by Maisey Yates
Stranded with a cowboy for Christmas...from New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates!
Oil and water have nothing on Sam McCormack and Madison West. The wealthy rancher has never met a haughtier—or more appealing—woman in his life. And when they’re snowed in, he’s forced to admit this ice queen can scorch him with one touch...
Madison had plans for the weekend! Instead she’s stranded with a man who drives her wild. A night of no-strings fun leaves both of them wanting more when they return to Copper Ridge. His proposal: twelve days of hot sex before Christmas! But will it ever be enough?
That was the problem with Sam.
He was exactly the kind of man she didn’t like. He was cocky, rough and crude. However, there was something about the way he looked in a tight T-shirt that made a mockery of all that very certain hatred.
“Are you going to take off your coat and stay a while?” That question, asked in a faintly mocking tone, sent a dart of tension straight between her thighs.
She could not take off her coat. Because she was wearing nothing more than a scrap of red lace underneath it. And now, it was all she could think of. About how little stood between Sam and her naked body.
About what might happen if she just went ahead and dropped the coat and revealed all of that to him.
“It’s cold,” she snapped.
The maddening man raised his eyebrows, shooting her a look that clearly said suit yourself, then set about looking for the fuse box.
She let out an exasperated sigh and followed his path, stopping when she saw him examining the little black switches inside the box.
“It’s not a fuse. That means there’s something else going on.” He slammed the door shut. Then he turned back to look at her. “You should come to my cabin.”
* * *
Hold Me, Cowboy is part of the Copper Ridge series from New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates
Dear Reader,
I’m delighted to welcome you back to Copper Ridge, Oregon. This series is all about community, family, love and hot cowboys. And in Hold Me, Cowboy, it’s Christmas in Copper Ridge, which means sparkling lights, chilly days and even colder nights. Except the hero and heroine in this book have found a way to make the nights a whole lot warmer!
I always enjoy writing a book where opposites attract. Because the explosion when irritation turns to passion is always so incredibly intense.
That’s just one of the many reasons that I had to pair my rough blacksmith hero, Sam McCormack, with prickly socialite Madison West. The two of them push all the wrong buttons in each other. But they push all the right ones, too. And when a snowstorm sees them both stranded up in the mountains, all that simmering anger turns into something else entirely. They figure having twelve passionate nights before Christmas to burn off all that attraction should be just about perfect. But in the end, it may not be so easy to walk away.
If you enjoy Maddy and Sam and your time in Copper Ridge, I hope you’ll check out more stories in the series. Also from Harlequin Desire is Take Me, Cowboy, which features Sam’s brother Chase. And you can read about the rest of the West family in One Night Charmer, Tough Luck Hero and Last Chance Rebel, out now from HQN Books.
Happy reading!
Maisey
MAISEY YATES
Hold Me, Cowboy
Maisey Yates is a USA TODAY bestselling author of more than thirty romance novels. She has a coffee habit she has no interest in kicking, and a slight Pinterest addiction. She lives with her husband and children in the Pacific Northwest. When Maisey isn’t writing she can be found singing in the grocery store, shopping for shoes online and probably not doing dishes. Check out her website, www.maiseyyates.com.
Books by Maisey Yates
Harlequin Desire
Copper Ridge
Take Me, Cowboy
Hold Me, Cowboy
HQN Books
Copper Ridge
Shoulda Been a Cowboy
Part Time Cowboy
Brokedown Cowboy
Bad News Cowboy
A Copper Ridge Christmas
Take Me, Cowboy
One Night Charmer
Harlequin Presents
Bound to the Warrior King
His Diamond of Convenience
To Defy a Sheikh
Visit her Author Profile page on Harlequin.com, or maiseyyates.com, for more titles!
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To KatieSauce, the sister I was always waiting for. What a joy it is to have you in my life.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Excerpt from One Heir...or Two? by Yvonne Lindsay
One
“Creative photography,” Madison West muttered as she entered the security code on the box that contained the key to the cabin she would be staying in for the weekend.
She looked across the snowy landscape to see another home situated far too close to the place she would be inhabiting for the next couple of days. The photographs on the vacation-rental website hadn’t mentioned that she would be sharing the property with anyone else.
And obviously, the example pictures had been taken from inventive angles.
It didn’t matter. Nothing was going to change her plans. She just hoped the neighbors had earplugs. Because she was having sex this weekend. Nonstop sex.
Ten years celibate, and it was ending tonight. She had finally found the one. Not the one she was going to marry, obviously. Please. Love was for other people. People who hadn’t been tricked, manipulated and humiliated when they were seventeen.
