I begin to relax.
As the captain starts to untie the mooring, a shout comes from the dock as someone runs toward us, shoes slapping the planks. A kid in his early-twenties, with sun-kissed brown hair, awkward as a crane on land. He carries nothing but a faded backpack and a cardboard drink tray, one of the cups already bleeding coffee down his hand.
“Wait up!” he yells, voice half-panicked.
The captain grins and motions him aboard. “Thought you got lost, Jared!”
He launches himself onto the deck, slips, and rights himself with a kind of loose-jointed grace. “Sorry, Kyle. I wanted to bring you a coffee.” Hestudies the half-spilled cup, shoulders drooping. “Not much left to it, I’m afraid.”
“Aw, you.” The captain ruffles his hair. “Stow your bag up front and take a seat by the wheel, cousin. You can top off from the thermos I brought from home.”
Looking sheepish, he shuffles through the crowd, looking around as if to gain his bearings, and for a second, our eyes lock. Not in the way it happened with the men on the boardwalk. This is different. More curiosity than anything else, despite him being an Alpha.
But when he spots Emily in the crowd, his face goes beet red, his big feet tangle together, and I dodge out of the way as he goes sprawling, the rest of his coffee splashing onto the floor.
I hear his mortified groan as he picks himself up, and I catch Emily’s wince before she turns away, pretending she didn’t witness his epic crash and burn.
The captain shakes his head as he steps around his cousin. “Mop is in the supply closet. Clean it up so it has time to dry before we dock on the island.”
“Yes, sir.” Head hanging, Jared shuffles up to the front and vanishes into the restricted area.
The engine chugs to life, rumbling through the hull and up into my bones. I settle back onto myseat as we pull away from the dock, and I let the noise and salt and potential of a happy future scrub away what’s left of the morning’s humiliation.
Behind us, the town shrinks. Ahead, the island rises from the water, shrouded in pine trees and possibilities.
I just hope they let me stay, because I have nothing left waiting for me and no home to go back to.
Chapter Three
Emily
Two strangers shouldn’t be on my island. At least not these strangers.
Not the blushing young Alpha I crossed paths with at the pawn shop, nor the big, wary Omega I pulled out of that mess on the boardwalk. Different circumstances, same morning. And then fate went and put them both on the water taxi to Misty Pines.
Too much coincidence for a place this small.
The scent of pine sap rides every draft in the Homestead’s skeleton, thick enough to coat the back of my tongue and sting my nose. I shoulder the front door, just a frame at this point, and walk into the cacophony of nailers pounding overhead and a table saw shrieking at intervals.
My phone pinches tight to my shoulder, heldthere by a neck gone stiff from an hour of being on this call. The screen of my tablet sweats under a sheet of fingerprints, the punch list already two pages deep before I even leave the foyer.
The new lobby’s support studs stand as bare columns, the drywall not yet sealing them off, so every sound pours through. I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke spliced with cedar, signaling that one of the electricians is slacking off in the utility closet. I don’t have to catch him in the act to know. The pheromones in the air tell me who’s working and who’s hiding.
“Copy that, yeah,” I bark into the phone, cutting off the supplier mid-spiel. “You sort the cost variance by EOD, or we’re going with Crestline for the remaining fixtures.”
The speaker on the other end sputters with frantic assurances. I end the call and flag the purchase order for follow-up. I’m behind by a few minutes, and my employers are already waiting.
Nathaniel and Blake stand shoulder to shoulder in the unfinished lobby, tape measures dangling from their belts, yellow hard hats tipped back in deference to the heat. Blake’s shirt is streaked with sawdust and sweat, his forearms covered in sleeve tattoos that hide a map of old scars from a lifetime on job sites. Nathaniel, by contrast, wears the onlycrisp button-down on site, cuffs unrolled and clean, guarding a sheaf of rolled plans under one arm as if the blueprints themselves were his most precious tools.
I pass through the dust cloud of a drywall sander and pause at the lip of the lobby, the hum of power tools crawling up my spine.
“You need a vacation,” Nathaniel says as he gestures to the tablet in my hand. “Blake’s convinced you’d staple that thing to your palm if you could.”
Blake bumps his elbow into Nathaniel’s, grinning. “Hey, don’t give her ideas. She’ll try it just to prove you right.”
I tuck the tablet under my arm. “If you can find someone who can wrangle this crew and finish the punch list, I’ll take two weeks off, easy.”
“Three days in,” Nathaniel says, “and you’d be twitching with worry about something getting messed up without you here.”