Save a Horse, Ride the Grump

A Contemporary Cowboy Romance
by Isla Wilde

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Save a Horse, Ride the Grump book cover by Isla Wilde

Free with Kindle Unlimited

Pairing: MF
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: Bitter Creek, Book 1 (Standalone)
Tropes: Grumpy/Sunshine, Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, He Falls First, Possessive Hero, Praise Kink, One Bed, Small Town, Cowboy Romance, Touch Her and Die, Slow Burn, Neighbors to Lovers, Hurt/Comfort, Found Family, The Grovel

He communicated in monosyllables. She went viral for all the wrong reasons. The Texas Hill Country wasn’t big enough for both of them.

Cade Walker is six-foot-four of silence, solitude, and Hill Country stubbornness. He runs the ranch his father drank himself to death on, hasn’t left the county in three years, and communicates primarily through jaw clenches and one-word texts. His mother left when he was twelve. He’s been building walls ever since — the kind made of stone, and the kind made of silence.

Piper Hayes had two million followers, a curated life, and a smile that could sell anything — until a viral meltdown turned her into the internet’s favorite cautionary tale. When she inherits a crumbling ranch next door to the grumpiest man in Texas, she shows up in a yellow sundress and cowboy boots she bought at the airport, determined to reinvent herself. She knows nothing about ranches. She knows even less about the man glaring at her from across the property line.

He thinks she’s a disaster. She thinks he’s a caveman. They’re both right. But when a storm traps them together and proximity becomes combustion, they strike a deal: burn it out of their systems. No feelings. No strings. No complications.

The deal doesn’t work. Not even close.

Because Cade Walker doesn’t just fall — he crashes. And the man who can’t say three words to save his life is about to discover that the woman next door isn’t the performance he assumed. She’s real. She’s brave. She makes the worst banana bread in Texas and the best sound he’s ever heard. And the secret he’s keeping about her land could destroy everything.

Save a Horse, Ride the Grump is a high-heat MF contemporary cowboy romance featuring a grumpy rancher who communicates in monosyllables and a sunshine former influencer who teaches him that silence isn’t the same as safety, seven explicit scenes that escalate from hate-fueled to holy, a goat named Dolly who judges everyone, the greatest grovel in Kindle Unlimited history, and a guaranteed happily ever after. Book 1 in the Bitter Creek series. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A six-foot-four rancher who says twelve words a day and means every one
✅ A disgraced influencer in airport cowboy boots rebuilding her life from the porch up
✅ A thunderstorm, a kitchen counter, and a deal to burn it out of their systems
✅ Touch-her-and-die energy and a hero who falls first and hardest
✅ A hayloft, a truck bed, and a moonlit creek
✅ Dolly the goat, who hates everyone and judges you accordingly
✅ THE grovel: 140 miles in an ironed button-down
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, small-town found family, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (multiple detailed MF encounters, including kitchen counter, truck bed, hayloft and creek scenes, praise kink, possessive behavior and rough sex; all between consenting adults), parental abandonment (both leads), alcoholism (father, backstory), online harassment and cancel culture, a property dispute and financial threat, emotional manipulation (backstory), and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Dust and Delusion

The GPS had given up forty minutes ago.

Piper Hayes stared at the spinning blue dot on her phone screen—a tiny digital existential crisis—and decided she related to it on a spiritual level. Recalculating, the robotic voice had said, for the ninth time, before finally surrendering to silence somewhere around mile marker 142. Even Siri knew when to quit.

Piper, unfortunately, did not.

She leaned forward against the steering wheel of the rental Nissan, squinting through the dust-caked windshield at a landscape that looked like God had gotten bored halfway through creation and just… stopped. Brown. Brown scrubland, brown dirt road, brown fence posts leaning at drunk angles toward brown earth. The only color was the sky—a bruised orange-pink that bled into violet at the edges—and even that felt aggressive, like Texas was showing off how vast and empty it could be just to make a point.

“Okay,” she said to no one. “This is fine. This is an adventure.”

Her voice sounded wrong out here. Too bright. Too city. Like wearing sequins to a funeral.

The lawyer’s email had included GPS coordinates, which she’d plugged into Google Maps with the confidence of a woman who’d once navigated the Tokyo subway system for a sponsored travel reel. The coordinates led her to a county road that led to a dirt road that led to a road that could only be described as “optimistic suggestion,” and now she was bumping along at fifteen miles an hour with her teeth rattling and her latte (bought four hours and a lifetime ago at the last Starbucks before civilization ended) sloshing cold in the cupholder.

