Outlaw Lake

Book 2: Rustler Mountain

by Maisey Yates

Genres: Action & Adventure Romance; Contemporary Romance; Western Romance

Synopsis

True to their family name, the Wilders of historic Rustler Mountain, Oregon, have an outlaw lineage and a wild nature to match. But when it comes to love, an untamed heart might know best . . .

Carson Wilder and Perry Bramble have been best friends forever, starting with their painful childhoods. As far as romance, Carson always knew he wasn’t good enough for her. And by the time they were grown, their bond was too important to risk messing up. Now, Carson is grieving the death of his wife. And like always, Perry is his rock. He can’t imagine life without her. But he may have to.

Perry has loved Carson since she was 7 years old. He never showed a hint of interest in her beyond friendship, but two-plus decades later, he’s still the most important person in her life. Maybe too important. Inspired by the diary of an ancestor who left everything behind to come west as a mail order bride, Perry stuns Carson with a decision: She’s moving to a neighboring city to expand her florist business—and to find love and start a family.

Carson hates the idea, but he’ll do anything for Perry’s happiness. He’ll even help get her historic home fixed up for sale. She can stay with him at his ranch house on Outlaw Lake in the meantime. What ensues are dinners filled with laughter, dating app disasters—and Carson wondering why he’d look for another woman when the one he loves is right here. His answers may lie in the letters he finds from the man who married the mail order bride. . . . But can he finally gather the courage to be true to his wild heart—before it's too late?

Release date: September 30, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

There is nothing left for me here. I’m going west.

—Mae Tanner’s Diary, June 15th, 1899

Perry Bramble loved Carson Wilder with all her heart.

It was just that her heart had been irrevocably broken into pieces when she was a child, along with any trust she might have had in the world, and Carson was an emotionally unavailable hot mess who had fallen in love with another woman.

As caveats went, those were pretty big ones.

It was why Carson was her best friend in the whole world, and nothing more. It was why she spent every evening with him, and many mornings, even though it wasn’t convenient for either of them.

It was why they were attached—if not at the hip, then at the very least, the soul.

They had been best friends since she was seven years old, when her family had moved in next door to the Wilder Ranch.

Stay away from them, they’re not the right kind of people.

That was what her dad had said, in his neat clothes with a bland expression on his face. And later he would turn into a monster and roll up those same sleeves while he hit her mother, and if that didn’t satisfy his rage—Perry herself.

Perry lived with a villain. She hadn’t understood that right away. What she did know was that … if her dad thought the Wilders were bad, she wanted to know about them.

She’d sneaked onto their property, and she could still remember plain as day, meeting a nine-year-old boy in overalls—nothing else—with skinny arms and a bony chest—who looked her square in the eye.

Do you want to play?

I do.

They’d spent the afternoon playing pirates, and when it was over they were best friends. As they had been ever since.

Not without trials, tribulations, and her dad trying to tear them apart, but Perry had learned one thing when she’d decided that Carson Wilder was her person: She was more than happy to be a rebel as long as she had a cause.

Her cause was Carson.

Though now she was thinking maybe—maybe—her cause needed to be herself.

She chewed the inside of her lip as she finished putting together her last arrangement of the day, which was due to be picked up just as she closed her shop, Bramble Flowers. Then she was going to Carson’s for dinner.

Instead of going on a date with Stephen Lee, which was stupid. He’d asked her to dinner, and she would have said yes, but she had her standing plans with Carson. They were not firm or official and could easily be blown off, but she hadn’t done it.

It was hard to want a new relationship when the one she had was so all-consuming.

And also she was wary of men.

Thanks, Dad.

She had once loved her dad with all her heart too.

It would have been easier if he had consistently been a fire-breathing dragon, but he hadn’t been. It was why she rolled her eyes when young girls on the internet talked about red flags in men. As if there were clear and obvious signs that were visible to anyone and everyone from the first—and sure, there were men like that.

Those men didn’t scare Perry.

It was the ones who smiled, who went to church every Sunday, and Wednesday besides.

