Hard Hand

Rhett Vale doesn't have room in his life for one more thing to lose.

The ranch is bleeding money, his father's health is failing, his shoulder's held together by spite, and the family land is one bad season from belonging to the suits. The last thing Rhett needs is the consultant the investors sent to comb through his books — a sharp-mouthed city man in the wrong boots, installed in the foreman's cabin twenty feet from Rhett's back door.

Casey Marrow came to Eden Falls to audit a failing operation and leave. He did not plan on the mud, the cold, the impossible hours — or the gruff, exhausted man who runs himself into the ground holding it all together and won't let anyone carry a single pound of it. Casey's good at reading what a place is worth. He's less prepared for what it costs him to start wanting to stay.

What grows between them has to stay buried. A town that gossips for sport, a crew that runs a betting pool on everything that moves, investors looking for any reason to pull the plug — none of them can know. So Rhett and Casey learn to love in the spaces no one's watching: stolen minutes, locked doors, a hand that drops away a second before someone turns around.

But secrets don't keep on a ranch this small. And when the work turns dangerous and the weather turns deadly, the two of them will have to decide what they're willing to risk out in the open — and whether some things are worth more than the cost of keeping them.

Hard Hand is a slow-burn, hidden-relationship MM romance set on a struggling Montana horse ranch. First in the Eden Falls trilogy. Grumpy/sunshine, forced proximity, one bed when the cold gets bad enough, and two stubborn men who don't know how to be taken care of. A guaranteed happy-for-now that leads straight into Book Two.