Chapter 11
She couldn't stop thinking about his hands.
Jocelyn lay in the dark of her borrowed room, staring at the concrete ceiling, feeling the ghost of his grip on her fingers. The careful pressure. The restraint. A man who could put someone through a barn wall holding her hand like she was something that might shatter if he got it wrong.
She'd left the fire an hour ago. Said goodnight. Walked to her room on steady legs and closed the door and told herself that the smart thing was sleep.
Sleep wasn't coming.
She could hear him. Through the walls, through the corridor, the faint grind of metal on metal. The workshop. Past midnight and he was in the workshop, hands busy, building something because the alternative was stillness and stillness was where the memories lived.
She knew because she was the same way. Four months of running her still at two in the morning because the quiet was too loud. Four months of keeping her hands on copper because idle hands remembered things—slashed tires, poisoned barrels, the sound of Farr's laugh on her porch.
Anvil's hands remembered a kid falling six hundred feet.
Jocelyn got up. Put on jeans and a tank top, didn't bother with shoes. Walked barefoot through the silent compound toward the blue-white flicker she could see through the workshop windows.
He had his back to the door. Hood up, arc blazing, bent over a piece of steel she recognized—the gate with the scrollwork, the one she'd traced with her finger two days ago.
He was adding to it. New curves flowing from the existing pattern, each one laid down with the steady hand that never wavered.
She leaned against the doorframe and watched.
The arc died. He flipped the hood and examined the weld, running his thumb along the bead the way she ran her fingers along copper joints. Checking. Always checking.
"You going to stand there all night?" he said without turning around.
"Maybe. The view's not bad."
He turned then. The welding hood pushed back on his head, sweat on his neck, forearms bare and scarred in the overhead light.
His eyes found her—barefoot, hair loose, leaning in his doorway past midnight—and something shifted in them.
Not surprise. Hunger. The kind he kept leashed so tight she'd only caught glimpses of it until now.
"You should be sleeping," he said.
"So should you."
"I don't sleep much."
"Neither do I." She pushed off the doorframe and walked into the workshop. Closer. Close enough to feel the residual heat from the welding rig, close enough to smell hot steel and sweat and something underneath that was just him. "Tell me about the bridges."
His brow furrowed. "I told you about—"
"You told me about Danny. About losing the work." She stopped at the bench, her hip against the edge, two feet from him. "I want to hear about the work itself. What it felt like. Before."
He was quiet for a long time. She watched him weigh the question the way he weighed everything—measuring, calculating, deciding how much load the moment could bear.
"It felt like being the only person in the world," he said finally. "Six hundred feet up, nothing but steel under your boots and sky in every direction. You could see rivers from up there. Highways. Towns that looked like circuit boards. And you were building the thing that connected all of it."
His hands moved as he talked. Not welding—just touching the steel, tracing the scrollwork, restless and alive.
"The beams vibrate when they're being set. You can feel the whole structure adjusting, finding its balance. And when it locks in—when the bolts torque and the welds cure and the steel takes the load—you feel it in your chest. This hum. Like the bridge is alive and you're part of it."
"You loved it."
"More than anything." His voice had gone somewhere she hadn't heard before.
Open. Unguarded. The flat steel tone stripped away, leaving something raw underneath.
"I was good at it. Not just competent—good.
The kind of good where foremen request you by name and engineers trust your instincts over their calculations. "
"And they took it from you."
"They took the job. They couldn't take what I know." He looked at his hands. "I still feel it. Every time I pick up a torch, every time I lay a bead, it's up there. Six hundred feet and flying."
Jocelyn's chest ached. Not pity—she'd never pity this man. Something fiercer. Recognition. The understanding of what it cost to have the thing you were built for ripped away, and to keep doing it anyway in smaller spaces for smaller reasons because the alternative was letting your hands forget.
"My grandmother distilled her first batch in 1962," Jocelyn said. "Illegal as hell—no permit, no license, just a copper pot and stubbornness. She sold it out of the back of her truck at the tobacco market."
Anvil's mouth almost curved. "Moonshine."
"Don't say that word in my presence." She smiled. "It was unregulated small-batch spirits. She ran that still for thirty years before I was old enough to learn. Taught me everything—the chemistry, the craft, the way copper changes flavor if you treat it right."
"She teach you to fight, too?"
"She taught me that keeping the land was the fight.
Everything else was just details." Jocelyn looked at the gate between them.
"Four women held those forty acres. My great-grandmother through the Depression.
My grandmother through two decades of men telling her she couldn't. My mother through two marriages that tried to take it. And me through Ray Embry."
"You'll hold it."
"I know." She looked up at him. "But I'm tired of holding things alone."
The words hung in the workshop air, raw and deliberate. She hadn't planned to say them. Hadn't planned any of this—the midnight walk, the bare feet, the conversation that had peeled them both down to something exposed and honest.
But she'd spent four months alone, and four generations of stubborn women hadn't raised her to be afraid of what she wanted.
She stepped forward.
One step. Close enough to feel his breath catch. Close enough to see his pupils blow wide, the hunger surging past whatever leash he kept it on. His hands gripped the edge of the workbench, knuckles white, every muscle in his arms rigid with the effort of holding still.
"Jocelyn." Her name came out rough, scraped raw. A warning. "I'm not—I don't do this gently."
"I'm not asking for gentle."
"You don't know what you're asking for."
