by Sosie Frost
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Cover Design: Pink Ink Designs
Created with Vellum
To L.G.
You know most of this book is true, don’t you?
1
Micah
It was a bad day to fall in love.
Then again, every day was a bad day to fall in love.
I’d missed the warning signs—the alarm that never went off, the torrential downpour, the car that didn’t start.
Days like that day were perfect for hiding in the office and catching up on paperwork. There, the only risk was the occasional coffee ring on an important contract or an unfortunate paper cut. And while I was sure that the good, old-fashioned journey of self-destruction they called love might have been exhilarating for the first few irresponsible moments, that sort of complication had no place in my life plan.
Especially since Mr. Julian Payne was the wrong man to steal my heart.
If he could find it under the layers and layers of mud.
Mud made a bad day worse. Worse and soggy. Mud caked me head to toe, settling in a variety of places that would require a very intimate scrubbing. Unlike Spa Gemma—Ironfield’s hottest and most exclusive health resort—Butterpond’s famous mud offered no organic benefits to skincare or hydration. Instead, this particular land was supposedly exceedingly fertile. Not any concern of mine, considering the next five years of my life were specifically organized to focus on career growth and physical fitness.
Butterpond wasn’t a great launch pad for any future ambitions or social networking. After four months of employment in the municipal zoning office, my most productive assignment had been unwedging myself from a mud hole in the Payne’s driveway-turned-swamp. I’d kept my shoe but lost my dignity to the sticky pit.
First, my broken-down car.
Then, getting tsunami’d by a speeding pickup truck tearing through a pond-sized puddle on Bakers Run Road.
And now…
Mud.
I’d fallen—wallowed—in six inches of uncompromising, unrelenting mud, crawling hand over fist until I reached the safety of the Payne’s county-styled farmhouse.
And, at the end of the quarter-mile trek up the filthy, water-logged, knee-deep mud driveway? I faced a man who might have stolen my breath if I hadn’t lost it all on the hike to his porch.
Julian Payne was a superior kind of sexy.
As hot as a flickering cigarette after hours of lovemaking.
As teasing as a wrinkle in the sheets twisted by bare toes.
As damning as a body prickling with sweat in the dark.
He was the type of man who’d make a woman giggle as she made the biggest mistake of her life.
I’d made a personal promise to never compromise my values for a little green, but eyes like his were worth dirtying a clean reputation in a new town.
My heart beat quicker—and it wasn’t the panic of leaving my Jimmy Choo’s sinking in a puddle of gloppy mud. This was either love at first sight…or an entirely inappropriate reaction as I stared at Julian, pacing the porch in broad, athletic strides.
Shame. Definitely shame.
I was supposed to be meeting this man on behalf of the Sawyer County Zoning Department. Instead, I drooled over a god so beautiful, so muscular, so utterly stunning that he’d be a perfect excuse to amend my current life plan of career advancement for a fairy tale dream of desire and lust.
Then…he opened his mouth.
“You know what’s wrong with this world?”
Julian spoke daggers—slicing words from lips that shouldn’t have tumbled anything but compliments and dirty words.
He wove his hand through thick, dark hair—wet from either the rain or a shower. His flannel shirt, only halfway buttoned, revealed a hard chest of solid muscle.
This was a man who had never feared a day of hard work in his life. Probably made hard work fear him.
Julian paced the porch, but he wouldn’t outrun his frustration. “I’m trying my goddamned hardest to get this farm up and running.”
This was a proud man. A confident man. A man unburdened by mud and dirty puddle water. And I stood, unnoticed, caked in the unthinkable.
Of course I would meet the man of my dreams while living a waking nightmare. But maybe he’d like a woman who smelled like his farm.
God…I hoped it was just farm I smelled. What the hell was in that mud?
Across the old, rickety porch—covered with a roof that would never meet modern structural guidelines—Julian’s friend eyed me with shock…then pity. Probably the same look I’d receive once I returned to the township offices for my scheduled meeting with the mayor and city council.
So much for the raise.
The second man bounced a baby on his knee. He didn’t seem the type to cuddle a one-year-old, but the baby took glee in tugging the trimmed beard teasing his hardened jaw. He spat out the fingers the little girl jammed into his mouth and attempted to interrupt Julian to greet me.
Julian ignored his friend and proceeded to rant instead.
“How the hell am I supposed to work this farm? The taxes are killing me, the regulations are binding my hands, and now this zoning bullshit tells me where I can and can’t build on my own damn property?”
He was a rugged sort of cowboy, chock full of muscles and arrogance and something less pleasant.
I attempted to interject and announce my arrival, but Julian had no time in the world to listen to anyone by himself.
And I didn’t like what I heard.
“This is our land. It was my father’s land. His father’s land. And his father’s land.” He slapped a calloused hand against the clapboard siding of his house. His home didn’t deserve the solid spank, punishing the building for the inconvenience of the zoning laws that were my job to enforce. “My grandparents built this home from nothing. When my father took over the farm, he worked every day of the year. Sunup to sundown. Back then, no municipality ordered them around on their own private property.”
