Chapter Twenty-One
Feet to the Fire
“Never say never, Thomas Asher.”
His full name sounds both foreign and right at home on my tongue.
Thomas Asher.
I do not move. I cannot breathe. I stand there, perfectly still, as though my body knows that any motion might betray me, that if I so much as shift my weight or blink too long, the careful composure I’ve spent years building will shatter like glass.
The world narrows to the space between us. The forge, the heat, the sound of the town—all of it fades until there is only him. Only those warm hazel eyes watching me with an intensity that makes my knees weak.
My heart knew what my mind refused to accept yesterday.
From the moment I stepped into this shop, from the first syllable he spoke, some part of me recognized him. But I couldn’t let myself see it. I couldn’t let myself hope—because hoping is dangerous and leads to heartbreak.
And yet …
This man. His name.
I have known it longer than I have known how to curtsy properly, longer than I have known which fork to use at supper, or that a woman’s life could be mapped before she ever understood the cost of obedience.
Thomas Asher—the boy who taught me how to steal apples without getting caught, who laughed when I scraped my knee, climbing over the stone wall, and then kissed the sting away as though it were nothing at all. As though his lips on me were the most natural thing in the world.
The boy my mother called unsuitable with a thin smile and eyes sharp enough to cut. The one she forbade me to see after she caught us in the stables, our faces too close, his hands in my hair, our clothes soaked from the night’s storm.
I can still remember how it felt, tentative and sweet, his hands gentle on my face, as though I were something precious. He promised me always. Promised we’d find a way. That our love mattered more than titles or money or anything that the world might say.
And I … help me, I believed him. I believed every word.
I ran after that carriage, screaming his name and reaching out for him until my legs gave out. I didn’t leave my bed for days, refusing to dress or eat. My mother would visit, brushing my hair and reassuring me that I would forget him.
But I didn’t. I never did.
I feel the forge close in around me now, the heat no longer stifling but clarifying, burning away the careful years I’ve spent convincing myself that he was only a childish fancy. A name pressed into the margins of a journal I was told to forget. A memory I was instructed to outgrow.
And yet here he stands.
Older. Harder. The soft edges of boyhood carved away by labor and life, replaced by sharp angles and muscles and a wariness that hadn’t been there before.
But it’s still him. My Tommy stands before me beneath the soot.
His name has grown along with him, as have the walls he’s clearly erected to protect himself.
His gaze remains on me, and I am painfully aware of the way my body answers it.
The way my pulse betrays me, thrumming too fast and eager.
The way my skin seems to remember his hands before my mind has the decency to catch up, the ghost of his lips on mine that last night, his fingers twisted in my rain-soaked hair as we shivered in each other’s arms.
My skin remembers what I’ve tried to forget.
I am engaged. I am spoken for. I am supposed to be planning a wedding to a man I do not love, building a life I do not want. I am supposed to be someone else entirely—someone practical and obedient and resigned to her fate.
But standing here, looking at him, I feel like that girl again. The one who believed in always.
I tilt my chin, schooling my features into something composed, something befitting a woman with a respectable future and a ring waiting to be placed on her finger. I can feel the performance of it, the mask sliding into place like armor.
“Well,” I say lightly, as though my heart is not threatening mutiny in my chest and every part of my body isn’t screaming at me to close the distance between us and damn the consequences, “it’s a pleasure to remake your acquaintance.”
His mouth twitches. It is the smallest reaction, but I see it.
“Nice try, dove,” he says, voice low and knowing. “You were a shit liar then. It hasn’t gotten any better with age.”
The breath I have been holding finally escapes me, slow and unsteady, somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
He’s right. Of course he’s right. I was never good at pretending, not with him. He always saw through me—past the manners and the propriety to the wild thing underneath. The girl who wanted to run barefoot through fields and fight the kids under oak trees and choose her own story.
The girl I’ve been running from for years.
But she’s still here. I can feel her now, clawing her way to the surface, demanding to be seen. Demanding to be chosen.
“You vanished,” I say quietly, abandoning the pretense entirely. If he can see through me, there’s no point in maintaining the facade.
The words hang between us, raw and honest and far too vulnerable. But they’re true. They need to be said.
His expression shifts, something dark passing behind his eyes. Pain. Regret. “I didn’t have a choice, Maddy. They kept me—” He stops, jaw tightening. “It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.”
“It does matter,” I insist, taking a step closer before I can stop myself. “It matters because I thought—I thought you’d changed your mind. That the promises you had made meant nothing. That I meant nothing.”
“You meant everything,” he says fiercely, the words rough and immediate, as though they had been locked inside him for years and finally broke free.
“You were one of the only good things in my life, but the road to the forge is not the same as the one that leads to finishing school. Don’t you dare think for one second that I wanted to leave you.
That I didn’t try everything I could to get back to you. ”
“And now?” I whisper, my voice barely audible over the crackling of the forge. “What about now, Tommy?”
His eyes lock on mine, and I see everything in them—longing and impossibility and the same dangerous hope I feel burning in my own chest.
“Now you have a fiancé,” he says quietly, and the word is an accusation and a reminder and a wall between us, all at once. “And I have a forge. And we’re not children anymore, Maddy. The world doesn’t care what we want.”
“Then perhaps,” I say, voice steadier than I feel, “we should stop asking permission.”
His breath catches. I see it in the way his broad chest stills, in the flicker of something wild and wanting in his eyes.
The boy I loved has become the man I must not.
And that knowledge settles between us, heavy and unspoken, as inevitable as heat and flame—dangerous not because it exists, but because once ignited, it cannot be undone.
I should leave. I should walk out of this forge, return to my gilded cage, marry Alister, and forget Thomas Asher ever existed.
But I’ve tried forgetting him once before.
It didn’t take.