He knows the sound of every engine in town. Hers is the one he never expected to hear again.
Noelle Voss is running. From a man who turned love into a locked door. From a city that has nothing left for her. From a past that taught her to count the exits in every room. All she wants is to reach Oregon—until her mother's truck dies on the dead Main Street of Harlan, Ohio, a Rust Belt town the rest of the country forgot.
Cole keeps Harlan running. He fixes everything that moves and most things that don't. He's quiet, careful, and the only mechanic for forty miles. He's also the man who watched Noelle's mother drive that same truck out of town ten years ago—and did nothing. He won't make that mistake twice.
The part she needs is simple. Cole orders the wrong one anyway. A few days become weeks. A motel bill quietly disappears. A kitchen, a town, a whole life begin to take shape around her—warm, comfortable, and built without her knowledge by a man who has confused protecting her with keeping her.
Noelle has survived a cage before. She knows the most dangerous ones don't have bars. They have a nice view.
When she finally sees the machinery beneath the kindness, she'll have to decide what she can forgive, what she refuses to live inside again, and whether a man who can take anything apart can ever learn to build something that doesn't trap the person inside it.
TORQUE is a dark, slow-burning small-town romance about control disguised as care, the difference between loving someone and keeping them, and a woman who refuses to be saved—because she already knows how to save herself.