The ones who built such a good facade that no one would believe they were monsters if you told them. And even if they did believe, they’d make excuses.

Why ruin a good man’s life?

Her father had status, had friends in the community, and a good job. He smiled easily.

A smile that could quickly turn, changing the temperature of the room. A smile that trained everyone in the house to walk on eggshells to avoid the explosion that could come if anyone stepped wrong.

Perry was very good at taking careful steps. Ironically, given what an absolutely transparent mess he was, Carson never made her feel she had to watch her step.

If Perry thought back really hard, all the way back, to the last time she’d had someone who counted as a boyfriend, she could easily say why it worked so well.

She’d never cared about that guy more than he’d cared about her. She’d always known walking away would be easy.

She’d never wanted her whole life to be wrapped around a man, not the way her mother’s had been.

The joke was on her, she supposed. She had thought that sort of obsession only came with romance.

But she chose not to think about Carson Wilder. Instead, she chose to think of the building in Medford—an hour away from Rustler Mountain—that had ivy climbing the sides and would be available in six months to house a new, larger florist shop.

The building that would require a heck of a down payment— one she could only realize by selling her house. Since she was renting this little building on Main Street, she wouldn’t get anything from vacating it.

Her only asset was the Victorian house she’d inherited from her grandmother—which had issues that went well beyond the cosmetic. But if she sold it, she’d be able to buy the building in Medford and that would allow her to expand her business and her focus.

Most of which involved trying to grow a massive array of flowers for weddings. And maybe working nights at the twenty-fourhour drive-through coffee stand off the freeway—also over an hour away, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

She had a plan. For the first time in a long time.

She finished up her arrangement and waited for the customer to arrive. And once he’d left, she turned the sign, locked the door, and zeroed out her register.

She took a deep breath, and her lungs expanded, her heart lifting slightly. She always felt this way when it was time to see Carson.

Which was why she had to move forward.

It was also the reason for the broken date.

And the dry spell of the last several years.

Her general girl treading water in circles around a man aesthetic.

She loved Carson with all her messed-up, broken, crushed little heart, and that ended up looking a lot like codependence.

Or so a therapist she saw once eight months ago had said. She hadn’t gone back because who wanted to hear that the most important relationship in their life was holding them back?

Not Perry.

But the worry had wormed its way into her brain like a weevil and had sat there, chewing and chewing and chewing.

She was devastated over what she was going to tell Carson tonight, yet she still felt so happy she was going to see him. As if she was racing toward the best part of her day even though tonight, it was going to be weird and difficult and maybe even terrible.

She was, perhaps, dramatizing.

It wasn’t like she was moving to Canada. Or like she was moving tomorrow.

They’d lived farther apart before.

The last time that happened, he got married to someone else.

She had comforted herself for a number of years with the knowledge that Carson didn’t seem to be interested in love. He was stoic and hard, her dearest friend. A man who was sometimes more like a well-guarded safe than a human being.

But he trusted Perry more than he did anyone else.

And in the absence of romantic affection, she’d been … happy with that. Sort of.

But he’d fallen in love with someone else. So the problem hadn’t been him. It had been Perry all along that he couldn’t love. That had been a wound she’d had a hard time healing.

She shoved that thought way, way, way out of her brain.

If she moved away, maybe she’d get married. Or not. She would move forward with starting a family because that was what she wanted, and she wasn’t going to wait around for a man she might never meet to get the ball rolling.

Just as she was done waiting for a man who was never going to …

She was doing this … well, not because of him. It was because of her. And her need to get a life. A bigger life.

She told herself that as she drove down Rustler Mountain’s quaint main street and looked at all the beautiful hanging baskets of pink petunias, smiling slightly at the new, updated plaques shining bright against the building facades.

Along with local wine and stunning mountain views, history was one of the big tourist draws in Rustler Mountain. As a gold-rush town eight miles from the California border, the romanticized American West was baked right into the red brick of the buildings.

