I had not packed the right shoes.
Elena Brooks builds skylines in Manhattan. She has never built anything in Montana. She has never wanted to. Six weeks of site work on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside Bozeman is not the assignment she would have chosen. It is the assignment that lands on her desk like a sentence.
The ranch belongs to Cole Ryder.
Thirty-eight. Ex-rodeo. The last living member of a family that has run cattle through three generations of drought, debt and bad weather. Cole did not invite Elena onto his land. His brother's gambling debts did. Forty-two days. After that she is gone.
The first time he sees her, she is wearing the wrong shoes. The first time she sees him, she forgets, for a full second, what she came to say.
They start with friction. A boundary she should not have crossed. A horse he refuses to let her near. Coffee at five in the morning she does not ask for but drinks anyway. The way he leans against the porch rail and watches her draw, saying nothing for hours, until she feels his quiet the way other women feel a hand on the small of their back.
Elena tells herself she is here to work. Cole tells himself she is here to leave. Both of them are lying.
Cole has not let anyone close in five years. Not since the morning he came back from a long ride and found his younger brother dead in the south pasture. He carries the silence of that morning the way other men carry guns.
Then a storm strands her in a line shack. Then her firm sends a document she did not authorize but signed. Then her ex-fiance calls. Then a clause in the resort contract surfaces that could take the south draw from the family in perpetuity.
The deal she came to deliver is not the deal she thought it was.
The man she came to leave is the one she cannot stand to lose.
Wild Country is a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers contemporary Western romance about a woman who has built her life on control and a man who learned to survive by giving it up. About the difference between being chosen and being claimed.
About the kind of love that asks you to come home to a place you have never been.
