Centuria Books · The Last Strong Man
The Last Strong Man — Read the First Chapter
A woman who owns every decision and a man who has spent his life carrying weight alone learn that real strength is a system of chosen reliance—while a mountain comes apart above a sleeping town.
Foreword
Hello, darling. Pour yourself something good — something red, ideally, and something you didn’t have to pretend to enjoy at a networking dinner — because the book in your hands is not going to apologize, and neither are you, not tonight.
I wrote Colt Hargrove because I was tired. Tired of male leads who workshop their feelings before acting on them, who ask permission three times before they kiss her, who treat decisiveness as a character flaw to be unlearned in therapy. Colt does not hedge. He does not consult a working group. He arrives, he assesses, he decides, and he stays — and when Klara tells him she has it handled, he listens, nods, and handles the part she shouldn’t have been carrying alone in the first place. He is, in the most old-fashioned sense of the phrase, a man who shows up. I made him forty-eight, built like something engineered to bear weight, and incapable of speaking in conditional clauses. I made him on purpose. You know exactly why.
Klara Brandt I wrote for you specifically. Yes — you. The one who has a doctorate and a corner office and a passport thick as a paperback and a flat in a good neighborhood and a calendar so disciplined it could run a small country. The one who learned, very young, that being clever was the only currency that bought safety, and so she got brilliant at it, and now she briefs ministers without breaking eye contact and cannot, for the life of her, remember the last time someone simply took care of something for her without being asked, thanked, and emotionally project-managed through the process. Klara is forty-two. She is exquisite at her job. She is so tired she has forgotten she is tired. If you recognize her, you are not alone in this room.
A word on what you’re buying, because I respect you too much to be coy. This book has explicit scenes, and they are not democratic. Colt leads. Klara, for the first time in her adult life, doesn’t have to run the meeting. There is a stalking-adjacent ex named Maxi who weaponizes the language of wellness against a woman who outgrew him, and his particular brand of harm — the Google Doc breakup, the HR-coded sabotage, the soft-voiced character assassination dressed as concern — may feel uncomfortably familiar. There is real institutional menace by the back third. There is also a Ukrainian boat captain who will become your favorite supporting character of the year. Consider yourself told.
Underneath the geopolitics and the yacht and the very good suits, this book is about being allowed to put it down. All of it. The vigilance, the management, the relentless internal translation of every feeling into a defensible position paper. Klara has spent forty-two years believing that if she ever stopped holding the ceiling up, the ceiling would fall. The love story I am about to tell you is the story of a woman discovering that the ceiling was never hers to hold, and of the man who walks into the room, looks at the load-bearing wall she has become, and quietly takes the weight.
I write romance for grown women who are done pretending they want a partner who is, functionally, a slightly taller colleague. I write men who are competent, protective, and unembarrassed about wanting their woman. I write women who are not diminished by being adored — who, in fact, become more themselves inside the shelter of it. I don’t think this is regressive. I think calling it regressive was one of the great cons pulled on our generation, and I am, in my small way, here to repossess what was taken. I will not apologize for any of it, and I would prefer you didn’t either.
So lock the door. Silence the work phone. Tell the group chat you’ve gone to bed early. You haven’t.
Yours, always and without committee approval,
Lady Heartswell
P.S. Huxley has been very quiet in the back of every scene he appears in, and I have noticed, and so has someone else — her book is already being written.
The Man Who Fixed It
The relentless slap of the Mediterranean against the Axiom’s reinforced hull was the only honest thing in the room. Inside the superyacht’s primary conference suite, the air conditioning labored against the Amalfi sun, pumping chilled oxygen over mahogany and sweating crystal pitchers.
Frederik van der Berg held the floor. He leaned over the polished table, fingertips pressed into the wood as if conveying some unbearable psychic weight.
“Before we delve into the technical modalities of the Baltic pipeline,” Frederik intoned, his Dutch accent rounded smooth by decades in parliamentary chambers, “we must first create a perimeter within this dialogue to hold space for ecological grief.”
The throbbing behind Klara’s right temple sharpened to a point. She pressed her thumb into the hollow beneath her jaw, working the tension loose without letting the line of her shoulders move a millimeter. She drew air in slow, controlled the volume of it, kept her ribcage expanding by increments — the breathing of a sniper, not a yoga instructor.