She spotted the mailbox first. Leaning sideways, paint peeled to bare metal, the name HAYES still barely visible in sun-bleached letters. Something clenched in her chest. She’d never met Ida Mae Hayes. Hadn’t known her grandmother existed until six weeks ago, when a lawyer with a south Texas drawl called to say that Piper had inherited one hundred and sixty acres of “agricultural property” in Bitter Creek, Texas.

Agricultural property. She’d Googled it and found a Zillow listing with one photo—a wide shot that made the house look quaint in a rustic-chic kind of way. She’d shown it to her roommate (former roommate; the lease was up and neither of them could afford it alone after the sponsorship money dried up) and said, See? It’s giving cottage core.

The cottage core fantasy died a swift, brutal death as Piper pulled up to the house.

“Oh,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”

The Last Stand was not giving cottage core. The Last Stand was giving condemned. The wraparound porch sagged like a hammock in the middle, and at least three boards were missing entirely, leaving dark gaps like pulled teeth. The clapboard siding had gone grey with age and neglect, and a shutter hung by a single hinge, swinging in a breeze that carried the smell of dry grass and something animal. The front door—painted red once, maybe, in a more optimistic decade—stood slightly ajar, which meant either the lock was broken or something had let itself in.

Piper put the car in park. Killed the engine. Sat there.

Her phone buzzed. A Google Alert she hadn’t gotten around to disabling: Piper Hayes viral meltdown resurfaces in new commentary from—

She deleted it without reading the rest.

Seven weeks. Seven weeks since the video. Seven weeks since she’d stood in front of two hundred people at a product launch for a skincare brand she’d been the face of for eighteen months, opened the wrong email on her phone (from Kyle, her boyfriend of two years, breaking up with her via email while she was literally at work for a brand he’d introduced her to), and burst into tears on a livestream being watched by forty thousand people.

Not cute tears. Not the dewy, single-glistening-drop tears of a carefully curated emotional moment. Ugly tears. Snot tears. Hyperventilating, mascara-flooding, I-can’t-breathe tears while a brand rep tried to hand her a serum and the comments section turned into a feeding frenzy.

Piper the Fraud was trending within the hour. By morning, the skincare brand had “mutually parted ways,” which was corporate for we’re running. Three more sponsors followed by end of week. Her agent stopped returning calls by Friday. Kyle posted a gym selfie captioned choosing peace on Saturday.

Two million followers. Gone like smoke.

She grabbed her suitcase from the backseat—the big one, the good one, Louis Vuitton from back when Louis Vuitton sent her things for free—and dragged it toward the porch steps.

The heel of her ankle boot caught the edge of the first step and snapped clean off.

Piper stumbled, caught herself on the railing (which groaned ominously under her weight), and looked down at her broken shoe. A two-hundred-dollar boot, bought in a previous life. She pulled both boots off, set them neatly on the bottom step like a woman who still had her shit together, and climbed the porch in her bare feet.

The boards were hot from the sun. Something skittered behind the wall.

She made it to the front door, nudged it open with her hip, and was hit by a wall of stale air—dust and old wood and the ghost of someone’s lavender sachets. The interior was dark. A narrow hallway leading to a kitchen, a living room to the left with furniture draped in sheets like a haunted estate sale. A staircase with a banister she absolutely did not trust.

Something screamed.

Piper screamed back, dropping her suitcase and stumbling into the hallway wall, heart slamming against her ribs—

The screaming continued. From outside. From the barn.

She pressed her hand to her chest, breathing hard, and forced herself to move toward the back door. Through the kitchen—avocado-green fridge, linoleum curling at the corners, a window over the sink with a view of the barn—and out onto the back porch, which was somehow in worse shape than the front.

A goat stood in the middle of the yard.

Small. Brown and white. Ears like satellite dishes. It stared at Piper with the flat, horizontal pupils of a creature that had judged her and found her lacking.

“Hey,” Piper said. “Hey, baby. Are you okay?”

The goat screamed again. Directly at her. With what Piper could only describe as contempt.

“Okay. Cool. Love that energy.”

Two more goats appeared from behind the barn—a bigger brown one and a fat white one who looked unbothered by everything. The screaming goat held Piper’s gaze with the intensity of a scorned ex and pawed the dirt.