Why did the cute ones always advocate anarchy?
A man like Julian Payne should’ve stayed quiet and enjoyed the air of mystery. Tall, dark, handsome, and utterly silent. Gone was my fantasy of a rugged cowboy, riding us off into the sunset on his trusty horse, while obeying every zoning regulation set forth in the county’s Unified Development Ordinance.
This was not a man who wanted to play by the rules…or by the laws enacted via local ordinance by the Sawyer County Board of Supervisors and vested in me as Director of Building and Zoning.
“Now there’s some hotshot, wannabe politician telling me what to do?” Julian hadn’t yet noticed me. That was fine. I’d wait this performance out. “He’s probably some fat ass who never even set foot on a farm.”
My ass was not fat. And none of my previous admirers had ever complained about the bump. All…two of them.
Julian seethed, his boots thudding hard against the porch’s warping planks. “He’s probably never worked a day in his life, you know?”
His friend cleared his throat. “Uh…”
“Probably spent his life sitting behind some desk in a cushy office.”
My desk had three legs and a pile of books propping up the fourth. One florescent bulb had burned out a year ago and had yet to be replaced. And, when it rained, the window leaked and trickled water into the outlet.
Real cushy.
Julian smirked. “Probably gets off on the power. Jerks it every time he rejects a building permit application.”
If I took any more offense to his statement, I’d be stuffing my pockets with indignation.
So what if my job was in an office? What did it matter if I wasn’t riding a tractor in the sun all day? I had papers to file and applicati
ons to review and men like him to disappoint when they thought they could do as they liked without regard to the greater good of the community.
But Julian was right.
His was one building permit application that would be downright orgasmic to reject.
“Know it took me two weeks to even get an appointment with this asshole?” Julian said. “And now he’s too goddamned incompetent to show up on time.”
Incompetent?
I’d just lost a five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes in the pit he called a driveway. This was after I’d rearranged my entire schedule to visit him in person, sacrificing my thirty-minute lunch and a growing stack of county fair plans in desperate need of review. I’d come to Triumph Farm as a favor to the one man everyone in Butterpond loved like their own damned child.
And now I was incompetent?
No matter how panty-melting handsome the son of a bitch was, he was going to be nothing but a pain in my ass.
“Julian!” The man holding the baby finally interrupted the rant, but Julian had already stuck his foot so far in his mouth he’d be shitting toes for a week. “I think he is here.”
Julian turned. My stomach flopped back into the mud.
This man took my breath away. Which was good. It’d put us on even ground once I punched him square in the gut. But that wouldn’t be very professional as a representative of Sawyer County.
I’d get him audited instead.
I extended a hand. A glop of mud dripped from my fingers. At least it made the java brown of my skin shine. Not that I wanted to exfoliate with the sticky, clumpy mess of debris that churned in Julian Payne’s backyard.
I sucked in a breath, tempered my anger, and attempted to introduce myself.
“I’m—”
His riotous, exceedingly inappropriate laugh carried across his untended farmland—land that would stay empty if he insisted on misbehaving.
“What the hell…” He stared at me—eyes greener than any weed sprouting in his fields. “What happened to you?”
His was a question that would take an afternoon in a spa, a soak in a tub, and a dinner of pure carbs and an entire bottle of wine to answer.
It’d started when I’d busted the corrupt Chief of Police in Ironfield and ended around the time the city fired me for whistle blowing. Fast forward six months of unemployment, and suddenly I was changing the tire of the hand-me-down Sawyer County Crown Vic with three hundred thousand miles, no air conditioning, and an accelerator that tended to stick. Add to that an afternoon dip in a mud puddle and fifteen minutes of clawing through a swamp to get to his front porch, and I had quite the tale to tell Mr. Payne-In-My-Ass about my punctuality and sludgy appearance.
Of course, that was the moment my shock, rage, and absolute lust for this cowboy coalesced into a knot that bound my tongue, heart, and a place a bit lower that—frankly—could have used a good hogtie in the past six months.
“Someone…” My words sputtered out in a most unflattering, incoherent jumble. I stumbled forward, my bare toes sinking into yet another slimy, cold layer of gunk. “There’s…a…it was locked…”
The man with the baby offered me the little girl’s blanket to, presumably, un-mire myself. It wouldn’t help. I needed a damned hose to clear the mud from every nook and cranny on me—places I’d worked so hard to keep clean.
The job wasn’t supposed to be like this.
My life wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I didn’t belong in the dead-end, rural, farming town of Butterpond.
And I sure as hell didn’t deserve to be treated like a inconvenience by Julian Payne when I’d been trying to help.
I swallowed the irritation and gestured down the quarter-mile of sludge that was the farm’s driveway.
“The gate was locked.”
Julian hadn’t stopped laughing.
“I had to get out of the car…open it…the mud was…everywhere.”
His cayenne smoky laugh gutted me. This was a bastard who’d rot in hell for watching my toes wiggle in the grass.
My words turned to a hiss. “You…are you Julian Payne?”