The most notorious local legend was the death of notorious outlaw Austin Wilder right on the main street Perry was driving along now. An ancestor of her very dearest friend in all the world.

But Carson’s brother Austin, named for the same man who was killed in these streets, had written a novel based on that event. His research had changed the long-held narrative in town, and since then there had been a lot of updates that gave folks a much deeper understanding of the history of town.

She’d miss this place.

That hollow thought reverberated through her as she drove on, out of town and along the road that would carry her to Outlaw Lake, Carson’s part of the vast Wilder Ranch.

When she pulled up to the modern ranch house, Carson was halfway out the door. Ready to greet her. She smiled and her heart squeezed.

She could remember him when he was a child. That skinny little boy in overalls. She had that picture so clear in her head, and she thought she probably always would.

But he was not that boy now.

Carson Wilder was well over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and the physique of a man who lifted tires and hay bales for fun. He had let his military haircut grow out over the last few years, his dark blond hair still short on the sides, but now longer on the top. It was rare to see him without his cowboy hat, but he’d clearly come in from working the ranch a while ago. His hat had been discarded, along with his boots. He was wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare.

A common enough sight, and yet it also spoke to the level of intimacy in their relationship.

Intimacy was the wrong word. It was a nice word. But it made them sound like emotionally healthy human beings, and she had to remember that they were not.

She put her car in park, and Carson opened the door and held it, waiting for her. “Hey,” he said, a smile on his handsome face.

His blue eyes were more intense than the sky.

She had to look away. “Hey, yourself.”

She ducked under his arm and went into the house. It was military neat, just like always. He was terrifying that way. Perry herself was more … eclectic. She liked a clean dining table and a made bed. But there were also ribbons and odds and ends all over the place, and dried flowers hanging from every corner of her kitchen ceiling.

Carson’s house had been as clean as if it was awaiting inspection until after his wife had suddenly died. Then it had been a mess, which was so unlike him it had been scary. A few weeks of untidiness had been one thing, but the ongoing mess had been a reflection of the pain inside him, pain he couldn’t get a handle on.

Thankfully, right now it was clean. Which made her think he was doing well. Was more like himself.

“Pizza?” she asked.

“Yeah, I had to go into Medford earlier, so I got a take and bake.”

“Ooooh.”

She smiled, and for a minute things felt normal.

The oven timer went off and she followed Carson into the kitchen. It was such a pretty kitchen. A lot more stylish than anything Carson would have chosen on his own, but then, that was the whole house.

The white countertops and emerald green cabinets had been chosen by Alyssa, who’d died less than a year after the house had been finished.

And Carson still had to live in it.

She shrugged that thought off and looked at the white double oven with the gold door handles, watching as he pulled the pizza out.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You cook for me often enough.”

“I do, it’s true.”

One of them did, every night. They were never alone. They went out together; they spent their downtime together.

It was a lot.

And never enough.

This was so perfect. It was even more perfect when they sat at his dining table with pizza. And they’d do it again tomorrow, and the day after that and the day after that and they would never, ever change.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said, setting her uneaten pizza crust down on her plate—she didn’t like crust.

He picked her crust up and started to eat it like a breadstick. “Oh yeah?”

She looked at those blue eyes, and emotion expanded in her chest, so big and bright it couldn’t be contained. Carson Wilder was the love of her life.

And that was precisely why she had to leave him.

She let out a long, slow breath. “Carson … I’m moving.”

I feel like I should be sorrier to leave, but the truth is it’s a relief. I could never be what everyone wanted me to be at home. I’ll miss the ones I love, but I’d rather be who I am surrounded by strangers than keep on trying to be someone I’m not with friends.

—Mae Tanner’s Diary, July 19th, 1899

Carson stared at Perry, whose face was as familiar to him as his own. Hell, more so, probably, since he didn’t look in the mirror much. He never took a selfie, but he looked at her every day.

He’d have been tempted to make a joke if that familiar face, those bright green eyes and that mouth that pointed down slightly at the corners, didn’t look so unhappy.

