His Last Defense. Karen Rock

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СКАЧАТЬ feelings she needed to keep locked down. It’d felt so right, so perfect to be in Dylan’s arms she’d almost forgotten all of the very solid reasons things hadn’t worked nine years ago. She’d made the right choice to let him go then, and she needed to steer clear now and focus on her career and her family.

      “Take a break.” Her Aunt Dai squeezed her arm and nodded in Nolee’s mother’s direction. Kathy Arnauyq sat at the end of a long folding table that had been mostly cleared by hustling volunteers. She was small, dark and intensely serious, her gray-streaked hair in a braid she’d pulled forward over her right shoulder. A young couple and their three boisterous children occupied the opposite end. “It’s time you talked.”

      Nolee bit back her sigh. Since losing her boat, she hadn’t dared visit her mother, unwilling to subject herself to a solid round of I-told-you-so’s. Tonight, though, she couldn’t put it off any longer.

      The chair scraped against the tiled floor when she pulled it out and seated herself opposite her parent. “Hi, Mother.”

      Kathy nodded as she toyed with the metal spoon in her empty coffee cup. Her neat, slightly sharpened features revealed none of the discomfort twitching through Nolee.

      “Did you get enough to eat? Because I could—” She cut herself off at the shake of her mother’s head. “Okay. What would you like?”

      “I’d like you to leave the Bering Sea and come back to Kodiak. Stop this foolishness,” Kathy said in the feather-soft voice that made others lean close and pay attention.

      Old frustration flared inside. “Captaining a boat is not foolish.”

      “A commercial boat.” Kathy’s hands were cool as she pushed a lock of hair away from Nolee’s eyes in a tender gesture that nearly brought her to tears. “They’re greedy. Taking more of the world than is needed. That’s not our way.”

      Nolee sighed. “No. It’s not.” She’d grown up being taught the value of subsistence living, a part of her tribal culture that went back thousands of years. What others might consider poverty, they believed to be a revered, responsible way of living. For Nolee, however, it’d been a relentless childhood of scraping by on whatever family members could toss their way. Their poverty had made them powerless, her mother’s precarious health preventing her from holding down a lasting job. “But I need to pay the bills. And where is your oxygen tank?”

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