"I'm asking for you." She put her hand on his chest. Felt his heart slamming against her palm, the heat of him burning through cotton. "The man who builds things at midnight because his hands won't stop. The man who put steel on my windows and stood in the road for me. I'm asking for him."
His control broke.
Not all at once. Not the way she'd expected—no explosion, no collision.
Instead, his hands released the bench and came to her face, both of them, cradling her jaw with a tenderness that contradicted everything she knew about what those hands could do.
The calluses rasped against her skin. The forge scars pressed warm against her cheekbones.
And he held her like that—just held her, his forehead dropping to hers, his breathing ragged.
"I check everything twice," he murmured against her lips. "Everything I build. Every joint, every weld. Because the one time I didn't check, someone fell."
"I'm not falling."
"If you do, I'll catch you." His thumbs traced her cheekbones. "That's not a promise. That's a fact."
She kissed him.
Or he kissed her. Or they met somewhere in the middle, two people who'd been circling each other for days finally closing a distance that had nothing to do with feet and inches.
His mouth was hot and certain, tasting like beer and something darker, and when her lips parted he made a sound in his chest—low, wrecked, the sound of a man who'd been starving and hadn't known it until someone put food in front of him.
His hands slid from her face to her waist, spanning the curve of her hips with fingers that covered an obscene amount of skin.
He pulled her in—not rough, but absolute, eliminating every inch of space between them until she was pressed against him from chest to thigh and could feel exactly how much restraint had been costing him.
"Workshop's not—" she managed between kisses.
"No."
He lifted her. Just picked her up, one arm under her thighs, the other across her back, and carried her out of the workshop like she weighed nothing.
The compound was dark and silent, the corridor empty, and he moved through it without hesitating—not rushing, not stumbling, just certain.
A man who'd decided what he was building and was moving with the deliberate focus she'd watched him bring to every piece of steel he'd ever touched.
His room. Door shut with his boot. Her back against it, his body pinning her there, his mouth tracing a line from her jaw to the hollow of her throat that made her spine arch off the wood.
"Tell me to stop," he said against her skin. "Any time. Tell me and I stop."
"If you stop, I'll kill you."
His laugh was dark and breathless. His hands found the hem of her tank top and drew it up slowly—slowly—his knuckles dragging along her ribs, her sternum, the shiver that followed his touch like current follows copper.
She raised her arms and the shirt was gone, and he leaned back just enough to look at her.
The way he looked.
Not assessing. Not weighing. Reverent. Like she was a blueprint for something he'd been trying to build his entire life and had only just found the plans for.
"You're staring," she whispered.
"I'm memorizing." His scarred hands settled on her waist, thumbs tracing slow circles against her stomach. "I memorize every structure I build. In case I need to rebuild it in the dark."
"That's the most romantic thing anyone's ever said to me and it's absolutely insane."
"Get used to it."
She pulled him back to her. Mouths meeting, hands moving, the careful patience dissolving into something urgent and consuming.
She found the hem of his shirt and dragged it up over a chest that was mapped with scars—forge burns, old injuries, the physical record of a man who'd spent his life too close to things that could hurt him.
She traced them with her mouth and felt him shudder, felt the tremor run through his arms where they braced on either side of her head.
The dangerous man. The one who'd ended Lonnie Farr in the dark. Shaking because she put her lips on his skin.
They made it to the bed—barely, a controlled collapse that was more gravity than grace. His weight settled over her, and she'd expected crushing but got cradling—his elbows planted, his body a structure built to hold weight without transferring it. Even here. Even now. Building things that held.
"Dominic," she breathed, and his whole body locked.
His forehead pressed against hers. His eyes closed. And when they opened, something had changed in them—something behind the steel and patience had cracked open, and what spilled out was so raw and desperate that it stole her breath.
"Say it again."
"Dominic."
He kissed her like the name was a key and she'd just unlocked something he'd welded shut years ago.
Deep, consuming, his hands sliding beneath her to pull her up against him in a way that left nothing to imagination and everything to sensation.
She wrapped around him—legs, arms, every part of her anchoring to every part of him—and let go of the last piece of resistance she'd been carrying since a man with a truck full of steel showed up at her gate and changed everything.
What followed was patient and thorough and devastating.
He was patient the way he welded—meticulous, attentive, reading every response the way he read stress points in steel.
And he was thorough the way he built things—nothing skipped, nothing rushed, every inch of her treated like a joint he intended to check twice.
She came apart under hands that knew exactly how much pressure to apply and exactly when to ease off, and when she said his name—his real name—the sound he made against her skin was worth every sleepless night and poisoned barrel and moment of terror that had brought her to this room.
Afterward, he pulled her against his chest, her head in the hollow of his shoulder, his scarred hands gentle on her back. His heartbeat was slowing, heavy and steady, a rhythm she could feel through her entire body.
"You check every joint twice," she murmured against his skin.
"I check everything that matters twice." His arms tightened. Not possessive. Protective. The arms of a man who'd lost something once and was holding on with everything he had. "You matter."
"Since when?"
"Since you pointed a shotgun at my chest and told me morning was relative."
She laughed against his skin. It felt foreign. She couldn't remember the last time she'd laughed.
His hands moved slow and heavy on her back, and his breathing deepened, and Jocelyn lay against the chest of a man who built things to last and felt her own breathing match his, falling into rhythm the way good structures find their balance.
She slept without dreaming.
His arms held through the night.