"Before it hits, yes."
He studied the wall. "That's useful." He handed her a pair of work gloves from his belt. "Take the southeast section. Stack them tight to the base, overlap the seams. Emmet's got the sand if you need more bags."
She took the gloves. They were too big but she folded the cuffs back and they held well enough. She worked the southeast section for the next hour, hauling bags from the cart and stacking them against the wall in a staggered pattern that would hold against lateral pressure. The work was physical and repetitive and exactly what she needed. Her shoulders burned after thirty minutes. Her hands ached through the gloves. The afternoon sun moved across the lake and warmed her back while she lifted, placed, tamped, and did not think about Rafe Lupeus.
Or at leastmostlydid not think about him.
One of Rowan's crew, the man with the tape measure, worked alongside her for a while without saying much. Eventually he nodded at her stack. "Good placement."
"Thanks."
"You've done this before?"
"Coastal towns. You learn fast when the water doesn't wait."
Rowan came by at the hour mark with water. He handed her a bottle and looked over her work. The southeast section was stacked tight, the seams overlapping, the sandbags packed firm against the stone foundation. He didn't comment on it directly, which she was learning was his version of approval.
"There's a second crew going out tomorrow morning to do the equipment dock on the north shore," he said. "If you want in."
"What time?"
"Seven."
"I'll be here."
He nodded and moved on. She drank the water and looked at what she'd built. Forty sandbags, placed well, protecting a wall that would hold if the next storm came through. It wasn’t much. A few hours of labor on a retaining wall in a town that was quietly deciding whether she was worth the weather she brought with her. But she'd shown up. She'd done the work. Rowan had asked her back, and that was more than she'd had this morning.
The square was busier when she walked back through it on her way home. The late afternoon crowd at Griddle and Grind was spilling out onto the patio, Twyla visible through the window pouring something steaming into a row of cups. A group of men stood near the fountain, talking about the flooding on the lower road. One of them looked at her as she passed. Not the evaluating look from earlier. Closer to neutral. She'd been at the retaining wall all afternoon and people had seen her there, hauling bags alongside Rowan's crew, doing the same work they were doing.
It wasn't acceptance. It wasn't forgiveness or trust or any of the things she'd been carefully not hoping for over the last year. But it was presence. She had been visibly present, practical, and impossible to frame as dangerous.
She passed the dock road on her way to the western path. The Ashvane's mast was visible over the tree line, Rafe's crew still working on the deck. She didn’t stop or look for him. She walked the birch-lined path to her cottage with sand under her nails and an ache in her shoulders and the quiet, stubborn refusal to leave sitting heavier in her chest than it had this morning.
The cottage was cool and empty when she let herself in. She washed her hands at the kitchen sink and stood at the counter where he'd lifted her onto the surface last night and pressed her palms flat against the wood.
He was leaving. That was the fact she needed to hold onto. Whatever had happened between them was weather, not a season. It would pass.
She made tea. Drank it at the window seat. Watched the lake go silver in the fading light and tried not to think about the way he'd said her name.
15
RAFE
Dex had handed him the plank and the note the previous afternoon with the expression of a man choosing not to say his true thoughts.
"She left it at the gangway," Dex said. "Didn't come aboard. Didn't ask for you."
"What did she say?"
"Nothing. Handed it over, said the note explained the rest. Then she left."
Rafe had read the note at his work bench below deck. The charge was real but minor, a residual frequency embedded in the grain that could attract secondary strikes if left untreated. She'd wrapped the plank in a grounding cloth soaked with something herbal.Leave it for forty-eight hours,she'd written.The frequency should dissipate. If it doesn't, bring it back.
Professional. Thorough. Not a single word in it that wasn't about wood.
Part of him had been grateful. She'd done what he'd asked, done it well, kept it clean. The other part, the part with teeth, was disgruntled in a way he couldn't reason with. His wolf wanted the distance between them closed. It had wanted that since themorning he'd walked out of her cottage, since the counter, since the wrist. Every hour apart felt like a rope pulled against current, and the current was winning.
But he had a ship to fix and a reputation being taken apart by someone who hadn't shown his face yet. That came first. It had to.
