Chapter 21 What He Deserves #2
“One more thing.” Wade stopped in the doorway.
His back was to the light, and for a moment all I could see was the outline of him, massive and still.
“This won’t win you anything with Nora. Not a conversation, not a second look, not a minute of her time.
If you’re doing it to prove something to her, save yourself the trouble and sit back down on that cot. ”
“I heard you.”
He turned enough for the light to catch the flat, patient expression that I was beginning to understand was the most dangerous thing about him. His size and Alpha strength mattered less than his patience. Wade Karlsson could wait me out without raising his voice.
“I heard you,” I said again.
He looked at me for another beat. Then he jerked his chin toward the service lane. “Bay three. There’s a scraper and a bucket. The thirty-two-footer in the second cradle hasn’t been touched. Start at the waterline and work down.”
I started.
The hull of a thirty-two-foot sailboat that had spent a season in Lake Superior was covered in algae, zebra mussel shells, and black slime that reeked of decay.
The scraper Wade had given me was dull enough that every stroke required my full arm behind it, and within fifteen minutes my healing shoulder was a bright, constant burn.
The October wind came off the water and cut through my flannel like it wasn’t there.
My hands, already bony after weeks of barely eating, went numb before I’d cleared the first three feet of hull.
Nobody helped. Hank limped past with a tow strap over his good shoulder and didn’t look at me.
Arvid carried a section of dock railing toward the storage shed and gave me a wide, deliberate berth, as if proximity to a Copper Point wolf might contaminate his morning.
Bette’s office blinds were open, and once, when I glanced up, I saw her watching me like a stray dog she hadn’t decided about.
I scraped.
The muck came off in long, wet strips that fell onto the concrete pad and onto my boots and onto the front of the flannel that already didn’t fit.
My knuckles cracked and bled where the cold had split the skin, and the mussel shells left thin cuts across my palms that stung when the slime got into them.
My shoulder screamed with every downward stroke. I ignored it and kept going.
At some point Nora came through the lane carrying a hydraulic hose over one shoulder.
She saw me at the hull and slowed long enough for our eyes to meet.
I expected some reaction, perhaps surprise, pity, or the satisfied anger she’d held since the ceremony.
Her face stayed unreadable. After a moment, she walked on.
I went back to scraping.
By noon my arms were shaking and the hull was half done.
Jules brought out sandwiches for the yard crew and set one on a clean rag on the concrete pad near my feet without a word.
I looked at him. He looked back. The healing cut above his left eye was dark against his skin, and beneath his easy expression something hard and territorial burned.
He’d been inside Nora last night. The bond had told me enough and none of what would help. Jules Duquette, who cooked her dinner and made her laugh and held her while she slept, who had no bond and no treaty and no claim except that he’d shown up and been decent and let her choose.
“Thanks,” I said.
Jules’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. Then he gave me a small grin with none of his usual charm. “Bette made the bread,” he said.
He left. I ate the sandwich in four bites, drank water from the yard spigot, and went back to the hull.
The wind picked up and drove spray off the harbor that mixed with the hull slime and turned the concrete slick.
My pants were soaked through to the knee.
The shoulder had gone from burning to a deep, grinding ache that radiated into my neck and down my arm.
I switched hands, worked left-handed until that arm gave out too, then switched back.
I thought about Copper Point. The house I’d grown up in, the room with the cracked plaster where I’d punched the wall the night I felt Nora with Wade.
The hallway where Delia had stood in my shirt, beautiful and hurt and wanting me.
The study where my father gave his orders.
His voice on the phone, saying threats are dealt with.
I thought about what Conrad would see if he could watch me now.
He would see his heir, his appointed successor, scraping mussel shells off a stranger’s sailboat with bleeding hands and a shoulder that hadn’t finished healing, wearing clothes that didn’t fit, and sleeping on a cot in a bunkhouse that smelled like diesel and damp wood.
To Conrad, I would be doing hard labor without wages or any promise beyond a bunk and meals.
I scraped another strip of slime off the hull and dropped it on the concrete.
This was harder than anything I’d done as heir.
The physical work was bad enough, but the absence of expectation wore at me more.
At Copper Point, every task I performed had a purpose that connected to something larger.
Training meant readiness, discipline meant authority, sacrifice meant legacy.
The whole structure existed to tell me that what I did mattered.
Here, nothing I did meant more than the work itself.
Wade had made that clear. The work was payment for a bunk and food, and beyond that it bought me nothing.
Nora wouldn’t soften because I scraped a hull.
The bond wouldn’t close because I bled into lake slime.
My father wouldn’t take back his threats, and Delia wouldn’t stop hurting, and the treaty wouldn’t mend itself because Rafe Sutherland finally learned what cold water and a dull scraper felt like.
I was just a man doing a job because it needed doing and the debt was mine.
I set the scraper against the hull.