No, she had no interest in love and marriage. But she had abundant interest in orgasms. So much interest. And she had found the perfect man to deliver them.
All day, all night, for the next forty-eight hours.
She was armed with a suitcase full of lingerie and four bottles of wine. Neighbors be damned. She’d been hoping for a little more seclusion, but this was fine. It would be fine.
She unlocked the door and stepped inside, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw that the interior, at least, met with her expectations. But it was a little bit smaller than it had looked online, and she could only hope that wasn’t some sort of dark portent for the rest of her evening.
She shook her head; she was not going to introduce that concern into the mix, thank you very much. There was enough to worry about when you were thinking about breaking ten years of celibacy without adding such concerns.
Christopher was going to arrive soon, so she figured she’d better get upstairs and start setting a scene. She made her way to the bedroom, then opened her suitcase and took out the preselected bit of lace she had chosen for their first time. It was red, which looked very good on her, if a bit obvious. But she was aiming for obvious.
Christopher wasn’t her boyfriend. And he wasn’t going to be. He was a very nice equine-vitamin-supplement salesman she’d met a few weeks ago when he’d come by the West estate. She had bought some products for her
horses, and they’d struck up a conversation, which had transitioned into a flirtation.
Typically, when things began to transition into flirtation, Maddy put a stop to them. But she hadn’t with him. Maybe because he was special. Maybe because ten years was just way too long. Either way, she had kept on flirting with him.
They’d gone out for drinks, and she’d allowed him to kiss her. Which had been a lot more than she’d allowed any other guy in recent years. It had reminded her how much she’d enjoyed that sort of thing once upon a time. And once she’d been reminded...well.
He’d asked for another date. She’d stopped him. Because wouldn’t a no-strings physical encounter be way better?
He’d of course agreed. Because he was a man.
But she hadn’t wanted to get involved with anyone in town. She didn’t need anyone seeing her at a hotel or his house or with his car parked at her little home on her parents’ property.
Thus, the cabin-weekend idea had been born.
She shimmied out of her clothes and wiggled into the skintight lace dress that barely covered her backside. Then she set to work fluffing her blond hair and applying some lipstick that matched the lingerie.
She was not answering the door in this outfit, however.
She put her long coat back on over the lingerie, then gave her reflection a critical look. It had been a long time since she had dressed to attract a man. Usually, she was more interested in keeping them at a distance.
“Not tonight,” she said. “Not tonight.”
She padded downstairs, peering out the window and seeing nothing beyond the truck parked at the small house across the way and a vast stretch of snow, falling harder and faster.
Typically, it didn’t snow in Copper Ridge, Oregon. You had to drive up to the mountains—as she’d done today—to get any of the white stuff. So, for her, this was a treat, albeit a chilly one. But that was perfect, since she planned to get her blood all heated and stuff.
She hummed, keeping an eye on the scene outside, waiting for Christopher to pull in. She wondered if she should have brought a condom downstairs with her. Decided that she should have.
She went back upstairs, taking them two at a time, grateful that she was by herself, since there was nothing sexy about her ascent. Then she rifled through her bag, found some protection and curled her fingers around it before heading back down the stairs as quickly as possible.
As soon as she entered the living area, the lights flickered, then died. Suddenly, everything in the house seemed unnaturally quiet, and even though it was probably her imagination, she felt the temperature drop several degrees.
“Are you kidding me?” she asked, into the darkness.
There was no answer. Nothing but a subtle creak from the house. Maybe it was all that heavy snow on the roof. Maybe it was going to collapse. That would figure.
A punishment for her thinking she could be normal and have sex.
A shiver worked its way down her spine, and she jolted.
Suddenly, she had gone from hopeful and buoyant to feeling a bit flat and tragic. That was definitely not the best sign.
No. She wasn’t doing this. She wasn’t sinking into self-pity and tragedy. Been there, done that for ten years, thank you.
Madison didn’t believe in signs. So there. She believed in fuses blowing in bad weather when overtaxed heaters had to work too hard in ancient houses. Yes, that she believed in. She also believed that she would have to wait for Christopher to arrive to fix the problem.
She sighed and then made her way over to the kitchen counter and grabbed hold of her purse as she deposited the two condoms on the counter. She pulled her phone out and grimaced when she saw that she had no signal.
Too late, she remembered that she had thought the lack of cell service might be an attraction to a place like this. That it would be nice if both she and Christopher could be cut off from the outside world while they indulged themselves.
That notion seemed really freaking stupid right now. Since she couldn’t use the phone in the house thanks to the outage, and that left her cut off from the outside world all alone.
“Oh no,” she said, “I’m the first five minutes of a crime show. I’m going to get ax-murdered. And I’m going to die a born-again virgin.”
