"Figuratively."
"I'm stranded in your town for the better part of a week because of what came off that lake last night." His voice was even, which was somehow worse than if he'd raised it. "I'm not delivering a verdict. I'm standing in front of the source and telling her I know what she is."
The wind picked up off the lake. Isla felt it in her hands, felt the charge of it, and pressed both palms flat against her thighs and breathed through it. "Then you know what I am," she said. "And you're still standing here, egging me on. That's your choice, Captain."
He opened his mouth, but Isla took control again.
“The town knows too, and I’m still here. I’m working on things and if they can get behind it, then you can deal with it too. I’m not the only storm fae, and if you know what I am, then you sure as hell know that. So again, I’m sorry for what happened but it’s the risk you run when you run routes where you do.” Isla had had enough and went to push past him back to her place. She was done with town and done with this wolf.
He seemed dumbfounded for a moment, but before she could make her escape, he turned.
“Now wait a minute.” He grabbed her arm and as she spun around, feeling the energy inside of her rise enough to lay him out with wind alone, she saw his face.
He had gone pale and still, eyes wide, and every charge she'd been pressing down through her palms went quiet.
5
RAFE
It was instinct, the reach, the same reflex that made him grab a line before it went over the rail. She spun to face him and he felt it the second his fingers closed around her wrist. A jolt that moved up his arm and hit him somewhere between the chest and the throat, and his wolf went silent in a way it had never gone silent before. Completely. Like a compass needle swinging and locking in on True North.
He knew the scent. He'd been smelling it since the storm, wild rain and silver, but with his hand on her skin it sharpened into something else entirely, something layered and specific and unambiguous, and the word that rose through the noise of his own pulse was the one he refused to say out loud.
Mate.
He let go of her wrist.
She was staring at him. Whatever anger she'd been running on a moment ago had dropped into something more uncertain, her silver-blonde hair lifting slightly in the lake breeze, those blue-gray eyes reading him fast, thorough, like she was looking for what it meant. She waited for him to say something.
He had nothing. For the first time in longer than he could recall, Rafe Lupeus had absolutely nothing.
His wolf was not helpful. It had gone from howling to something worse, that low, focused vibration of an animal that had found what it had been looking for and was waiting, with terrible patience, for him to catch up. He felt the pull toward her the way he felt current against the hull, something that required active effort to hold against. It didn’t stop him from trying.
She was afraid of her own power. He'd seen it in the way she pressed her palms flat to her thighs on the inn steps, in the tight control of her voice when she told him the storm wasn't aimed at him, in the way her eyes had gone to the sky like she was checking a lit fuse. A woman who carried that kind of fear and that kind of pride in the same body was not a woman he could walk up to and say,by the way, my wolf has decided you belong to him. That wasn't a conversation. That was a trap.
Instead, he took a slow breath and looked at her with the same expression he used when a contract negotiation was going sideways and he needed to reset without giving ground, and he watched her confusion sharpen into something edgier.
"Why did you go quiet?" she said.
"Thinking."
"About what."
"About whether this conversation is worth continuing."
Her chin came up. "You grabbed my arm."
"I did. And you were about to walk into me and you know it."
The color that moved into her face was something. She had fine features, sharp at the cheekbone and softer at the mouth, and she wore her irritation cleanly, no attempt to hide it. He found that easier to deal with than the moment before it, when she'd just been looking at him and the whole square had felt very small.
"I was walking away," she said. "You were in my path."
"Then we agree it was a navigational issue and nobody needs to make anything of it."
She stared at him. He could see her working through the shift in his register, the way he'd gone from confrontational to flat, and he watched her decide she didn't trust it. Smart. She shouldn't.
"You were considerably angrier five minutes ago," she said.