Nobody else in the room was regulating a damn thing. Twelve men, European Energy Security Coalition, slouched in Italian leather and performed their solemnity. Career committee animals. They thrived on optics and abandoned outcomes, generating endless documentation that insulated them from the terrifying obligation of having to actually finish something.
Klara’s stylus hovered over the encrypted tablet on her lap. Her spine was the structural beam holding this entire negotiation upright. Let her attention slip — let one degree of her rigor go — and the pipeline initiative would dissolve into seventy pages of collaborative reflections and zero miles of poured steel. She cataloged Frederik’s vapor, translating his syllables into logistical bullet points, stripping the sentiment, extracting the data.
“We cannot simply build,” Frederik continued, sweeping an open palm. “We must engage in dialogue with the earth. We must acknowledge the trauma of industrialization.”
Sabine leaned in toward her left shoulder. The junior analyst smelled like expensive citrus and ambition.
“Are we factoring this grief paradigm into the Q4 risk metrics?”
“There is no paradigm,” Klara murmured, focus locked on the slow crawl of the slide. “He’s stalling. The German delegation hasn’t committed the subsidiary funding and he won’t openly demand it. Draft an addendum to section four. Hard timeline on the environmental impact survey. Strip the rhetoric.”
Sabine’s fingers flew across her screen.
A notification banner cut across the top of Klara’s tablet, bypassing the Do Not Disturb protocols she had meticulously programmed.
Document Shared: Reflections on Our Relational Journey — Final Pass.
Owner: Maximilian Schreiber.
Metal flooded the back of her throat. Her stomach contracted hard, dragging everything inside her tight against her ribs. She swiped the notification away with a violent flick of her index finger. Gone — but a cold block of lead settled directly beneath her sternum and stayed there.
Maxi hadn’t required a conversation to dismantle three years of shared life. He had required a Google Doc. He had weaponized HR vocabulary to evaluate their compatibility, neatly bulleting her unregulated independence and hostile refusal of collaborative consensus. He had emailed her the document on a Tuesday evening while she was actively triaging a diplomatic crisis in Brussels. She had not shattered. She had not wept over her keyboard. She had read the data, accepted the conclusion, closed the document, kept managing the situation, because falling apart was a luxury reserved for people who had someone standing by to catch them. Klara had no one. She caught everything. She caught everyone.
The low oscillating frequency of the Axiom’s primary generator hitched.
She registered the auditory wrongness a full millisecond before the pitch dropped out entirely. The aggressive hum of the air conditioning sputtered and died. The lighting flickered, plunged the mahogany table into black, surged once into a blinding white, then cut out completely.
The stabilizers died next.
Stripped of the mechanical counterweight fighting the rolling sea, the superyacht lurched viciously to starboard. Glass shattered. A heavy pitcher vaulted off the table and dumped ice water into the carpet. Chairs skidded. Sabine made a sharp ascending sound, hands scrabbling for the table edge.
“Secure your terminal.” Klara’s voice cut clean through the dark. She slammed her boots flat to the floor, widened her stance, took the roll of the deck through her hips.
An emergency siren tore through the un-airconditioned air. Red strobes started firing in chaotic bursts, slicing the suite into stuttering fragments.
The men disintegrated.
“What is the protocol!” Frederik shouted, his voice climbing an entire octave and shedding every smooth parliamentary syllable. “Is this a targeted disruption? Has the perimeter been breached?”
In the strobing red, Klara watched the European Energy Security Coalition collapse inward, surging toward the center of the room, seeking proximity, an overlapping snarl of French and Dutch and Italian.
“We need a localized consensus on our geographical position—”
“Draft a priority communication to the mainland authority—”
“We cannot interface with emergency services without first clearing it through the internal diplomatic liaison — who is handling liaison today?”
They were forming a committee in the dark while the vessel listed under them. The sheer, colossal weight of their uselessness pressed down on her chest. The room was souring fast — stagnant heat, the sharp note of adrenaline going off twelve different bodies at once. The siren hammered her skull on a punishing beat. Her jaw locked. She’d have to wade in, physically insert herself, force them into a line. She’d done it before. She’d do it again. That was the arithmetic of her life.
She cranked the tablet to maximum brightness, intending to weaponize the square of blue light, preparing to stand—
Someone moved.
Through the red bursts, a shape detached from the shadows at the back of the room.
Her fingers clamped down on the tablet.
Colt Hargrove did not shout over the siren. He didn’t ask permission as he routed around the mahogany table. He had an economy of motion that flatly refused the chaos. Every footfall placed. Every shift of his weight absorbing the pitch of the deck plates beneath him.
