My Alpha Shamed Me at His Victory Feast, So I Took His Coast novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Over the Bridge

Mercy goes home to Beals Island; the Hall's Keeper tells her the boat shop is not hers, and she takes Armand into it anyway and takes him over her father's workbench; the Keeper gives her until dark.

The Jonesport bridge came up out of the fog at eleven, and I had not crossed it in a year.

The harbor lay gray and flat on the far side.

Boats rode at their moorings in rows, and traps stood in stacks on every wharf.

The air smelled of bait and diesel and cold salt, and my eyes filled before I could stop them.

"That's home," Armand said, and slowed the truck.

"That's the Bay," I said.

Verna Alley's house sat at the end of the Beals Island road, gray-shingled, with a VHF antenna on the roof.

She was standing in the kitchen door in a man's flannel shirt before we stopped.

She was five foot one and seventy-one years old, and she looked me up and down.

"You hauled," she said.

"I hauled."

"Good. Your father would've thrown a plate." She turned her eyes on Armand. "You carried my nephew home. Come in and eat."

He ducked under the lintel and sat where he was told.

She put a plate of eggs and fried bread in front of each of us.

She poured coffee strong enough to stand a spoon in.

Then she lowered herself into her chair and folded her knotted hands on the oilcloth.

"Do you know what night it was?" she said.

"A year and a day since Vanceboro."

"A year and a day since your father died, with no Alpha on the Bay's wharf since. The Hall's been keeping it."

"Through me," I said.

"Through you. While a Beal hung on the Hall's Wall, the Compact let the Hall keep the Bay."

She tapped the oilcloth.

"Josiah Thurston took your colors down on the very night the year ran out."

I put down my fork.

"There's a law older than the Compact," Verna said.

"What law?"

"The Bay goes a year and a day without an Alpha, and the Keeper's Luna is put aside."

She held up one finger.

"Then any captain of Beal blood can call the Hail."

"Call it on who?" I said.

"On the Keeper," Verna said. "On Dwight Thurston, who has sat in your father's chair since last November."

"What's the Hail?"

"He answers it on the wharf at slack tide, in his wolf skin, in front of the fleet."

"And?" I said.

"Whoever's standing at the end is the Bay's Alpha."

"I'm a lobsterman, Aunt Verna."

"You're a Beal." She sniffed. "And Dwight has weighed two hundred forty pounds since high school."

Armand said nothing at all.

He kept his eyes on his plate, and I noticed that, and I was grateful.

When the plates were clean I went out to look at the wharf.

Dwight Thurston was leaning on a Hall truck at the head of it, with his arms folded over his belly.

He had a red neck and a loud laugh.

He had been the Hall's Keeper for a year and had never once been let near my father's boat.

"Mercy Beal," he said. "I heard the news. Hell of a thing."

"Get off my wharf, Dwight."

"It isn't your wharf." He grinned.

"It's the Hall's, and so's the shop. Josiah says you can have the Dora B. and go."

"Josiah says," I repeated.

"I'd think hard about that offer," Dwight said. "Michaud, this isn't river business, friend."

Armand had come up behind me, and he stood there quiet, with his hands in his coat pockets.

I walked past Dwight down the planks, and I pushed open the door of my father's boat shop.

Nobody stopped me.

It smelled of cedar shavings and linseed oil and cold coal.

My father's oilskin still hung on its peg.

His vise was bolted to the bench, and gray light came through the one window.

Over the bench, on a nail, hung a photograph of Eben.

He was nineteen in it, on the stern of the Dora B., grinning at whoever held the camera.

His top left eyetooth had a notch in it.

He got that falling off this wharf at fourteen, and he never let anyone fix it.

I looked at it for a long time.

Armand came in behind me and shut the door.

I dropped the wooden bar across it.

I took the photograph off its nail, very gently, and laid it face down on the bench.

"Sorry, Eben," I said. "You'd never forgive me, but sorry."

Then I turned around and looked at Armand, and the whole shop went still.

"It's daylight," I said.

"It is."

"I said I'd do the rest in daylight."

He didn't move.

He stood with his back to the door and his hands loose at his sides, and he waited for me.

I crossed the floor and took hold of his belt.

I kissed him hard, with my hands under his coat and my mouth open.

He kissed me back with his whole body, and he went tight from his shoulders to his knees.

"Take your coat off," I said against his mouth. "Take everything off."

He shed it in a hurry, boots and shirt and jeans.

He stood in my father's shop in the gray light with his chest heaving, and he was beautiful.