Piper heard the truck before she saw it.

A low diesel rumble, the kind that started in the ground and worked up through her bare feet, growing louder until a mud-caked Ford F-350—the kind of truck that had never seen a car wash and considered itself better for it—rolled into view from the direction of the county road.

It pulled up to the edge of her property. Stopped. Engine idling.

The driver didn’t get out.

Through the dust-hazed windshield, Piper could make out a shape: broad shoulders, a hat, one arm resting on the window frame. He sat there and watched her the way someone watches a nature documentary about an animal making a poor decision.

She tucked her hair behind her ears, straightened her sundress (yellow, now streaked with dust and something she hoped was dirt), and walked toward the truck with her bare feet and her broken boots left behind on the porch like a metaphor.

“Hi!” She raised a hand. Bright smile. Full wattage. The smile that had sold a million units of teeth-whitening strips. “I’m Piper. I’m the—I just inherited—” She gestured vaguely at the collapsing homestead behind her. “I’m the new neighbor, I guess?”

The driver’s side window was already down. The arm on the frame was brown from sun, corded with muscle, and dusted with dark hair. The hand was enormous—scarred knuckles, callused palm, fingers that could probably crush a beer can without trying. Her gaze traveled up the arm to a shoulder that blocked the window frame entirely, to a jaw squared off beneath a short, dark beard, to a mouth set in a line so flat it could’ve been used as a level.

His eyes were the grey of a sky about to do something terrible.

He looked at her. Looked at the house. Looked back at her. His expression didn’t change. Not a flicker.

“You’ve got forty-eight hours before the coyotes eat you, City Hall.” His voice was low, unhurried, and completely devoid of warmth. “Sell me the deed and go home.”

The smile on Piper’s face held for a beat—two beats—the way a cartoon character hangs in the air after running off a cliff. Then something hot and reckless flared in her gut. The same feeling she’d had in the sixth grade when Maisie Parker told her she couldn’t sit at the good lunch table.

She’d sat there every day for a year.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and her voice had shifted—still bright, but now it had edges. “And you are…?”

“Cade Walker.” He said it like it should mean something. Like the land itself should have briefed her.

“Well, Cade Walker.” She took a step closer to the truck. Then another. Close enough to see the scar through his left eyebrow, the way his jaw tightened when she moved into his space. Close enough to notice that he smelled like leather and sweat and something woodsy-dark underneath, and that his eyes weren’t just grey—there was blue in there, deep and dangerous, like a riptide.

She filed that information away under Absolutely Not.

“This is my property.” She planted her feet—bare, dirty, ridiculous—in the dust. “And I don’t recall asking for a real estate opinion from a man who can’t be bothered to get out of his truck to introduce himself.”

Something moved behind his eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was irritation or interest, and she didn’t care. (She cared. She absolutely cared. But she’d die in this dust before she’d show it.)

“You’re standing in a fire ant bed,” he said.

Piper looked down. She was, in fact, standing in a fire ant bed.

The pain hit three seconds later—a constellation of tiny, searing bites across her left foot—and she yelped, hopping sideways, slapping at her ankle. The hostile goat screamed again, apparently in solidarity with the ants. Piper’s heel caught a rock and she stumbled, caught herself, and ended up with mud on her right knee and what was left of her dignity scattered somewhere between the mailbox and the coyote threat.

When she looked up, Cade Walker was still in his truck. Still watching. His mouth might have twitched—might have—but by the time she blinked, it was that flat line again.

He put the truck in gear.

“Forty-eight hours,” he repeated. And then he was gone, the dually kicking up a rooster tail of dust that settled on Piper’s sundress, her suitcase, and her entire concept of a fresh start.

She stood there. Ant-bitten, barefoot, mud-kneed, standing in front of a house that was actively returning to the earth. The goat stared at her. The sun bled out across the horizon. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote—an actual coyote, because of course—sent up a howl that sounded like a question she didn’t know the answer to.

Piper looked at the house. Looked at the barn. Looked at the goat, who had begun eating the strap of her Louis Vuitton suitcase.

“Hey! Hey! No—that’s Louis—stop—“

She lunged for the suitcase. The goat dodged with the agility of a creature born for spite, ripping the leather strap clean off and trotting away with it dangling from her mouth like a trophy.

