Wild Country

I hadn't packed the right shoes.

Elena Brooks builds skylines in Manhattan. She has never built anything in Montana, and she has never wanted to. Six weeks surveying a working ranch outside Bozeman is not the assignment she would have chosen. It is the one that lands on her desk like a sentence.

The ranch belongs to Cole Ryder. Thirty-eight. Ex-rodeo. Six feet of weathered muscle, a hat pulled low, and a quiet that does more to her in three seconds than any man in Manhattan managed in three years. He did not invite her onto his land. His dead brother's debt did. Forty-two days, then she is gone.

The first time he sees her, she is in the wrong shoes. The first time he puts a hand on her, only to steady her, she forgets her own name.

They start with friction. A boundary she should not have crossed. A horse he will not let her near. Coffee at five in the morning she does not ask for and drinks anyway. And the way he watches her, slow and unhurried, like a man who has already decided exactly what he wants and is willing to wait out the clock to get it.

Cole has not let anyone close in five years. Elena has not let a man near enough to undo her since the night her engagement did. So when a storm strands them in a line shack with one small bed and nowhere left to hide, the rule they make is simple. She says his name, he stops. She does not say his name.

What comes after is forty-two days of slow burn that finally, completely catches fire. His patience. His hands. His mouth at the soft place under her jaw. One low word against her skin that no man has ever said to her and meant. Mine. The word she gives back undoes them both. Yours.

Then her firm sends a clause she never authorized but signed. Then her ex calls. Then the deal she came to deliver turns out to be the one thing that could take this land from her for good. And this man with it.

The cowboy she came to leave is the one she cannot survive losing.

Wild Country is a scorching, slow-burn, enemies-to-lovers contemporary Western romance about a woman built on control and the man who teaches her, one unhurried night at a time, how good it feels to give it up. Dual POV. A forty-two-day clock. A grumpy, broken, devastating alpha cowboy and the city woman who walks into his country and never leaves. Standalone with a guaranteed happily ever after.

Quiet cowboy. Slow burn. Filthy payoff. Heat level 5, for readers 18 and over.