Chapter 17
She found him in his room after dinner, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands open in his lap, staring at them like they were evidence.
Jocelyn leaned in the doorway and watched him for a moment.
The compound was settling into its nighttime quiet — brothers drifting to their rooms, the bar going dark, the low hum of a place winding down.
Anvil hadn't spoken much since coming back last night.
Hadn't needed to. She'd held him in the yard and felt the answer to every question she might've asked vibrating through his body.
Womack was handled. Harold was avenged. And Anvil was sitting in his room looking at his hands like he couldn't decide if they belonged to a builder or a weapon.
"Hey," she said.
He looked up. The weight in his eyes shifted when he saw her — didn't disappear, just rearranged itself. Made room.
"Hey."
She walked in and closed the door. Sat beside him on the bed, close enough that their shoulders touched. His room smelled like metal and soap and the particular warmth of a man who ran hot, and she breathed it in because it had become the smell of safety.
She reached over and picked up his right hand.
He let her. Didn't resist, didn't pull away, just let her lift his hand into the light from the bedside lamp and hold it between both of hers like something she was studying. Which she was.
The forge burns came first. Old scars, long healed, tracing patterns across his palm and up his wrist — the topography of twelve years spent working with things that could burn you if you weren't careful and sometimes burned you even if you were.
She followed one with her thumb, a raised white line that ran from the base of his index finger to the meat of his palm.
"This one?" she asked.
"Bridge job outside Atlanta. Spatter from a bead I should've let cool." His voice was low. Not guarded — open. The voice he used with her in the dark, when the walls came down. "I was twenty-four. Thought I was invincible."
She traced the next one. Shorter, thicker, curving around the heel of his hand.
"Pipe fitting in Savannah. The coupling cracked under heat and the flux sprayed." He flexed his fingers under her touch. "First week on a new crew. Didn't want to show weakness, so I wrapped it in electrical tape and kept working."
"That's stupid."
"That's ironwork."
She laughed softly. Turned his hand over and traced the knuckles — swollen, scarred differently than the burns. Newer marks layered over old ones. The evidence of what his hands had done in the last two weeks, written in split skin and bruises that were still fading from purple to yellow.
"And these?" she murmured.
"You know what those are."
She did. Farr's men. Breen. Womack. Violence done in her name, on her behalf, with hands that had been built for building.
She pressed her lips to his knuckles. Felt him inhale — sharp, held, released slow. She kissed each one. The split skin, the bruises, the scars underneath. Every mark on every finger, a catalogue of everything he'd done with these hands, everything they'd built and everything they'd broken.
"Your turn," he said.
She looked up. His eyes were darker than usual, the lamp throwing shadows that made his face look carved from something ancient. He held out his hand, palm up. Waiting.
She gave him her left hand.
He cradled it the way he cradled everything — carefully, with the full attention of a man who understood what he was holding.
His thumb found her calluses, the thick ridges on her palm from years of gripping wrenches and copper fittings and bung mallets.
He traced them like she'd traced his scars. Reading her.
"Here." He pressed his thumb into the callus at the base of her ring finger.
"Wrench grip. Seven years of tightening fittings by hand because I couldn't afford a power tool."
"Here." The pad of her index finger, hardened and slightly flat.
"Soldering iron. I hold the joint with my finger while the solder flows. Bad habit. My grandmother used to smack my hand."
"And here." The inside of her wrist. Not a callus — a scar. Thin, white, almost invisible unless you knew to look.
"Steam burn. First batch I ever ran. The condenser seal blew and I was standing too close." She smiled. "I was twenty-six. Thought I was invincible."
"That's stupid."
"That's distilling."
His mouth curved. The real smile, the one she'd seen exactly three times — rare enough to count, warm enough to melt the steel he carried in his expression.
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to the steam scar, and the tenderness of it — this man, these hands, his lips on the place where her craft had first marked her — made something crack open in her chest that she'd been holding shut for a very long time.
"I want you on my land," she said.
His mouth stilled on her wrist. She felt his breath catch against her pulse point.
"Not as protection. Not as the club's man watching over an operation." She held his gaze. "I want you there. Living. Building. Waking up in my house and working beside me and coming in at the end of the day smelling like steel."
"Jocelyn."
"I know it's fast. I know it's only been—"
"It's not fast." He lowered her hand, but didn't release it.
Held it against his chest, over his heart, where she could feel the steady thud that quickened when she spoke.
"Three years I've been building things that don't matter.
Gates. Fences. Compound projects that nobody asked for.
I built them because my hands needed to move, not because any of it meant anything. "
He pulled her hand tighter against him.
"Then I walked onto your property and saw the still house. The copper, the joints, the work you'd done with your own hands. And I thought — that's what it looks like. Someone building something that matters."
"A bourbon still matters?"
"A life matters. A legacy matters. Four women holding forty acres because they refused to break — that matters." His eyes burned. "You matter. And I've been building toward you since the day I showed up with a truck full of lumber. I just didn't know it yet."
She kissed him.