“What do you mean you’re moving?” he asked, pushing his plate into the center of the table.

He’d eaten all of Perry’s crust, so he didn’t need the plate anymore.

“It’s pretty self-explanatory.”

“You’re sitting still,” he said, in spite of himself. If he and Perry couldn’t make jokes even when it was clearly a bad time to joke, then everything was pointless.

“I’m leaving,” she said, a small notch denting that space between her eyebrows.

He couldn’t wrap his head around what she was saying. If someone else had been saying those words, he’d think it meant they were moving away. Leaving town. But Perry didn’t mean that. She couldn’t mean that.

She belonged here. Like the sun, the sky, the mountains. She couldn’t up and leave any more than the trees could pull themselves up by their roots and run off.

But she was sitting there, looking at him like that. Saying that. “You’re moving out of your house?”

She spread her hands out flat on the table. “Yes.” She seemed relieved.

“Down the street or … ?”

“To another town.”

It was his turn to furrow his brow. “What?”

“I need to … I need … something?” She turned her hands over, palms up, spreading them wide. “I have been treading water for … for years, Carson, and I have to stop.”

“You haven’t been treading water. You’ve been sitting at my kitchen table.” Her eyebrows moved up, just fractionally. She said nothing, and he found it annoying. “Perry.”

Her shoulders shook, as if she shivered. “I want to expand my shop,” she said. “And I found a place in Medford. And I want …” She let out a long breath. “I want to have a baby. Someday. And how am I ever going to get that life sitting here every night?”

He felt like she’d punched him. In his guts. In his face. “Excuse me?”

“I would like to have a baby, Carson. I am thirty-two years old, and it’s time to do something … more.”

“You don’t have a boyfriend,” he pointed out.

“I don’t need a boyfriend to have a baby. All I need is sperm.” The word rolled around in his head for a minute, all alone. Sperm.

It left him feeling … not good.

It was just distasteful to think about that word and Perry, together.

But not more distasteful than thinking of her leaving. Than thinking of her … having a baby. Moving on. From him.

He realized that was a thought that bordered on unhinged. But she was … his lifeline. His … God dammit, she was his person. In a way he couldn’t have explained to another living soul. She wasn’t just a friend. But she’d never been his lover. She wasn’t a sister. It was deeper. More complicated. It was …

“We aren’t good for each other,” she said softly.

He looked up at her, then down at their empty plates, and back up at her. “What the fuck does that mean? And you’re wrong. You don’t like crust, and I just ate your crust.”

She sighed heavily. “That’s actually the issue, Carson. The crust. That I don’t finish it, but you do. It’s … codependence.”

“I thought it was you being picky and me being raised with an old man who made me clean my plate?” It wasn’t funny. He didn’t laugh. Neither did she.

“It’s … enabling.”

“It’s pizza crust, Per, not crack.”

“For God’s sake!” She slammed her palms down on the table. “You know what I mean.”

He didn’t, though. Or he didn’t want to. Or maybe he did but he didn’t see it as a problem and couldn’t understand why she did.

“Perry,” he said, his tone serious now because she was being ridiculous, and he wasn’t fucking around. “You don’t need to leave to have what you want.”

He deliberately left the implications of everything she said she wanted out of his mind. He deliberately did not imagine her choosing random sperm. Being pregnant.

The image made him think of a desecrated saint. He couldn’t cope with it.

She could get anything she wanted or needed here. She was being dramatic, and for some reason she was making him her bad object, which was a fine fucking thing.

He’d protected her, cared for her, for most of their lives.

For twenty-five years.

They’d hidden from her father in the old barn. Run feral out in the fields and played pirates at the lake.

Life moved on, relentlessly, horrendously, but Perry was like Neverland. His safe and never-changing haven.

He’d tried to be that for her.

Now she was leaving?

“You don’t understand,” she said, looking bleak.

“Obviously I don’t.”

“We can’t keep doing this. It’s not good for either of us. I could have been on a date tonight, but instead I’m sitting here in my childhood best friend’s kitchen, letting him eat my pizza crust.”

