"I'm capable of adjustment."
"What changed?"
"I'm still stranded," he said. "My cargo is still ruined. Being angry about it doesn't change the repair timeline." He looked past her toward the dock road, where the Ashvane sat waiting for him with her list of damages. "Nothing's changed."
He said it like he believed it. His wolf told him what a liar he was.
She was watching him with the careful attention, he kept his face neutral and his eyes off hers because direct contact with those blue-gray eyes right now was not something he was prepared to risk. He could feel her proximity the way he felt a change in barometric pressure. It wasn’t just in the chest, it was in the back of the neck and pressing in on his whole body.
"I owe you for the damage," she said finally. "I know that. I'm not trying to get out of it."
"What I'd really use is an extra hand on repairs." The offer came out before he'd fully thought it through. She blinked.
"I could ask Rowan's crew," he continued, watching her face, "or I could ask the person responsible and save myself the favor and money." He paused. "Although I suppose there's a risk you'd touch the wrong thing and blow out the hull entirely."
There it was. He saw the flash of it in her eyes, the way her shoulders pulled back and her jaw set.
"That's an incredibly generous offer," she said, her voice had gone very level.
"I thought so."
"You're telling me you want my help and in the same breath questioning whether you should let me within ten feet of your ship."
"I'm telling you it's an option," he said. "Whether it's a practical one is another conversation."
"I have exceptional control," she said, and the way she said it told him exactly how much that sentence cost her. She meant it and she was angry that she had to say it and she was angry that there was enough truth in his jab that she couldn't throw it back at him cleanly. He almost felt bad about that. Almost.
"I'll keep that in mind," he said.
"You do that."
She pulled her bag up on her shoulder and turned and this time he let her go, standing on the inn steps and watching her cross the square with the purposeful stride of a woman who wanted to be out of his line of sight as quickly as possible without running. Her hair caught the light as she turned toward the western path, bright against the overcast sky, and his wolf tracked every step she took until the birch trees swallowed her up.
The breeze off the lake was clean and cool and still carrying that thread of scent, faint now with distance, and he breathed it in once before he could think better of it and then exhaled hard before he turned back toward the dock. He had gone to the inn to grab some things out of the rooms Diana had set him and the crew up in, but right now, he needed work. Distraction.
Dex was leaning against the dock post at the bottom of the bank road with a tin cup of something hot. He had watched the entire exchange from a comfortable distance and formed several opinions about it.
"Good morning," Dex said.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
Dex looked into his cup. "She the one who put us into the dock?"
"Yes."
"Fae?"
"Storm fae."
Dex was quiet, doing the kind of math that fox shifters were constitutionally unable to avoid. "She's the one who lives out west. The one Rowan was careful about."
"That would be her."
"She's very—" Dex seemed to search for the right word.
