The walk home was her favorite part of the day. The birch trees lining the path, their white bark catching what was left of the sun. The beekeeper's field, the hives dark shapes against the golden grass. The sound of the lake growing louder as she got closer to the western shore. She knew every root and dip in this path. She'd walked it hundreds of times in the last year, always toward the cottage, always toward the quiet, always toward the careful life she'd built around not being too much.
Today the walk felt different. Not because the path had changed. Because she had.
She wanted things. Specific things. She wanted fifteen more minutes at Corin's meadow. She wanted another morning of eggs and coffee at her kitchen table with a man who compared her salt pouches to bilge pumps. She wanted to stop flinching when people looked at her in the square. She wanted to stay.
And she wanted Rafe. Not the version of want she could dismiss as biology or proximity or storm-forged adrenaline. She wanted the man who listened without fixing. The man who slept on her floor and who told Malrick Sloaneshe isn't mine, that's the point, as if ownership was the opposite of what he felt rather than the definition of it.
What if she was his true love? Not the water. Not the routes. Her.
The thought hit so hard she stopped walking. Right there on the birch path with the lake glinting through the trees and the evening light going amber. The happiness that came with it was startling, bright, physical, warming her chest and her hands.
He was leaving. She knew that. But wanting him to stay didn't have to be a weakness. It could be evidence. Evidence that she was capable of choosing something bigger than survival. That her heart could want without her power punishing her for it.
She started walking again. The cottage came into view through the last of the birch trees, the stone walls catching the evening gold, the lake spread out behind it, flat and quiet. The south shutter they'd fixed together held steady in the breeze.
Isla’s stomach clench with nerves suddenly as her eyes went to her gate.
Rafe was sitting on the top step of her porch. Jacket on, elbows on his knees, his sandy hair loose around his face. He was looking at the lake. He turned when he heard her on the path and their eyes met across thirty feet of evening light, and the expression on his face was one she hadn't seen before. Open. Uncertain. Like a man who'd come to say something he hadn't finished deciding on.
He stood as she stopped at the gate with her hand on the latch.
24
RAFE
He'd been on her porch for twenty minutes, which was long enough to question the decision three times and not long enough to leave.
The walk from the dock had been fast. He'd finished the cargo mounts, climbed topside, stood at the rail looking at the lake the way he'd done every evening since the storm put him here. Dex had been checking rigging tension nearby, not saying anything, which was its own kind of commentary. Orick was below. Pell had gone to town for food.
Two days. Emmett's question. Rowan's quiet observation about things worth staying to finish. The ship was nearly done. In forty-eight hours he could cast off, run the backlog north, honor his contracts, resume the life he'd built on moving water and clean ledgers. That was the plan. That had always been the plan.
The plan didn't account for salt pouches spread across a quilt or a kitchen table that was becoming theirs. It didn't account for the fact that every time he walked away from this woman’s cottage, his wolf turned him around before he hit the tree line and it took conscious effort to keep going.
He'd looked at Dex. Dex had looked back with those yellow-green eyes and said nothing, which meant he'd already figured out where Rafe was going and was choosing not to make it worse.
Rafe had walked the birch path to her cottage, found it empty, and sat on the top step to wait. He thought about what he was going to say and couldn't organize it into anything clean, so he stopped trying and just sat there.
Then she came up the path.
She stopped at the gate with her hand on the latch. Her hair was down, loose around her face, catching the amber light. She had her jacket pulled close and her boots were muddy and she looked like she'd been somewhere good today. There was a lightness to her posture he hadn't seen before.
He stood.
"You're on my porch," she said.
"I am."
"How long?"
"A while."
She opened the gate and came up the path and stopped at the bottom of the steps, looking up at him. Her blue-gray eyes moved across his face, reading whatever was there.
"Something's wrong," she said.
"Nothing's wrong. I need to tell you something."
"That's usually how conversations start when something's wrong."
