Rough Hands (Gentle Giants #9)

He can crack stone with his bare hands. He takes his time with me.

He's six-foot-six. I barely clear five feet.

His hands can split stone. They can also take me apart one slow inch at a time, and I have the bruises to prove he's very good at it.

I'm the curator who cried over one of his sculptures. Alone, in a storage room, over a piece that isn't for sale and never will be. I've never told anyone.

Dorian Vance is the artist who noticed.

The first time I'm alone in his studio he stands behind me to show me how to work the clay, and my hands disappear inside his, and so does every sensible thought I have ever had. He's twice my size in every direction. He's spent his whole life being careful with a world that isn't built for him.

I don't want him careful.

I want to know what happens when a man who makes things for a living stops holding back — and it turns out what happens is the storage room of my own gallery, forty people drinking champagne one floor below us, catalogues all over the floor, and me finding out exactly how much of him I can take.

Turns out: all of it.

Then he shows me what he's been making in secret. It's small enough to sit in his palm. It has my stance and the lift of my chin and no face at all — because my face, he says, wasn't the part he was trying to understand.

He calls it Still Here.

A quiet giant who won't rush anything, a tiny curator with a sharp mouth, and a size difference that neither of them can stop thinking about. Ends with a bronze in the window and a baby on the way. He's enormous. He's careful. And he is completely, quietly hers.