Tainted Soil

He didn't save her farm. He bought it.

Elara Vance is down to her last ninety days. Her father is dead. Her mother is gone. And the bank is circling sixty-two acres of Montana dirt like a vulture with a briefcase. She needs a foreman she can't afford. What she gets is Kaelen Thorne—a man built from silence and scarred knuckles who shows up at her gate offering to work for nothing but a roof and a meal.

He's too good to be real. Too skilled. Too patient. Too willing to bleed for a stranger's land.

Because Kaelen isn't a stranger. He's been watching her for four years. And six weeks before he knocked on her door, he walked into a bank and bought every dollar of her debt.

Every fence post she grips. Every field she plants. Every breath she takes on that property—it belongs to him. She just doesn't know it yet.

By day, he pushes her body past its limits in the dirt and the heat, stripping away her pride one calloused hand at a time. By night, he reminds her exactly who owns the ground beneath her boots—and the skin beneath his grip.

She calls it survival. He calls it possession. The truth is somewhere in the soil between them—dark, fertile, and impossible to wash off.

But secrets buried under bunkhouse floors don't stay buried forever. And when Elara finds the documents with her name where the bank's should be, the man she let into her bed becomes the man who bought her cage.

Now she has to decide: burn it all down, or learn to grow in tainted soil.