Chapter 21 What He Deserves
Rafe POV
The bond moved first.
I was lying on the bunkhouse cot with my bad shoulder propped on a rolled blanket when Nora’s arousal slid into me like a blade heated in a fire.
The dull ache I’d learned to live with and the background hum of her contentment over the past two days vanished beneath something sharp, sudden, and intentional.
She was with Jules.
I knew it. Wade’s nights with her had come through the bond before, slow and heavy. This was quicker and brighter, playful at the edges before it turned intense. Jules Duquette’s hands were on her, and Nora wanted them there.
I sat up and immediately regretted it. My healing shoulder screamed as the skin around the scab pulled tight.
I pressed my left palm flat against the cot’s metal frame and breathed through my nose.
The space heater ticked in the corner. Wind rattled the bunkhouse’s single window.
Beyond the wall, twenty yards of cold October dark separated me from the pack house kitchen where Nora was letting another man touch her.
Her pleasure hit me, wholly hers and impossible for me to escape. I had rejected her. I had chosen Delia in front of both packs and spoken words that should have ended this. None of it mattered to the bond. It had become a window I could neither close nor look away from.
Nora’s first climax bent me double on the cot, both fists knotted in the blanket.
My body responded without permission, betraying me the same way it had when Wade was the one making her come.
This time I knew who was in that kitchen.
I’d watched Jules Duquette carry plates and crack jokes and look at Nora with his dark eyes like she was already his.
I’d overheard him and Wade in the boatyard office, heard Wade say he wouldn’t demand exclusivity, heard Jules promise not to turn it into a contest.
Whatever Jules called it, he was another man inside the woman I was still bonded to.
My wolf surged. It wanted to cross that yard, rip the door off its hinges, and tear into Jules.
The impulse was so strong that I got as far as standing and putting my hand on the bunkhouse doorknob.
Then I remembered Lyle Pelto’s face, the two trucks in formation, and seven wolves entering a yard that wasn’t theirs to drag Nora away against her will.
I took my hand off the knob.
The realization sat in my gut. If I crossed that yard now, if I burst into the pack house and confronted Nora while she was naked and willing in another man’s arms, I would become another intruder who believed his claim trumped her choice.
The enforcers had grabbed her wrist and told her she was coming to Copper Point whether she liked it or not, and I had ordered them to stop.
I had stood between Nora and the pack I’d been raised to lead.
And now my wolf wanted to do the same goddamn thing, just with a different excuse.
I sat back down on the cot. The springs creaked.
Nora’s pleasure built again, slower and deeper this time.
Genuine, startled laughter that hadn’t been there with Wade broke through her arousal and turned it into something worse than raw desire.
She wasn’t performing or making a point or punishing me through the bond.
Jules made her happy while he was inside her. Then her second climax hit me.
I bent forward with my elbows on my knees and my left hand gripping my hair. My body ached, hard and useless, responding to a woman who hadn’t touched me since the ceremony. The nausea that had dogged me for weeks rose and mixed with the arousal in a combination so wrong it made my jaw clench.
I stayed.
I stayed through the sounds I imagined and the feelings I couldn’t block, through the rhythm that built and crested and broke, and through the calm satisfaction that followed.
I stayed because crossing that yard would make me the thing I’d told my father I would never become.
The hours crawled. At some point the space heater’s orange coil dimmed and came back. I must have slept, because the next thing I registered was gray light pressing through the window and Superior striking the rocks in the slow, heavy cadence before dawn.
The bond had gone quiet. The deep, contented sleep I’d felt from her before was there again, but muted and far beyond my reach. Jules was probably still holding her.
I got up. My shoulder had stiffened during the night, the healing tissue tightening into a hot knot, and I worked it carefully, rolling the joint in small circles the way I’d seen Nora do when checking whether it could bear weight.
Something caught, released, caught again.
I’d have a scar, she’d told me. One more thing to carry.
The bunkhouse had a sink and a toilet behind a plywood partition.
I ran cold water over my face and looked at myself in the pitted mirror above the basin.
I barely recognized the gaunt man staring back at me.