He walked straight at the bulkhead behind the panicked huddle.
Frederik, turning blind, collided with something solid. “You cannot simply move about the cabin, we are currently establishing a triage hierarchy—”
A hand bypassed Frederik’s shoulder, displacing the Dutch politician backward with the unbothered leverage of a man moving a folding chair out of his way.
Colt reached the far wall. The strobes lit up the heavy metal latch of the yacht’s primary electrical sub-panel, the block-red unauthorized-access warning printed across the casing.
He gripped the latch and tore it open. Metal groaned.
“Excuse me!” an Italian delegate shouted, finger vibrating in the air. “That is an automated system locked by the maritime authority, any manual tamper protocol requires authorization from the—”
“Shut up.”
He didn’t yell it. He projected it. Two syllables that landed with the blunt weight of concrete dropped from height, and the hysteria flattened.
He drove inside the panel. A secondary safety lockout covered the main breakers. He didn’t look for a key. He drove the heel of his palm up and shattered the plastic housing in a single impact.
Her breath stopped.
He buried his hand in the wires, wrenched a heavy lever fully down, held it against mechanical resistance, slammed an adjacent toggle up. His other hand went to his collar, depressing the transmit on a heavy-duty radio clipped to his sternum.
“Cap.”
The reply crackled instantly. Captain Oleg’s thick, unbothered Ukrainian filled the gap between siren wails. “Go.”
“Main bus overload on your port generator. I bypassed the safety lockout on panel four. Kill port engine. Reroute structural power to starboard auxiliary. Drop port anchor immediately to stabilize the roll. Acknowledge.”
“Port engine killed. Starboard auxiliary engaging. Anchor dropping. Stand by.”
Klara stayed locked in her chair. Siren still screaming. Men still vibrating with aborted panic. But inside her body something seismic and irreversible was happening.
The iron band that had been cinched around her ribcage since she boarded this vessel — since she opened Maxi’s document, since she learned a decade ago to expect the failure of everyone within reach — simply snapped.
The relief was physical. A jarring, terrifying spike of pure surrender. Adrenaline that had been bottlenecked behind her need to control the room flooded her like ice water. Her jaw unhinged. The muscles at the hinges went slack. The tension holding her shoulders up by her ears dissolved into gravity. Her chest pulled in unfettered oxygen down to the bottom of her lungs.
It was obscene. She wasn’t managing the crisis. She wasn’t calculating the fallout. She wasn’t holding the roof up.
Someone else had the load.
Beyond the reinforced glass, the iron chain of the port anchor brutally unspooled, roaring into the Mediterranean. The yacht jerked against the sudden resistance, leveled, steadied.
A sharp electric whine spooled up through the deck plates.
The panel under Colt’s hand sparked. He didn’t flinch. He held the breaker open and let the charge cycle through.
The overhead lights blasted back on. The strobes died. The air conditioning vents shuddered and resumed roaring frigid manufactured air onto spilled ice water. The siren clicked off and left a ringing hollow in the air.
The transition from catastrophe back to hyper-luxury was so abrupt the room lagged behind it.
The delegates stood clustered on the carpet, blinking aggressively in the clinical light. They looked down at their tailored trousers, the overturned chairs, the shattered glass. Their instinct for self-preservation mutated instantly back into a desperate need for image control.
Frederik adjusted his cuffs, cleared his throat. “Well. A minor mechanical hiccup. Excellent that we maintained a central point of composure.”
She did not look at Frederik.
Her attention was anchored to the man at the open panel.
Colt released the manual breaker. He brushed shattered plastic from his knuckles. He didn’t scan the room for approval. Didn’t wait for acknowledgment. He closed the twisted metal door, pressed it flush against the bulkhead, and walked back, boots silent on the dense carpet, toward his seat at the perimeter.
Her hands began to tremble. A fine vibration localized in her fingertips, a delayed physiological recoil from a situation she had no protocol for. She pressed her palms flat against the glass of her tablet to hide it.
Unacceptable. She could not afford this loss of internal equilibrium. She demanded structure of herself. She required absolute detachment. The liquefying relief pooling behind her ribs was a structural vulnerability, an unaccounted variable kicking her entire operating system into critical error.
To need someone to intervene was a weakness. To enjoy it was a catastrophe.
As Colt drew level with her chair, the economy of his stride hitched. A fraction of a second.
