Chapter 29 Nobody’s Heir
Nora POV
The shelf brackets were wrong.
I’d noticed them three days ago. The plywood shelving above the parts counter in the boatyard office had been sagging since before I arrived in Pine Harbor, and whoever installed the supports had sunk screws into drywall instead of the studs.
Amateur work. The kind of shortcut that holds until it doesn’t, and then you’ve got thirty pounds of marine hardware on the floor and a bookkeeper with a concussion.
I’d mentioned it to Jules on Monday. By Wednesday evening, someone had started fixing it.
I came in from the bay after seven, hands still black from the fuel line replacement on Arvid’s runabout, and found Rafe halfway up a stepladder with a stud finder and a handful of proper lag screws.
He’d already pulled the old brackets, patched the holes with joint compound, and was marking new anchor points along the studs.
The office smelled like sawdust and WD-40 and the faint mineral tang of Superior blowing through the cracked window.
He looked up when I came through the door. His eyes found mine, and the bond stirred between us the way it always did now, low and persistent instead of the raw wound of the first weeks. It felt like hearing my name called from a room I’d already left.
“Jules said it needed doing before freeze-up,” Rafe said. “Another loaded box would’ve pulled those screws out.”
“Probably.” I leaned in the doorway. “You’re using two-and-a-half-inch lags?”
“Long enough to bite deep without going farther than we need.”
He was right. I didn’t tell him that.
I watched him drive the first screw with a ratcheting socket wrench, his left arm doing most of the work while he guarded his right shoulder.
The bandage was gone now, replaced by a raised pink scar visible above the collar of his thermal.
His hands didn’t shake today, at least not while I was looking.
“You could’ve asked me to do this,” I said.
“You were under the runabout.”
“I would’ve come out.”
“I know.” He set another screw and tested the bracket with his palm. Solid. “So I didn’t ask.”
The quiet settled between us. Outside, the harbor had gone dark, and the dock lights threw long orange reflections across the water.
Bette had locked up two hours ago. Wade was at the pack house reviewing the haul schedule for the week, and Jules was making something that smelled like garlic and butter when I’d passed the kitchen window.
“The guide cable held through today’s haul,” I said.
“I inspected it after the haul.”
“So did I beforehand.”
His gaze warmed for an instant.
I should have left. I should have washed my hands at the bay sink, walked up the hill, eaten whatever Jules had made, and gone to bed between clean sheets that smelled like cedar and the two men who had earned a place there. That was the smart play.
Instead I said, “You did good work during the emergency.”
Rafe came down the ladder and set the socket wrench on the counter. “You already told me that.”
“I gave you a nod. That’s not the same thing.”
He turned to face me fully. In the yellow overhead light, his face looked less gaunt than it had a week ago.
The hollows under his cheekbones were filling.
His jaw was clean-shaven for the first time since I’d known him in Pine Harbor, and without the stubble he looked younger.
Closer to the man I’d walked toward at the ceremony in my green dress, expecting everything.
“The night at the fire ring,” I said. “When you knelt.”
He went still.
“You said you rejected me because you thought I’d cooperate. Because I was the reliable one. The one who does what she’s told.”
“I said that.”
“You said it in front of two hundred wolves, and it was true, and I am glad you said it.” I kept my voice level.
“But you left out the part where you listened to everyone call me obedient and decided that was all I was. You mistook the fact that I showed up and did my job and didn’t cause problems for the idea that I didn’t have anything else in me.
You looked at a woman who could rebuild an engine block and thought, She’ll fold. ”
Rafe didn’t look away. He didn’t argue. He stood with his hands at his sides and his shoulders down and took it.
“You weren’t wrong that I was obedient,” I said.
“I was. I spent twenty-four years being exactly what Gordon needed and exactly what the treaty required, and I was good at it. But you confused obedience with character. You thought doing my duty meant I didn’t have a spine.
And when I turned out to have one, you acted like I was the problem. ”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” His voice was rough but certain. “I looked at you and saw someone who would make my choice easy. I didn’t see you. And by the time I understood what I’d thrown away, you were already gone.”
For weeks, anger had carried me through the drive east, the first cold nights in the pack house, and every pulse of his sickness through the bond. Now it did something I wasn’t ready for.
It banked.
It hadn’t vanished, and I hadn’t forgiven him. But its heat changed direction, making room for the thing I’d been fighting since I watched him sweep a concrete floor one-handed without looking for an audience.
Want filled the space it left, inconvenient and unwelcome and deep enough to ache.
The bond felt it the same moment I did. I knew because Rafe’s pupils widened, his breath caught, and his hands curled into fists at his sides. He could feel everything I felt, and what I felt right now was weeks of denied attraction flooding in like Superior through a cracked hull.
“Nora.” My name came out low and strained.
I closed the distance and kissed him.
His mouth was hot and hungry and tasted like black coffee and something sharper underneath, and the bond opened wide.
Wade’s bond carried an even warmth, and what I had chosen with Jules burned on trust. This was different: the first fated match the Goddess had confirmed before both packs, starved for weeks and suddenly fed.
My wolf surged toward his with a wordless sound torn from somewhere deep.
Rafe’s hands came up to cup my jaw before sliding into my hair. His fingers trembled. He waited for me to decide.
Good.
“Lock the door,” I said against his mouth.
He did. I heard the deadbolt click, and when he turned back I was already sitting in Bette’s desk chair with my coveralls unzipped to the waist, and the look on his face was worth every miserable night I’d spent feeling his pain through the bond.
“Strip,” I said.
His hands went to the hem of his thermal.
