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Rust and Bone
Paperback
Series: Stripped Down, Book 1
Publisher: J.T. Blackwood
Published: Mar 14 2026
Pages: 260
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.59 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Harper Gallagher is four hundred and eighty-seven dollars away from a bus ticket out of Oakhaven, West Virginia. She works double shifts at a dying diner, hides her savings in a coffee can behind the toilet, and counts every dollar like a prayer. She has a plan. She has a number. She has a deadline.
Kael Maddox has a different plan.
The mechanic at the end of Route 19 doesn't talk much. He tips too well, drinks his coffee black, and watches Harper from stool nine with the patience of a man dismantling an engine - methodically, silently, and with absolute knowledge of how every piece fits together.
When Harper's tire blows on a dark stretch of road at midnight, Kael is already there. When her father disappears, Kael knows why. When her car dies, her phone breaks, and the walls of her life collapse one by one, there is only one door left standing.
His.
She moves into the room above his garage. He gives her a lock, a heater, and a cup of black coffee every morning brewed exactly the way she drinks it - a detail he memorized months before she ever spoke his name.
Harper tells herself she's saving to leave. Kael is making sure the math never adds up.
But cages built from warmth are harder to escape than cages built from iron. And the most dangerous thing about the man who destroyed her life to keep her is that he might be the only person who ever made her feel safe.
RUST AND BONE is a full-length standalone dark romance. This is not a safe book. The hero does not apologize. The heroine does not need rescuing. Reader discretion is strongly advised.
Tropes: possessive hero, forced proximity, blue-collar romance, obsessive love, morally grey hero, he falls first, small town, captor-captive dynamic.
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