She scowled, looking back out at the resolutely blank landscape. Christopher still wasn’t here. But it looked like the house across the way had power.
She pressed her lips together, not happy about the idea of interrupting her neighbor. Or of meeting her neighbor, since the whole point of going out of town was so they could remain anonymous and not see people.
She tightened the belt on her coat and made her way slowly out the front door, bracing herself against the arctic wind.
She muttered darkly about the cold as she made her way across the space between the houses. She paused for a moment in front of the larger cabin, lit up and looking all warm and toasty. Clearly, this was the premium accommodation. While hers was likely beset by rodents that had chewed through relevant cords.
She huffed, clutching her coat tightly as she knocked on the door. She waited, bouncing in place to try to keep her blood flowing. She just needed to call Christopher and find out when he would be arriving and, if he was still a ways out, possibly beg her neighbor for help getting the power going. Or at least help getting a fire started.
The front door swung open and Madison’s heart stopped. The man standing there was large, so tall that she only just came up to the middle of his chest. He was broad, his shoulders well muscled, his waist trim. He had the kind of body that came not from working out but from hard physical labor.
Then she looked up. Straight nose, square jaw, short brown hair and dark eyes that were even harder than his muscles. And far too familiar.
“What are you doing here?”
* * *
Sam McCormack gritted his teeth against the sharp tug of irritation that assaulted him when Madison West asked the question that had been on his own lips.
“I rented the place,” he responded, not inviting her in. “Though I could ask you the same question.”
She continued to do a little bounce in place, her arms folded tight against her body, her hands clasped beneath her chin. “And you’d get the same answer,” she said. “I’m across the driveway.”
“Then you’re at the wrong door.” He made a move to shut said door, and she reached out, stopping him.
“Sam. Do you always have to be this unpleasant?”
It was a question that had been asked of him more than once. And he gave his standard answer. “Yes.”
“Sam,” she said, sounding exasperated. “The power went out, and I’m freezing to death. Can I come in?”
He let out a long-suffering sigh and stepped to the side. He didn’t like Madison West. He never had. Not from the moment he had been hired on as a farrier for the West estate eight years earlier. In all the years since he’d first met Madison, since he’d first started shoeing her horses, he’d never received one polite word from her.
But then, he’d never given one either.
She was sleek, blonde and freezing cold—and he didn’t mean because she had just come in from the storm. The woman carried her own little snow cloud right above her head at all times, and he wasn’t a fan of ice princesses. Still, something about her had always been like a burr beneath his skin that he couldn’t get at.
“Thank you,” she said crisply, stepping over the threshold.
“You’re rich and pretty,” he said, shutting the door tight behind her. “And I’m poor. And kind of an ass. It wouldn’t do for me to let you die out there in a snowdrift. I would probably end up getting hung.”
Madison sniffed, making a show of brushing snowflakes from the shoulders of her jacket. “I highly doubt you’re poor,” she
said drily.
She wasn’t wrong. A lot had changed since he’d gone to work for the Wests eight years ago. Hell, a lot had changed in the past year.
The strangest thing was that his art had taken off, and along with it the metalwork and blacksmithing business he ran with his brother, Chase.
But now he was busier coming up with actual fine-art pieces than he was doing daily grunt work. One sale on a piece like that could set them up for the entire quarter. Strange, and not where he’d seen his life going, but true.
He still had trouble defining himself as an artist. In his mind, he was just a blacksmith cowboy. Most at home on the family ranch, most proficient at pounding metal into another shape. It just so happened that for some reason people wanted to spend a lot of money on that metal.
“Well,” he said, “perception is everything.”
She looked up at him, those blue eyes hitting him hard, like a punch in the gut. That was the other obnoxious thing about Madison West. She was pretty. She was more than pretty. She was the kind of pretty that kept a man up all night, hard and aching, with fantasies about her swirling in his head.
She was also the kind of woman who would probably leave icicles on a man’s member after a blow job.
No, thank you.
“Sure,” she said, waving her hand. “Now, I perceive that I need to use your phone.”
“There’s no cell service up here.”
“Landline,” she said. “I have no power. And no cell service. The source of all my problems.”
“In that case, be my guest,” he responded, turning away from her and walking toward the kitchen, where the lone phone was plugged in.
He picked up the receiver and held it out to her. She eyed it for a moment as though it were a live snake, then snatched it out of his hand. “Are you just going to stand there?”
He shrugged, crossing his arms and leaning against the door frame. “I thought I might.”
She scoffed, then dialed the number, doing the same impatient hop she’d been doing outside while she waited for the person on the other end to answer. “Christopher?”
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