Wild night cowboy, p.1
Wild Night Cowboy, page 1
Praise for the novels of Maisey Yates
“Yates brings her signature heat and vivid western details to another appealing story in the excellent Gold Valley series.... Fans of Kate Pearce should enjoy this.”
—Booklist on Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch
“Yates’s outstanding eighth Gold Valley contemporary...will delight newcomers and fans alike.... This charming and very sensual contemporary is a must for fans of passion.”
—Publishers Weekly on Cowboy Christmas Redemption (starred review)
“Fast-paced and intensely emotional.... This is one of the most heartfelt installments in this series, and Yates’s fans will love it.”
—Publishers Weekly on Cowboy to the Core (starred review)
“Multidimensional and genuine characters are the highlight of this alluring novel, and sensual love scenes complete it. Yates’s fans...will savor this delectable story.”
—Publishers Weekly on Unbroken Cowboy (starred review)
“Yates’ new Gold Valley series begins with a sassy, romantic and sexy story about two characters whose chemistry is off the charts.”
—RT Book Reviews on Smooth-Talking Cowboy (Top Pick)
Also by Maisey Yates
Secrets from a Happy Marriage
Confessions from the Quilting Circle
The Lost and Found Girl
Four Corners Ranch
Unbridled Cowboy
Merry Christmas Cowboy
Cowboy Wild
The Rough Rider
Gold Valley
Smooth-Talking Cowboy
Untamed Cowboy
Good Time Cowboy
A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas
Unbroken Cowboy
Cowboy to the Core
Lone Wolf Cowboy
Cowboy Christmas Redemption
The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch
The Hero of Hope Springs
The Last Christmas Cowboy
The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass
Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch
The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge
For more books by Maisey Yates,
visit maiseyyates.com.
MAISEY YATES
WILD NIGHT COWBOY
This book is dedicated to the mothers and mother figures, the ones who make magic at the holidays but, most importantly, give unconditional love.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
SHAYNA CLARKE KNEW one thing. She couldn’t go on like this.
She looked down at the valley below, from where she stood on the viewpoint. The trees were a blanket of green, jagged bottle brushes layered one over the other in an endless patchwork. There was a line where the trees frayed and became red, charred, twisted. The evidence that remained of a wildfire three years ago.
This land, this stalwart land where she’d grown up, found peace, comfort and tranquility for all of her life, had changed more than she had in the past few years.
She had always found peace out here.
Her father was the pastor of the oldest church in Mapleton—both in terms of the age of the building and the average age of the congregation. And while she sat in church every Sunday to hear her father’s gentle word, the wilderness had always been her true church.
She took a deep breath, of the pine, the earth, the way the sun baked them both and mixed them together.
Out here she felt wild, when in truth, her staid floral dresses were turning her into wallpaper.
She could feel herself fading into the peeling paint of the Mapleton Episcopal Church. And she didn’t much care for it.
She also didn’t know how to change.
She didn’t really think she was allowed to. She was Shayna Clarke, pastor’s daughter, and everyone in the church loved her. And also reminded her often that she was a good girl. It never felt like a compliment, but more of a warning in many ways.
Her father had done such a nice thing adopting her, he deserved the good girl she was.
She was his reward for his good deeds.
The expectation that she be a reflection of his parenting, his teachings, and also an emblem for why charity was so important, weighed on her.
It always had.
She knew how to dream. In her mind, she was as wild everywhere as she was here on the mountain. In her fantasies, she knew exactly what she wanted. How to find the sort of man who set her body and soul on fire. How to touch him. How to ask him to touch her.
In reality, she was so entrenched in her role in this small town she felt nearly trapped by it. If she hated it, it would be easy. She could simply break out of the mold and leave all the shattered pieces behind.
But she didn’t hate it.
She loved so many things about her life.
She didn’t know how to be the Shayna she was in her head—the Shayna who read erotic romance and wanted a man who did the things she had found in those books—with the Shayna she was during the day.
A church secretary who loved the work she did in the community.
Her father had adopted her when he’d been fifty. Never married, with no children, he’d taken her in when he’d found out about a congregant whose great granddaughter had needed someone to take her baby.
Shayna loved her father. And she loved the quiet life she lived with him. Or at least, she had.
Until she’d begun to feel like the quiet was stifling her. Smothering her.
She could pinpoint the moment it had hit.
She’d been in the grocery store, buying a fiber drink for her father, and she had run into ten geriatric members of the church and she’d had lovely conversations with them.
