Wild Night Cowboy

Book 0: Four Corners Ranch

by Maisey Yates

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Holiday Romance; Western Romance

Synopsis

Can this cowboy with a dark past live up to her every fantasy?

For years, reformed bad boy Zane Fox didn’t think he’d live to have a future. He might have made some bad decisions in the past, but he would always be grateful for the place they’d led him to. Most recently, a remote cabin in the Oregon woods. Privacy and peace guaranteed—until Shayna Clarke turns up on his doorstep…

Pastor’s daughter Shayna is desperate for her life to change. But she’s read enough romance novels to know that happy-ever-afters don’t just happen. If she wants something different from her small, quiet, comfortable life, she needs to do something different—and quickly! Zane Fox makes her feel things she’s only ever read about—but will wild nights with her cowboy make Shayna brave enough to seize the future she’s always dreamt of?

Release date: August 1, 2023

Publisher: Harlequin

Print pages: 77

Sample

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. ...