When Emery Langston returns to her late father’s failing Texas ranch to sell it and escape her suffocating city life, the last person she expects to find running the place is Ryder Kane—her older brother’s best friend, the town’s most dangerous cowboy, and the man who once shattered her teenage heart with a single cold refusal. Ryder is six-foot-four of hard muscle, scarred hands, and a reputation for riding horses—and women—until they break. He needs Emery’s land to save his own ranch from foreclosure, and he’s willing to strike a devil’s bargain: she stays thirty days to help run the annual Harlan County Rodeo, and he’ll make sure she walks away with enough money to never look back. But the moment those dirty silver spurs dig into the stirrups beside her, old sparks ignite into an inferno. Stolen kisses in the hayloft turn into nights of raw, filthy pleasure under the stars. Ryder doesn’t do gentle—he takes, he claims, he ruins. And Emery discovers she likes being ruined. Yet when a ruthless developer threatens everything they both love and a rodeo accident rips open Ryder’s darkest secret, the walls between them come crashing down. Now Emery must decide: sell the ranch and run, or risk her heart on a cowboy whose love is as wild and permanent as the brand he leaves on her soul.