My cheekbones were too prominent, my eyes recessed and bloodshot, and the dark hair I’d always kept trimmed now curled untidily around my ears.
The borrowed flannel hung off my shoulders.
I looked like one of the strays Pine Harbor took in, which I was.
I’d demanded freedom from fate for myself. At the ceremony, I had said I choose her, meaning Delia, meaning my love for her mattered more than the Goddess’s plan. I had claimed the right to choose.
And then I’d spent every day since furious that Nora used the same freedom.
The thought was so plain, so obvious, that I wanted to smash the mirror for not showing it to me sooner.
I had rejected my fated mate because I believed love should be a choice, not an assignment.
Nora had walked away from the ceremony and chosen a boatyard in a harbor town, chosen work that paid by the hour, chosen Wade, chosen Jules, chosen every single thing that I had told her she didn’t get a say in when I spoke those words.
She was doing exactly what I’d done, and doing it without wrecking anyone else.
I dried my face with the hem of my shirt and went outside.
? ? ?
I found Nora alone on the pack house porch after breakfast. She was sitting on the top step with a mug of coffee and her work boots unlaced, her hair still damp and pulled into the knot she always wore at the yard.
She looked rested, like someone who’d spent the night being wanted by a man who had nothing to prove.
“Can I talk to you?” I said from the bottom of the steps.
Her face went still. “Go ahead.”
“This isn’t about the treaty, the bond making me sick, or what I felt last night,” I said.
Her attention sharpened, but the wariness remained.
“I was wrong,” I said. “Before, I called what I did cowardly and then asked you to build something with me anyway. I missed the point. I rejected you because I thought love should be chosen, and then I hated you for choosing.”
Nora’s hands tightened around the mug. The steam drifted between us.
“I’m asking if we can start over as two people in the same place,” I said, “without pretending that makes us mates.”
She was quiet for long enough that I heard the wind in the pines and a truck somewhere on the shore road. Then she set the mug on the step beside her and looked at me with those gray-green eyes that were so much like Gordon’s it made my chest hurt.
“Your father’s wolves were in this yard three days ago,” she said.
“They grabbed my wrist. They shifted first. Jules has a cut above his eye because of them, and Hank is still limping through his watch. You took a bite meant for me, and I’m grateful for that.
But better words are still just words, Rafe.
I’ve had a lifetime of men telling me what they’re going to do differently. ”
“All right,” I said.
She gave me a long look, as if she expected an argument. When none came, she finished her coffee, laced her boots, and walked down the steps past me toward the boatyard.
I watched her go. My wolf howled, thin and ragged. This time I told it to be quiet without hating it for wanting her.
? ? ?
Wade Karlsson was in the boatyard office with a parts catalog and a bandaged left forearm when I knocked on the open door. He glanced up without surprise. He reacted to most things as if he’d already considered the possibility and decided how much it was worth.
“I want to work,” I said. “Not because Nora is watching or because I think it’ll change anything. I’m sleeping in your bunkhouse and eating your food, and I should be paying for it.”
Wade closed the catalog. His brown eyes moved over me with an assessment that reminded me uncomfortably of my father’s, except Conrad’s evaluations always carried the weight of dynasty behind them.
Wade’s carried something simpler. He was deciding whether I would be useful or whether I’d be in the way.
“You ever hauled a boat?” he said.
“No.”
“Scrubbed a hull?”
“No.”
“Cleaned a bilge?”
“No.”
“Then you’re going to be bad at this.” He stood. “Your shoulder good enough to grip?”
I curled my right hand into a fist, then raised and lowered my arm. The shoulder ached, but the joint moved and the healing tissue held. “Good enough.”
Wade came around the desk. He was half a head taller than me and far broader through the shoulders, and his scent filled the office, pine and cold water and the steady warmth that clung to Nora whenever she came near him. I held my wolf down.
“I’ll put you on hull work,” he said. “Scraping, pressure-washing, whatever the boat needs before it goes into winter storage. It’s cold, it’s wet, and it smells like lake rot.
You’ll work until the shift ends, same hours as anyone else, and you won’t get paid because you’re covering your bunk and meals.
If you slow down Hank’s haul schedule, I’ll pull you. ”
“Fine.”