He stopped. Squared his shoulders to her. He stood close enough that the lingering scent of ozone and mechanical grease and coastal heat coming off his clothes displaced Sabine’s citrus entirely. The architecture of his presence blocked out the room, the delegates, the scattered paperwork, and dropped her into his immediate gravity.
She forced her chin up. The proximity demanded a response she had not prepared.
“Your terminal.” His voice stayed level, an unadorned declarative dropped into the quiet between them.
She looked down. In the dark, in her absolute refusal to let go of the situation, she had crushed her encrypted tablet. The reinforced glass was split clean down the center, destroyed under the violent localized pressure of her own thumbs.
“You’re bleeding,” Colt said.
Managing the Fragile
The splintered glass bit deeper.
Klara mapped the fracture lines on the dead tablet between her palms. Heat needled across her right thumb. A dark bead welled from the heel of her hand, fat enough to drop onto the teak.
Operational control allowed zero physical liabilities. She shoved the ruined device under a stack of printed briefs.
A white linen napkin pressed to the cut. Firm. Steady. Capillary action drank the stain before it could become evidence.
Colt stayed anchored a fraction of an inch away. Heat rolled off his shoulders. Scorched wiring. Marine salt.
He knew exactly what she’d done.
The auxiliary grid locked in with a heavy thud. Overhead lighting flooded the suite in unforgiving white. The glare lit up the flushed faces of delegates mid-flail.
A French envoy swiped at his upper lip. “The infrastructure is entirely inadequate. We demanded total stability.”
Fragile male egos. Instant structural reinforcement required. Exhaustion wedged behind her eyes like iron.
“The transition was handled perfectly, Antoine.” Her voice cut clean through the noise. Tuned. Crisp. Broadcasting safety. “Latency algorithms accounted for the disruption. Secondary metrics are fully intact.”
Antoine stopped swiping. His panic curdled straight into defensive self-importance. “Well. Assuming my subcommittee’s data remains uncorrupted.”
Your data is theoretical garbage. She sealed the assessment in a vault. Your subcommittee exists to justify expense accounts.
“Perfectly uncorrupted,” she lied.
She seized the wheel. The Swedish minister demanded a break to revisit wind tariffs. The Belgian whined about subsidies. Every demand was a plea for validation in a cheap suit. Every complaint required a counter-offer dressed in flattery.
She synthesized the noise. Handed each man his own pathetic conclusion repackaged as vision. The mental gymnastics burned glucose at a punishing rate.
Sabine attacked her backup laptop. “Pivoting the cross-border framework. Should I project the transition slides?”
“Hold,” Klara murmured. “Momentum requires the illusion of organic consensus. Let them exhaust themselves for four more minutes.”
She glanced at Sabine’s secondary monitor.
A banner slid in.
Maxi Schreiber.
A block of concrete dropped into her stomach.
Message: Reviewing the notes Sabine forwarded. Noticing relational friction in your agenda phrasing. Let’s mindful-breathe through these maritime delays. I’m sensing some dysregulation in your current operational tempo.
Acid hit the back of her throat.
Dysregulation. Maxi’s favorite blade. Clinical vocabulary repurposed to dissect her competence. HR buzzwords weaponized to recast a boundary as hostility.
He’d ended it with a Google Doc. Thirty pages. Reflections on Our Relational Journey. Bulleted complaints about her resistance to reciprocal vulnerability. He sipped ethically sourced chamomile across the room while she read.
She dismissed the notification. Hard tap. Left index finger.
Her right hand throbbed under the linen. Pulse hammered against the cut. Expand. Contract. She boxed the pain into a corner and shoved it under the floorboards of her mind.
Across the teak, Colt sat in shadow.
The delegates leaned in. Waved expansive hands. Hoarded the oxygen.
Colt leaned back.
He took up space without asking and without performing. Shoulders squared against the bulkhead. Wrists loose on his thighs. No phone. No nodding to flatter the speaker.
He watched.
His focus had weight. It settled hot at the join of her neck and shoulder.
A Dutch committee man launched a diatribe about hydrogen logistics. She arranged her mask. Slight smile. Nods at exact intervals.
She caught Colt’s reflection in a dead monitor across the suite.
He wasn’t watching the speaker.
He was watching her hands. The wad of linen pinned against her right thigh.
He was tracking the labor.