I told him so.

I pulled my sweater over my head and unhooked my bra.

I stepped out of my jeans and my underwear, and the cold air touched every inch of me.

He looked at me and made a rough sound.

I turned my back on him and set both hands flat on the workbench.

The wood was cold and pitted with fifty years of knife marks.

Eben's photograph lay face down between my hands.

"Fuck me," I said.

His hands came onto my hips.

He was big and hot against my bare back, and I felt him hard against the cleft of my ass.

He ran one hand down my belly and between my legs.

"You're soaked," he said.

"I've been soaked since the bridge."

He kissed the back of my neck.

He kissed my shoulder blade and then the long line of my spine, one slow kiss at a time.

His hands came around and filled themselves with my breasts.

He rolled my nipples between his fingers until I swore at him.

"Stop teasing me, Armand."

"You said daylight. I'm taking my time."

He slid two fingers through my wet and found my clit, and my knees went.

He held me up with one arm around my waist and worked me slowly.

He circled, and pressed, and eased off whenever I got close.

I was panting and pushing back against him, and I could feel him hard and hot against my ass.

"Don't you dare make me ask twice," I said.

"Then ask once."

"Now," I said. "Armand, I want you inside me. Now."

He took himself in his hand and rubbed the head of his cock through me, once, twice, slicking it.

Then he pushed in.

He went slowly, one inch and then the next, and I felt every inch.

I had to put my forehead down on the bench.

He was thick, and I was stretched, and it burned, and it was the best thing I had ever felt.

"God," I said. "All of it."

He gave me all of it.

He sank in to the root and stopped.

His hands were tight on my hips, and his breath was ragged against the back of my neck.

"Tell me when," he said.

"Move."

He moved.

He drew almost out and pushed back in, long and deep, and the bench creaked under my hands.

I braced against it and pushed back to meet him.

The sound of it filled the shop, wet skin and hard breath, and a tool rolled off the bench and hit the floor.

Neither of us stopped.

He found a rhythm that took the breath out of me every time he bottomed out.

"Harder," I said.

"Mercy."

"Harder, I said."

He gripped my hips and gave me harder.

He fucked me against my father's workbench in the gray light.

My hair came down, and my fingers went white on the wood.

I heard myself begging, and I didn't care.

"There. Right there. Don't stop. Don't you stop."

He reached around and found my clit and rubbed it in tight, fast circles in time with his thrusts.

I came so hard I saw white.

My whole body clenched around him, and I cried out into the cedar air.

He swore in French and held still inside me, shaking, and did not come.

"Not yet," he said into my hair. "Not yet. I want to see you."

He pulled out and turned me around.

He lifted me by the waist and set me on the edge of the bench.

The cold wood bit my bare thighs, and I pulled his mouth down to mine.

"Again?" he said against my lips.

"Again," I said, "and look at me while you do it."

I wrapped my legs around his hips and reached down between us and guided him in.

He sank into me slowly, with his eyes on my face.

I had not known a man's face could do that.

Every stroke cost him something, and he paid it gladly.

I held his face in both hands.

"Mercy," he said. "Mercy."

"I'm here."

He rocked into me, deep and steady, and I met every thrust with my hips.

The bench knocked against the wall.

My breasts moved against his chest, and the hair there rasped my nipples until they ached.

I opened my mouth on his shoulder to bite, and I stopped myself.

He felt it and jumped inside me.

"No marks," he managed.

"Then don't make me want to."

He laughed, helpless, and thrust harder.

I came again, slower and deeper, with my forehead against his and my eyes open.

He watched it happen, and that finished him.

He groaned and drove in deep, and I felt him pulse hot inside me, again and again.

We stayed like that for a long moment, joined, with our foreheads together.

He kissed my mouth, slow, and I felt him soften and slip out.

I wrapped my arms around his neck and leaned my head on his collarbone.

"I'm not going back," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I'm calling the Hail."

"I know that too."

"You're not going to tell me I can't?" I said.

"No," he said. "I'm going to hold your coat."

I laughed into his chest.

We were dressing when the fist hit the door.

"Beal!" Dwight shouted. "You've got until dark to clear your things out of that shop, or the Hall carries you out!"

I picked up Eben's photograph and put it back on its nail, face out.

I lifted the bar and swung the door open.

Dwight stood on the planks with three Hall wolves behind him and a truck idling.

"Dwight," I said.

"What?"

"The Hail. I'm calling it at slack tide tomorrow, in front of the fleet."

I looked him in the face.

"Be on the wharf."

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