“You had a date?” he asked. Her dating life wasn’t really the point of the conversation, but it snagged his thoughts all the same.

“Yes. I did. Stephen Lee asked me to dinner.”

He frowned. He liked Stephen. Which actually kind of pissed him off. Stephen was good enough for Perry. He was an accountant, and he had his own tax firm. He and Austin both used him, in fact. He was successful and nice and honest and exactly the kind of man who could give Perry babies and a decent life.

He hated that such a great guy had asked Perry out and that she should have gone with him. Damn, he hated that a lot.

“You could have gone,” Carson said.

“But I didn’t because I knew you and I would have dinner if I didn’t.”

That made his chest glow with warmth. Perry chose him.

But she shouldn’t have—that was the thing. Because all Perry was ever going to get from him was this. Him eating her pizza crust.

That wasn’t true. He’d given Perry more than that.

He’d encouraged her to apply to the college she’d wanted to go to, and he’d been on the phone with her while she did her financial aid and scholarship applications. He’d offered to pay for her school if she didn’t get enough money so that she would never have to ask her horrible father for anything—in the end, everything had been covered.

He’d promised himself he would always be her hero.

Her father had come to the house looking for her once, wild-eyed and furious, convinced that Carson was messing with his daughter. He’d been seventeen. Perry had been fifteen.

Carson had punched her father in his fucking face, and the man had had to wear a bruise on his face to his job as a mortgage broker. He’d had to sit there with the marks of violence on him in the pew at church.

Just as his wife and daughter had done for years. Though he’d never struck them where the bruises would show. His abuse wasn’t caused by a temper he couldn’t control, or anger management issues, it was systemic, controlled violence that wore a smiling face in public while inflicting pain in private.

Carson had never touched Perry in violence or as a sexual object. He’d been determined—always—to be the man who protected her, not took from her.

But the last two years had been complicated.

If he was honest, the last four years had been.

When he’d moved back home with his bride, she and Perry had gotten along better than Carson and Alyssa had behind closed doors. Sometimes he’d felt as if Perry preferred his wife to him, which had been weird.

In the years before that, they’d written while he was on deployment. Actual letters. It had brought them closer, because he’d been able to put things in writing that he couldn’t say in person.

But he’d locked some things away when Alyssa died. Just the same, Perry had relentlessly been there, open and honest as always and his sunshine when the day was so dark he couldn’t breathe through the oppressive weight of it.

And now the only way she could imagine living differently was getting the fuck out of town?

Because apparently her relationship with him was a burden, not a bright spot.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I mean, you don’t have to babysit me every night.”

“I’m not babysitting you. I’m choosing to be here but … I need to expand my life,” she said. “I just do. I need … you know how it’s always been with my dad.”

Yeah. He did.

And he could still feel the man’s cheekbone cracking under his fist.

He relished that memory.

“The day your dad dies, I’m sending a gift basket straight to hell so Satan will spend extra time on him.”

“I’ll add a card,” she said.

She looked up at him with her wide blue eyes, her blond hair all disheveled, and he couldn’t help but think of her as the little girl she’d been when they’d first met—a tiny little thing, only two years younger than he was. He’d seen her wander onto the property wearing a flowered dress and big rubber boots, and he’d thought to himself: I’m going to keep her.

Like she was a puppy.

But he had kept her, all this time.

“I’m going to do it like Mae,” she said.

“Mae?”

“My five-times-great-grandmother who came out to Rustler Mountain as a mail-order bride.”

“I missed the part of the story where some guy who works in car sales in Medford with an aftermarket spoiler on his Honda sent away to have you come to that mighty metropolis as his bride,” Carson said, his tone dry.

She rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, she struck out on her own and she made her own life, and it’s starting to be abundantly clear to me that that’s what I need to do.”

“You have a shop right on Main Street.”

“And I live month to month because I can only afford one person to help me, and my job is so seasonal it’s painful, and local people only send so many flowers, and and and.”

“So what’. . .