Not the desperate collision from the shower. Not the patient discovery of their first night. Something in between — something that had weight and certainty, the kiss of a woman who'd made a decision and a man who'd been waiting for permission to make the same one.
His free hand came to her hip. Drew her toward him, across him, until she was in his lap with her knees on either side of his thighs and her hands on his shoulders and his face tilted up to hers.
The position put her above him — looking down at a man who filled every room he entered, who'd torn through Embry's operation like a force of nature, who was looking up at her now like she was the blueprint for everything he'd ever wanted to build.
"Can you handle it?" he asked. His hands spanned her waist, thumbs resting on her hip bones.
Warm. Steady. Claiming without gripping.
"Being with someone who checks every joint twice.
Who can't stop building things. Who's going to reinforce your barn and your still house and probably your fence line and your porch and—"
"Yes."
"I haven't finished."
"You don't need to. Yes."
She kissed him again and his hands tightened on her waist — not careful this time, not measured, the grip of a man who'd heard yes and was done being patient about it.
He pulled her flush against him and his mouth opened under hers, and the kiss went from warm to scorching in the space between one heartbeat and the next.
She pulled his shirt up. He pulled hers off.
And then it was skin on skin, his scars against her calluses, the map of his life pressed against the map of hers.
She ran her hands down his chest, feeling every ridge and valley — the forge burns, the old injuries, the hard muscle underneath that flexed and shifted under her palms like something alive.
He laid her back on the bed with deliberate care.
Not slow — purposeful. The way he set a beam before welding, making sure the position was right before committing.
His weight settled over her and she arched into it, wanting the pressure, wanting to feel held by something strong enough to carry whatever she brought to it.
"Yours," she said.
Not a question. Not a revelation. A fact, stated plainly, the way you'd state the tensile strength of steel or the proof of a good bourbon. Measurable. Permanent. True.
His forehead dropped to hers. His eyes closed. When they opened, the last wall behind them was gone — no steel, no patience, no careful assessment. Just a man, bare and burning, looking at her like she'd handed him the plans for something he'd build for the rest of his life.
"Mine," he confirmed. And then softer, against her mouth: "Yours."
What followed was nothing like before.
Not the first night's patient exploration.
Not the shower's desperate fire. This was both and neither — slow where it needed to be slow, fierce where the heat demanded it, his body moving with hers in a rhythm that felt less like discovery and more like memory.
Like they'd been doing this for years and were only now recognizing it.
He traced every callus on her hands while he moved inside her.
She traced every scar on his while she moved beneath him.
Two craftspeople reading each other by touch, finding the stress points and the strong points, learning where to apply pressure and where to ease off.
His mouth found the steam burn on her wrist and she gasped.
Her fingers found the forge scar on his shoulder and he groaned — deep, broken, the sound of a man being taken apart by someone who knew exactly which joints to loosen.
She said his name. His road name, because that's who he was — Anvil, the man who shaped steel, the brother who built things that lasted. He answered with her name against her throat, the vibration of it buzzing through her skin.
The ending came like a structure settling. Not a crash — a lock. Everything finding its place, every joint catching, the whole thing solid and balanced and right. She felt it in her chest before she felt it anywhere else, the click of two things aligning that had been built for each other.
Afterward.
She lay against him, her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat slow from thunder to steady rain. His hand moved through her hair — slow, rhythmic, the absentminded motion of a man who'd found something to do with his hands that wasn't building.
"The barn," she said. "Tell me what you're thinking."
"Steel frame. Forty by sixty. Insulated for barrel aging, ventilated for summer heat." His voice rumbled through his chest and into her ear. "Concrete pad, not dirt — moisture control matters for long-term storage. Roll-up doors on the south side for equipment access."
"Keep going."
"The still house gets expanded. Proper drainage, temperature control, room for a second still when you're ready to scale. Your grandmother's house gets the porch reinforced and new wiring — the current stuff is a fire hazard."
"You inspected my wiring?"
"I inspect everything." His hand paused in her hair. "There's room on the north side of the property for a workshop. Not big — twenty by thirty. Enough for a welding rig and fabrication equipment."
She lifted her head. Looked at him.
"A workshop," she said. "For you."
"If you want it."
She put her chin on his chest. Studied his face — the broken nose, the hard jaw, the eyes that had gone soft in the lamplight. A man planning a workshop on her land. A permanent structure, not a temporary measure. Something that said I'm staying.
"I want it," she said. "And I want you to build the gate for the property entrance."
"What gate?"
"The one my grandfather built. Wrought iron, scrollwork, lasted fifty years before the rust took it." She pressed her lips to his chest. "I want you to build a new one. Better. Something that'll last another fifty."
"I can do that."
"I know you can." She settled back against him. His arm tightened around her. "That's why I'm asking."
They lay in the narrow bed, planning a life. The barn. The still house. The workshop. A gate that would stand at the entrance to forty acres of stubborn women's legacy and announce that someone who built things right lived there now.
Outside, the compound was silent. Inside, two people who'd spent their lives building things alone finally had someone to build with.
Jocelyn closed her eyes.
For the first time since her grandmother died, the land didn't feel like a burden.
It felt like a beginning.