Piper sank onto the porch steps. The wood groaned. She pulled her knees up and pressed her forehead against them, feeling the fire ant bites throb and the dust settle in her hair and the absolute, crushing silence of a place with no followers, no filters, and no one watching.

No one is watching.

The thought should have been freeing. Instead, it felt like vertigo.

She lifted her head. The sky was going dark, purple bruising into indigo, and the first stars were punching through—more than she’d ever seen, more than she thought existed, a wild, careless spill of light that made the sky look like it was showing off.

The house creaked behind her. The goat had circled back and was eyeing her other boot. Something rustled in the ceiling—probably a possum, possibly a demon, definitely not up to code.

Piper pulled her phone out. No signal. Of course. She held it up toward the sky like an offering to a dead god, turned in a slow circle, and got exactly zero bars.

She put the phone down. Looked at the Last Stand. Looked at the stars.

“I can do this,” she whispered.

The goat screamed.

“Shut up, Dolly.”

She didn’t know why she called the goat Dolly. It just fit—something about the attitude, the audacity, the refusal to be anything but exactly what she was. Piper respected it even as she hated it.

She stood up. Her feet hurt. Her knee was muddy. Her suitcase was missing a strap. Her boots were broken. She had no cell signal, no running water (she’d tried the kitchen sink; it had coughed brown once and gone silent), and a man built like a mountain range had given her forty-eight hours before the local wildlife made her a meal.

Forty-eight hours.

She walked back inside, dragging her suitcase over the threshold. Found a light switch. Flipped it. Nothing. Flipped it again, harder, as if violence would help. On the third try, the overhead fixture buzzed, flickered, and coughed to life—a single bare bulb casting yellow light across the dust and the draped furniture and the narrow staircase.

It wasn’t much. It was barely anything. But it was light, and it was hers, and Cade Walker could take his forty-eight hours and choke on them.

She set her suitcase in the middle of the living room, pulled the sheet off the couch (releasing a mushroom cloud of dust that made her sneeze four times in a row), and sat down.

Tomorrow she’d figure out the water. And the goats. And the barn. And the ants. And whatever was living in her ceiling. Tomorrow she’d make a list and buy supplies and learn how to do things she’d never imagined doing—things that didn’t involve ring lights or engagement metrics or performing her way through another day.

Tomorrow.

Tonight, she sat in the weak light of a bare bulb in a dead woman’s house in the middle of nowhere, Texas, and she didn’t smile. She didn’t perform. She didn’t do anything at all except sit there and breathe and be exactly as terrified as she actually was.

It felt like the most honest thing she’d done in years.

Outside, Dolly had settled on the porch, her small body pressed against the front door like a sentry. The coyote howled again, further away now, and the stars kept spilling across the sky, and the house ticked and settled around her like it was deciding whether to let her stay.

Piper pulled her grandmother’s quilt off the back of the couch—hand-stitched, faded, smelling of lavender and time—and wrapped it around her shoulders.

Forty-eight hours, he’d said.

She was going to need longer than that.

But she wasn’t leaving.

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Frequently Asked Questions

How steamy is it?
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (5/5 flames). Seven fully explicit scenes that escalate from hate-fueled kitchen counter sex during a thunderstorm to slow, devastating lovemaking in a moonlit creek where both characters cry and neither apologizes for it. The heat serves the story — every scene marks a shift in the power dynamic and the emotional stakes.

What kind of hero is Cade?
The strong, silent type — literally. Cade Walker communicates in monosyllables, jaw clenches, and acts of service. He’ll rebuild your porch railing without being asked but can’t say “I love you” without his throat closing. He’s possessive, protective, and devastating when he finally breaks.

Is there a grovel?
THE grovel. Chapter 20. A man who hasn’t left his county in three years drives 140 miles in an ironed button-down to stand in a motel parking lot and deliver the longest speech of his life. With tears.

Tell me about the goat.
Dolly is a goat who hates everyone. She screams at the sunrise. She headbutts phones. She judges you with flat yellow eyes and finds you wanting. She is also the emotional barometer of the entire book — when Dolly lets you touch her, you have earned something sacred.

Is there a happy ending?
Always. Full HEA: a public kiss in front of half the town after a grass fire, a fence torn down between their properties, a goat who still screams at Cade every morning, and banana bread that finally works. No cliffhangers. Standalone with series potential (Jesse’s book is next).