That stripped a layer raw. Men in her radius never saw the labor. They extracted it. Demanded it. Called it facilitating group harmony while she carried a collapsing room on her back.
Colt applied no pressure. He was calculating her load-bearing capacity. Watching her hold up the structural integrity of a useless dialogue.
“Therefore, the tariffs must remain flexible.” The Swede folded his arms like a conqueror.
“A brilliant synthesis,” she said instantly. “We’ll draft the addendum to encompass your foresight.”
Validation acquired. Defenses lowered. Ego stroked.
Colt’s jaw locked. A tendon snapped tight along his neck.
He pushed off the bulkhead. Boots struck teak. The sound severed the chatter in one stroke.
“Oleg wants the forward deck clear,” Colt said.
No collaborative phrasing. No padding. No polite inquiry.
The men blinked.
“Maintenance.” The word landed like a dropped hammer.
The Swede scrambled for his legal pads. “Of course. The meeting is adjourned. We made excellent progress.”
Progress. Her molars ground. Zero actionable consensus. Three new working groups initiated to camouflage the failure.
Chairs scraped. The delegates funneled toward the mahogany doors, already complaining about the hallway temperature.
Sabine hovered. “I can run the synergy report upstairs. Should I flag Maxi’s integration protocols?”
“No.” The word cracked.
Sabine flinched.
Collateral damage. Modulate. “Leave the integration protocols to me. You navigated the blowout perfectly. Take your break.”
“Copy that.” Sabine grabbed the screen and bolted.
The doors clicked shut. Silence rang in her ears.
She locked her knees. Two hours of accumulated weight set in her muscles like drying plaster. Her right hand shook visibly under the soaked napkin.
She reached for the stack of briefs. Three hundred pages of dense text inside heavy cardstock.
Her right thumb refused the command. The torn skin rejected the work entirely.
Fingers slipped.
The stack hit the floor. A slap of paper and scattering cardboard.
Pages fanned six feet across the dark wood. Fifty hours of political mapping sprawled in disarray.
A shadow peeled off the corridor. Frederik stepped back in.
“Oh, Klara.” His voice oozed practiced concern. “Are we experiencing a minor overload? Let me help you process the moment. We can establish a space to unpack—”
“Step outside, Frederik.”
The order didn’t come from her.
Colt occupied the gap between the fallen pages and the diplomat. Materialized there. Immovable. Non-negotiable.
Frederik puffed his chest. “I was merely making myself available as a sounding board. It’s crucial to monitor emotional bandwidth—”
“She dropped a folder.” Colt’s voice had no tonal fluctuation. Sand and gravel. “She isn’t having a crisis. Walk away.”
The mandate hit Frederik in the sternum. He opened his mouth. Found no traction in Colt’s posture. Calculated his odds, pivoted, and fled.
The latch sealed.
Isolation.
She stared at the documents. The bridge of her nose burned. Operational control unspooling across the floorboards.
She knelt. Her heels dug into the decking.
A large rough hand intercepted the motion.
Colt crouched. Economy of movement. No wasted energy.
“I have it.” Her voice thinned. “I am perfectly capable of retrieving my own materials.”
“Didn’t say you weren’t.”
He swept the sliding sheets together. Calloused fingers squared the cardstock. One solid tap against the deckplate. Order.
He stood. Held the stack out in his left hand.
She straightened. Reached with her uninjured left.
“Right hand.” His directive was low. Grating.
Her pulse kicked. “My left is sufficient.”
“Show me the cut.”
No room to negotiate. He didn’t invite her to discuss her complicated feelings about the laceration. He didn’t tentatively suggest a collaborative healing journey.
He demanded reality.
“It requires no external intervention.” Her chin tipped up. “A minor abrasion. I have cataloged the liability.”
“Let me see it.”
“Mr. Hargrove. Your contract concerns structural logistics. Not my physiological maintenance.”
He took one step forward.
The oxygen left the suite. His frame blocked the salon windows. He dropped the stack onto the table. A dull thud through the floor.
He reached out.
Every wiring in her body screamed retreat. Reposition. Build a defense. Her boots stayed bolted to the deck.
He didn’t grab her wrist. He didn’t force contact. He offered an open palm, face up, exactly one inch from hers. Waiting.
The contrast gutted her.
Every man in her orbit demanded she hold him up. Maxi needed his bottomless narcissism validated. Frederik needed his mediocrity praised. Her entire architecture relied on managing the endless weakness of men.
Colt just wanted her hand.