Gold Buckle Winter

GOLD BUCKLE WINTER

A High-Heat Contemporary Western Rodeo Romance Series

3-Book Series • Open Door (high heat, explicit) • HEA each book

“Three brothers. One handshake empire nobody wrote down. And three women who arrive holding the pen.”

For eighty years the Strickland Stock Yard outside Cielo, Texas has run on one man’s handshake and one man’s memory. Three years ago that man dropped dead in his own sorting pens with a wrench in his hand, and left his three sons a leather ledger, a barn full of bloodlines and thirty years of business that exists nowhere on paper.

A bull rider with a rebuilt shoulder and one winter left to prove it, and the physical therapist whose signature can save him — whose father owns the money strangling them both. A pickup man who has spent nineteen years buying back three seconds, and the Roman trick rider who has never let anybody catch her. The brother who stayed, and the state veterinarian whose audit can end him in sixty days.

Harlan Croft of the Apex Rodeo Group does not want the arena or the stock. He wants the paperwork. High-heat, open-door romance with a guaranteed happily-ever-after in every book — three interconnected standalones, one family’s independent dirt, and three women who arrive holding the pen.

Book One — Eight Seconds from Home (Rhett & Juniper)

“A bull rider with one winter left to prove his shoulder still works — and the therapist whose signature can save him, who refuses to be anybody’s rescue.”

Rhett Strickland came home to Cielo, Texas with three trips to Vegas behind him and a right shoulder held together by titanium screws. The family stock yard runs on his dead father’s handshakes and his brothers’ sleepless bookkeeping, and a certified letter has just made every dollar of it conditional: the sponsorship continues only against documented rehabilitation — weekly, certified, signed by a licensed specialist qualified in rodeo athletic injury. There is exactly one inside a hundred miles.

Dr. Juniper Callow built her clinic out of nine hundred square feet of former dry cleaner, with a contractor she could not quite afford and every dollar borrowed under her own name, so that nobody — least of all Arthur Callow of Callow Feeds — could ever hold the deed to her. She has not spoken to her father in six years. She has never signed a form she did not believe. So when the biggest name in Texas rodeo walks into her clinic with a fitness-to-ride form and a smile built to open doors, she refuses to sign it.

What she offers instead is harder than a refusal. Three mornings a week at six. No flirting, no jokes, no charm. Every report out of her hands, her findings, her signature. It is the only arrangement that keeps his career and her doors alive — and it is the exact arrangement that can end them both, because a therapist who touches the patient whose clearance she is certifying has no licence left to sign with.

Then Harlan Croft of the Apex Rodeo Group starts circling the yard’s arena leases with a deadline and a boardroom smile. Arthur stops threatening and starts arranging — pulling accounts, sending compliance officers, leaving exactly one door open and standing in it. And a man with a notebook begins asking the town what time a big black dually leaves the alley behind the clinic. In Cielo, gossip travels faster than any lawyer. But gossip can be denied. A photograph with a licence plate legible in the frame is not gossip — it is a document.

Forced-proximity, forbidden-romance rodeo western where the rehabilitation is the plot and not the backdrop — a man who learned young that being watched and being left are opposites, and a woman who audits every kindness for the ask underneath it. One of them is going to have to stand in the dirt in front of eight hundred people and stop hiding.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Rhett & Juniper) • HEA

Book Two — The Pickup Man (Colt & Calla)

“She rides standing on the backs of two galloping horses and has never let anybody catch her. He is the safety outrider the insurance company just assigned to her blind side.”

Calla Moreno is booked into the yard’s winter series for three weeks: haul in, headline the December showcase, take the money, drive on. She hauls her own rigging, stitches her own leather and checks every strand of it herself in the freezing dark with her gloves off, because ten years ago a producer in California promised to cover her surgery and dropped her act the week she could not ride. The first thing she says on Strickland dirt is that she carries her own leather.

Colt Strickland is the yard’s pickup man, and he has been three seconds too slow exactly once in his life. He was fifteen. His brother was thirteen and under the hooves, and Colt stood at the fence and did not move. He has spent every year since learning to buy back the moment before a wreck instead of the moment after, and he knows before she has said a word that he is not going to be able to sit on the rail and drink his coffee while this woman stands on two running horses.

Then a man in a wool coat drives a black SUV onto the yard and finds the loose strand. Apex Rodeo Group does not want the arena or the stock — it wants the paperwork, and an independent trick rider with no certified safety outrider is an insurance nightmare that can close eighty years of somebody else’s family. The only way Calla keeps her slot, and the only way the yard survives the audit, is if Colt is filed as hers. Every rehearsal. Every performance. On paper.

She calls it charity. He calls it a job. But the mornings start at five in a barn cold enough to freeze the latigo stiff, and he learns the exact order in which she checks her rigging without ever once asking to touch it, and somewhere between the frozen buckles and the iron stairs above the feed store, the arrangement stops being paperwork. Which is when Harlan Croft buys the circuit out from under the yard and sets a folder on the desk with her sister’s tuition inside it — and Colt Strickland has always known exactly what he does when the ground goes soft under somebody he loves.

Protector romance built on craft rather than rescue — a heroine whose independence is her armour and her wound, a hero who falls first and says so, and a grand gesture nobody has to take on faith because she can inspect every stitch of it. The book calls his sacrifice cowardice out loud, and it is right.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Colt & Calla) • HEA

Book Three — The Stock Side (Nash & Tovah)

“He has sixty days to prove thirty years his father never wrote down. She is the auditor whose signature can save the yard or end it.”

Nash Strickland is the brother who stayed. While Rhett rode bulls and Colt worked the arena, Nash took the dirt — a stock contractor’s yard outside Cielo, a barn full of Brangus bloodlines, and a father who ran every bit of it on a handshake and a memory. Three years ago that memory died in the sorting pens, mid-sentence, and left him a leather ledger whose last line trails off two-thirds down a November page. He has been holding the whole operation together on nerve and unopened envelopes ever since.

Dr. Tovah Ren arrives unannounced to certify the yard, because a yard that knows she is coming spends three days making itself look like a different yard. She inspects, she certifies, and she leaves before she gets attached to anything she will have to be objective about later. She was twenty years old the day men in good coats ruined her father with a record that did not reflect reality, and she swore she would be the one holding the pen next time. What she finds in the Strickland office is a boot box of feed-store receipts and three decades of nothing she can sign.

She gives him sixty days. Her format, her standards, nothing goes into the file that she has not verified herself. So they share a desk built for one man — night after night in a plank-floored office that smells of cedar smoke and dry paper, a stockman who reads animals better than he reads people dictating a life to a woman who writes everything down. The record gets more honest. The line between them gets harder to hold, and they put the secrecy in writing the way they have put everything else in writing.

And Harlan Croft has been circling this yard since the day Nash’s father died. He has a standing buyout letter in the bottom drawer and needs only one state flag to take the place for nothing. He does not have to win the audit. He only has to catch the auditor with the man she is auditing — and he is patient, he is well dressed, and his hand has a habit of resting on things that do not belong to him.

Grumpy-stoic rancher and precise professional woman, both fully competent and neither made foolish — an office, a lamp, a desk built for one man, and a corporate raider whose weapon is bureaucracy rather than money. It closes the trilogy with all three Strickland brothers on the page, Gus Miller presiding over the yard, and the whole county turning out for its own.

Alternating First Person, Present Tense (Nash & Tovah) • HEA

Throughout All Three Books

Series Details

Heat Level

Content Warnings

What You Get

Three Books • Three Brothers • One Winter That Decides Everything ♥