquette grocery runs. The pack ate what I fed them, and they ate well. It was the closest thing I had to a territory.
Tonight I wanted something better than well.
I pulled the last of the lake trout from the freezer, fillets Hank had caught before the weather turned.
I had butter, garlic and a lemon from Bette’s last supply trip.
The bread dough I’d started after breakfast had risen cleanly.
I hadn’t known Nora would say yes when I mixed it, but I’d hoped hard enough to plan for it.
The bread went into the oven first. I checked the fillets for bones, seasoned them and set the cast-iron pan to heat.
I trimmed green beans from the last farmers’ market run and tossed them with olive oil and garlic.
Then I set two plates and two glasses for the bottle of white wine I’d been saving since August.
Wade came through once. He looked at the two-plate setting, the wine, the bread cooling on the rack. He didn’t say a word. He took a beer from the fridge and went upstairs, and the weight of his restraint filled the kitchen after he left.
Hank and Arvid ate early, cold sandwiches and leftover soup, and retreated to their rooms before dark. Bette took her plate to the office. The kitchen emptied. A pack knows when something private is happening, and this one had the decency to make room for it.
I was plating the trout when I heard the water shut off upstairs.
Nora had been in the shower. I’d heard her come in from the yard, boots on the stairs, the bathroom door closing. Now the pipes went quiet, and I heard her move through her room, the soft sounds of drawers opening and closing.
When she came down the stairs, I looked up from the stove.
She was wearing a skirt. Dark, simple, falling just past her knees.
I’d never seen her in anything but jeans, coveralls, and flannel work shirts.
Her hair was down, still damp from the shower, falling past her shoulders.
She’d put on a fresh shirt, something soft and fitted that wasn’t borrowed from anyone.
She had scrubbed her hands, though the calluses and traces of grease remained.
Her feet were bare on the kitchen floor.
She had dressed for me without making herself into someone else. She stood in the kitchen doorway with her eyes on me, every choice intentional. Her gaze moved over me and stopped at my mouth. I knew exactly what she wanted after dinner.