Shayna had also seen two people closer in age to her from a distance, and one of them had been a man, a reasonably attractive man named Michael who she knew from high school, and who she’d had nothing to say to.
Nothing at all.
It was realizing that her life was so out of step that had sent her into a spiral. Well, that and her looming twenty-fifth birthday. Because twenty had slid into twenty-five with her barely noticing, and she had realized that twenty-five would slide into thirty with no actual changes.
Unless she made them.
She knew how to make a quilt, and a loaf of bread, and some very good cookies.
She didn’t know how to make changes.
She knew how to dream about freedom. She didn’t know how to take it.
She’d been cautioned against being out here right now, out in the woods, because the rumor had been that Zane Fox was back.
She could only barely remember Zane Fox, and the Fox family. He was at least ten years older than her, so she’d been very young when he was arrested out in front of the church, though she could remember it.
She could remember looking out the church window, seeing him bent over the hood of a police car. She could remember thinking of a wolf at the zoo. Her dad had just taken her to Portland and to the zoo. She’d been devastated by the sight of such a beautiful animal in a cage, and seeing Zane in handcuffs...had been like that.
So strange how it lingered in her memory like that.
She turned away from the view and shrugged her backpack higher up onto her shoulders as she continued down the trail.
And for some reason she felt drawn away from the rocky edge. She generally liked to walk so that she could see down below the whole time—the closest thing to risk-seeking behavior she ever engaged in—but right now she found herself drawn into the trees. Maybe because it was warm.
But either way, she followed that still, quiet voice in her soul. She didn’t always think it was God, but given her upbringing, she did sometimes wonder. And she was a little afraid to ignore it when she felt a strong pull toward something.
So away she went, down the winding trail that led into the dark dense of the trees. It was rocky and uneven, but beautiful, silent there in a way it hadn’t been beneath the wide expanse of sky. She could hear branches shifting, birds fluttering.
She paused and listened.
And then she continued on. And stopped.
There, right there, was a cabin. Sheltered by the trees and from the sun. It was dilapidated. To the point of looking abandoned. She hadn’t realized that anything here was private land, and she knew she was trespassing now. And yet she stood, still, unable to move.
This felt like something. The verge of adventure maybe.
And all her fantasies rose up and tangled with that possibility.
Zane Fox.
His name whispered through her, across her soul, and then she heard heavy footsteps.
“What are you doing here?”
She turned sharply, and her heart leapt up into her throat.
It was him.
She could remember. Those blue eyes. But she’d had no idea how big he was. She only came to the middle of his chest, and when he took a step toward her, she felt like she was being swallowed by him.
His face had scars on it, a day’s wor
He was the kind of man she could find in one of her books. The kind of man her mind conjured up for her late at night.
The kind of man who would know just how to hold her—firm like she wanted it.
Her sexual fantasies had an edge no one would believe. Well, first of all, no one would believe good girl Shayna Clarke had sexual fantasies. Much less that she fantasized about being dominated. That pain and pleasure tangled together in her mind. That she sometimes touched herself with one hand while digging her fingernails into her thigh with the other. Chasing an edge that was hard to find on her own.
That what she liked most of all about men wasn’t a handsome face, but all that strength.
That she felt a deep desire to feel that strength against her own softness. To be held down. Restrained.
Zane could do all of those things.
The thought made her feel thrilled and panicked at once, because this was reality, not the safety of her mind, and she wondered if the mountain air and thoughts of freedom were making her giddy.
The reality was, she was a virgin who should want safety, softness and a man she knew well her first time.
Instead, she wanted a hard, controlling man who would take charge of it all. Who would push her. See what she could handle. She wanted a dominant man, and she knew that.
She’d started reading romances when she’d found them in boxes donated to church charity sales, and it was always the large, commanding men who captured her imagination.
She looked around her small town and she didn’t see those men. Maybe that was the biggest reason she’d always felt stuck.
She knew her fantasies. So well. She knew what she wanted.
She’d never found it.
Right now she felt like she’d run squarely into it.
“I’m...hiking,” she said softly.
“Not here you shouldn’t be, this is Fox land.”
“I didn’t know.”
“You better run, Little Red,” he said, his tone nearly mocking.
“I...”
“You heard me. It doesn’t do you any good to be here. Run away, Little Red, before you get eaten.”
And then she suddenly felt it. The peril, rather than the soft edge of fantasy she’d been tempted to embrace. She was alone in the woods with a large man who was rumored to be dangerous. He’d been arrested, tried and convicted for armed robbery years ago.
He’d served jail time, everyone in town knew it, for a crime he’d certainly committed.