For half a second, I prayed I had the wrong man, wrong farm, wrong anything.
If he was the whip and cream on my chocolate sundae, he’d just melted my entire dessert.
“Yeah,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”
Unfortunate. He was the one man I’d hate to hate.
I straightened my dress as best I could and attempted to wipe some of the mud from my face. No good. It only smeared yet another line across my cheek.
“I’m your appointment,” I said. “And I would have been here sooner if someone hadn’t locked the driveway gate. I fell in the mud and had to claw my way here.”
I received no pity from him. Julian scowled. Damn the man for looking so good even while irritated.
“Look, swamp thing. Sorry you got a little dirty…that’s life on a farm. This is what happens when you’re working the land, not pushing papers.”
Like he had any idea how to do my job. I clenched my fists, wishing a layer of gunk hadn’t squished from between my fingers. My voice cracked with rage. Not the most intimidating.
“Well, I’m here now,” I said. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Hell, no. I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Micah Robinson, not…”
He gestured over my curves. He couldn’t be that stupid. All brawn and no brains.
Julian shook his head. “I’m not meeting with his secretary.”
If I wasn’t so sure I’d lost my earrings somewhere by my flattened tire, I’d have ripped the hoops out and prepared to rumble.
Bad day to fall in love.
Bad day to have my heartbroken by a jackass.
Bad day to mess with me.
“You know, cowboy…” I used the term loosely. His farm had no crops and no animals, and it’d probably stay that way. “I intended to do you a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“I came out in person. I wanted to survey the farm. Meet this Julian Payne everyone keeps talking about.”
And they talked a lot.
The Paynes were the glue that held together a town comprised mostly of a grocery store that stocked nothing organic and a roughneck bar that didn’t serve Cosmopolitans or even understand the meaning of the word.
Small couldn’t begin to describe Butterpond—but financially insolvent got close. Maybe it was the family’s charity from years ago, or maybe it was the trouble caused these last thirty years by his five sons, but the Paynes dominated the town gossip. Tales of wild nights and fires, eligible bachelors and warring siblings added a bit of mystery to the usual stories of the town’s bingo cheaters, not-so-secret affairs, and warnings about the feral cats overrunning the county fairgrounds.
But Julian Payne?
This man could do no wrong.
Giving up a potentially lucrative career with the Ironfield Rivets just to come home and take care of the family farm, his grieving family, and the responsibility as head of household? Supposedly, the man was a rural messiah who still had enough connections to score the occasional Rivets’ ticket.
That would teach me to listen to idle gossip again.
Especially when it wasn’t about me or threats to my employment.
I raised my chin and pretended the mud was just another layer of Sephora foundation. “And here I thought you could use some help…and you’re gonna need it. You submitted an application to rebuild a barn that’s been demolished for five years.”
“Burned down,” Julian said. “Long story. It burned down.”
“Yes, well, you haven’t attempted to rebuild it within a permitted time frame which makes it exempt to any grandfathered building codes and requirements. Since the structure’s destruction, Sawyer County has passed a new set of zoning regulations which you must adhere to. Your application—which did not include the required set of architectural drawings or a survey of your property—”
“It�
��s just a barn.”
“—Was not only incomplete, but it lacked the relevant detail to even consider approval for the new construction of an accessory structure on this chosen location.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
It meant this would have felt a hell of a lot better if I wasn’t covered in mud for the reveal.
“It means…I can tell you right now what the decision will be regarding your barn.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I tasted the anger. It tasted a lot like mud. “It’s gonna get denied.”
“What?” Julian blinked. He held his arms out. “That’s it?”
“Don’t bother helping me with the gate. I can manage this time.”
“Don’t let it knock you on your ass on the way out.”
Maybe then he’d stop staring at it, curves barely covered by a designer skirt ruined by the mud and gunk. I hobbled across the driveway just as the skies opened and my luck torrentially poured on me. The saturated material clung to my curves—curves which might’ve been a grand accomplishment for any lady who was not attempting to maintain a level of professionalism within her newfound career. I hadn’t intended to literally storm to my car, but I crossed my fingers for a flash flood to whisk me away.
No amount of hand sanitizer would clean this mess. Especially not before my two o’clock meeting with the mayor and council. I couldn’t go back to the office looking like this. Then again, I doubted I could even make it back to my car.
The mud snowballed around my feet, mixing with the rain to become as heavy as cement. I’d have to cancel the meeting with the council meant to save my job. Too many complaints in government usually meant a municipal employee was doing something right. But in a town where everyone knew each other’s names, kids, properties, secrets, and vulnerable insecurities, one-too-many High Grass and Weed citations didn’t commend me for community outreach. It pissed off the wrong people.
I groaned.
This was his fault.
That sexist, arrogant jerk of a man.
I wouldn’t have gotten muddy if I hadn’t come to his stupid farm. Wouldn’t have popped the tire if I hadn’t volunteered to meet him. Wouldn’t have been late to the meeting to save my career if I hadn’t offered to help that egotistical son of a—