He pulled it over his head, exposing the lean, hard body beneath and the new scar on his right shoulder.
The pink, ridged scar marked where he had taken the bite meant for me.
He’d lost weight and muscle since the ceremony, his ribs still too easy to count.
Weeks of labor had hardened what remained.
He reached for his belt.
“Slower,” I said.
He slowed. He opened his belt, unlaced and removed his boots, then pushed down his jeans.
He stepped out of them without taking his eyes off me and stood naked in the cold office, his cock already hardening under my gaze.
His ribs showed above his flat stomach, and his hands stayed open at his sides because I hadn’t told him what to do with them.
I leaned back in the chair, toed off my boots, and peeled off my coveralls and underwear. Then I slid my hand between my legs.
The bond carried what I did next straight into him.
I watched his jaw clench, watched his hands fist and release, watched his cock thicken and rise as my fingers found the right rhythm and my breathing changed.
He could feel my pleasure as if my hand were on him, and his arousal returned through the bond until the heat built faster than it should have.
“You wanted to know what you threw away,” I said, my voice unsteady now. “Watch.”
He watched. His whole body shook from desire rather than bond tremors or sickness. I held that desire at arm’s length while I took my time and made myself feel good in front of the man who had publicly humiliated me.
I took myself right up to it and moved my hand away.
“Now you.”
Rafe dropped to his knees between my legs the instant I called him.
His mouth replaced my hand, and his tongue pulled a sound from my throat that I would’ve been embarrassed about if I’d had room left for embarrassment.
He worked my clit with unhurried, firm strokes, and when he added two fingers and curled them upward, I grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled hard.
“Wait,” I said through my teeth.
He stopped. His mouth glistened, and his eyes were wild. His pulse hammered against the inside of my thigh where his jaw pressed, and through the bond I felt his wolf howling at mine with a desperation that would have broken me if I’d let it.
I hauled him up by the hair and dragged him into the chair. It was a heavy oak thing with wide arms, the one piece of office furniture that wasn’t falling apart. It held us both when I straddled his lap, braced my knees on either side of his hips, and reached between us to guide him in.
I sank onto him by degrees until he made a strained sound through his teeth.
The bond opened all the way. His sensations layered over mine until I felt the stretch of being filled and the grip of being inside at the same time.
I buried my face against his neck and squeezed my eyes shut, unable to do anything except breathe through the overwhelming completeness of joining with my fated mate at last.
Then I moved.
I started with a slow grind of my hips that made his hands clamp on my waist hard enough to bruise. I decided when he got more, and I made him earn every adjustment with bitten-off groans, my name dragged rough from his throat, and a harsh exhale every time I rose almost off him and came back down.
“Nora—fuck—”
“Shut up.” I rolled my hips and clenched around him, and his head dropped back against the chair. “You don’t get to talk right now.”
He didn’t talk. He held on and he took it and I rode him until the rhythm stopped being slow and became something desperate, my thighs burning and my hands braced on his shoulders and his hips driving up to meet mine because neither of us could pretend this was controlled anymore.
My nails dug into his shoulders and my mouth pressed against his neck as I came, my teeth held carefully away because a bite meant something I wasn’t offering.
The bond blew through both of us until I couldn’t tell my pleasure from his.
He held me through it while I shook, and the sound I made was raw enough to echo off the office walls.
I climbed off him. My legs didn’t want to cooperate.
The desk was three steps away. I swept Bette’s filing trays, a box of lag screws, and the parts catalog onto the floor and bent over the broad surface. The cold laminate against my flushed skin felt like relief.
“Go on,” I said.
Rafe was behind me before the words finished leaving my mouth.
He drove into me and the desk jumped across the floor, and whatever restraint had survived the chair was gone.
He fucked me rough, one hand on my hip and the other reaching around to where I was still swollen and sensitive, and the dual sensation of being filled from behind while his fingers worked my clit emptied my head of everything but him.
Everything came through the bond. His pleasure, mine, his guilt, my anger, all the lies and the honest labor and the fact that I still hadn’t said the words that would break us apart or the words that would bring us together.
All of it lived in the space between his body and mine, and neither of us tried to sort it out. We just moved.
He came with his forehead pressed hard against my back, shuddering, spilling inside me, and feeling him come tipped me over after him with a strangled cry. I gripped the desk edge hard enough to hurt.
We stayed like that for a long time. His weight against my back. My cheek on the cool desk. Our breathing ragged in the silent office while the dock lights threw orange stripes across the ceiling and Superior pushed against the rocks below.
Then Rafe withdrew and turned me around. Gently, which was worse than rough because gentle meant he was paying attention, meant he was present, made this more than friction and a fated bond too hungry to deny.
He rested his forehead against mine. His hand came up and pressed flat where my neck met my right shoulder, where Wade had held his teeth and stopped.
Rafe’s warm, calloused palm covered the unmarked skin he had no right to claim.
I let it stay through one breath. Then I moved his hand.
“That’s not yours,” I said.
“I know.”
We cleaned up with paper towels from the office dispenser and cold water from the utility sink.
I pulled my underwear and coveralls back on, zipped up, and laced my boots.
He put on his jeans, thermal, and boots, then picked up the lag screws I’d swept off the desk.
Neither of us spoke while he finished fastening the brackets and I reset the shelf.
We restacked the filing trays and returned the parts catalog, leaving everything solid and level.
At the door, Rafe looked at me the way he’d been looking since the gathering, all the old entitlement gone. In its place was raw attention. He understood exactly what he’d been allowed and how easily it could be taken back.
“Go to the bunkhouse,” I said.
He went.