And he was giving her the chance to run. Telling her to run.
So she did. She ran.
She stumbled and her backpack came loose and fell away from her shoulders and she didn’t care. She left it behind as she ran, her feet pounding on the ground as she fled.
And when she reached her car, breathless, her heart pounding, sweat dripping down her forehead, her whole body trembling, she realized that it was the most exhilarating thing that had ever happened to her in her entire life.
* * *
SHE’D BEEN FAR too pretty. And too soft.
He knew who she was.
The preacher’s daughter.
That man had been good to Zane back then, and he could remember the wide-eyed little redhead he’d towed along on those charity visits back in the day.
He’d scared her on purpose. He liked to be left alone.
He’d only come back here because a fool would turn down free property, and while Zane Fox had been many things in his life, he wasn’t a fool now.
The place was hardly habitable, and it brought back bad memories. Of fists and screaming, and illegal stills. Of his mother weeping, and going away and never coming back. Of his brothers, who were probably all dead now, and his father, who was definitely dead.
This wasn’t a happy place.
There were so many ghosts, he had half a mind to sell it, after he got something habitable built. Right now, while the land could fetch a decent enough price, it wasn’t going to sell for what he’d like it to. So he’d been working on a new dwelling for the last few months. Building a house on your own wasn’t the most fun task, but Zane never expected life to be fun.
Life, in his experience, cut sharp and deep and mean.
And was very little else but teeth and claws.
She was soft.
Yes, she was soft, and that was why he’d told her to run.
He didn’t touch soft things.
He liked women who were as hard as he was. Though that came with its own issues. Especially back when he’d been on parole and the girls he’d hooked up with had kept stashes of coke and heroin around.
Ever since he’d come back to Mapleton, though, he’d been more of a hermit, finding something new and interesting in the solitude.
Of course seeing her had made him very aware that he’d had the sort of solitude that left him hard and aching for a woman.
He hadn’t been celibate in a long time, mostly because he’d had five years of enforced celibacy and he was deeply uninterested in continuing on in that vein. So he prioritized sex. And food he liked. Because he knew what it was like to not be able to choose to have those things. And he knew what it was like to not be able to choose your own clothes, and your own TV shows.
He’d lived that for five long years.
So now he chose it all, and he reveled in it, and he didn’t feel guilty about a damned thing.
He’d also spent these years learning a trade. He’d gotten into construction, and then he’d gotten into being a contractor, and during that time he’d learned a lot about real estate and what sold and for how much. From there he’d begun investing in property, and he’d seen the inheritance of the Fox land on his father’s death—in prison of course—as a chance to reclaim his whole sordid childhood.
But then of course he’d decided to build it all himself, and it had turned into a penance of a strange kind that he hadn’t anticipated.
Or maybe it was more of an exorcism. But his reaction to the preacher’s girl proved to him he had a lot more demons than he liked to admit.
He bent down and picked up her backpack. And was hit by the scent of soap and wildflowers. Damn.
He kept it held tightly in his hand as he walked back toward the cabin. If she came back for it, she could have it.
But he had a feeling he’d effectively scared her off, and he wouldn’t be seeing Little Red again.
Which was just fine by him.
Because he would be tempted to eat her up.
CHAPTER TWO
SHE DREAMED OF HIM.
And when she woke up, she was sweaty and throbbing.
She had always been outraged when people had scoffed at sexy books and acted like the women reading them couldn’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. And here she was, letting her fantasies bleed into reality.
He was dangerous. And yet she’d dreamed of him. Big and rough, and over her, kissing her, his lips hot and intense on her skin as he...
She put her hand over her mouth and sat there in bed, her knees drawn up to her chest, her heart pounding.
She should have sex dreams about Michael. Who was safe and anodyne and a known entity and not a source of gossip.
She shouldn’t have sex dreams at all, because she’d never even been kissed.
But that wasn’t how she was built.
Part of her...part of her had sort of hoped...thought that maybe fantasy was only fantasy, and someday she would go on a date with a man like Michael and she would be okay with...normal.
But Michael didn’t make her burn. Zane Fox did.
But she wasn’t an idiot. A dream was a dream. A book was a book. A fantasy was a fantasy.
He wasn’t a fantasy object. He wasn’t the hero in a romance novel. She had to remember that and not totally romanticize him.
Well.
That dream hadn’t been romantic.
She felt flushed all over again.
She got up and looked outside. There was rose-colored light spilling over the top of the mountains and it was going to be a gloriously warm summer day. The kind of day she would normally go and have a hike on.
